There have been times when I was so pissed off about this website I wanted to punch my monitor and there have been times when I would wake up and jump out of bed and run to my computer to start working on stuff here. So I have seen the highs and the lows.
The highs mainly seem to correlate with a huge surge in STEEM Price and for a limited amount of time we are in a somewhat gated community because others can't get in fast enough to tap into the wealth that we are sitting in. Once things level out with more people eventually getting in and the price sinking then things get a lot tougher and then most people start falling off the bus and getting upset because they can't see a clear vision to it being "worth" their time to be on here.
From my perspective who is what I would call a mid level content creator on here (Someone who has invested a ton of time gets some decent payouts but actually can't live solely off this platform) there is always the fact that by doing a calculation for how much STEEM power we would have to buy to have a certain influence the investment still doesn't make sense in a lot of ways.
The only way we can do it is by STEEM dropping to about $0.25 or lower and everyone being super pissed off and most people giving up on the platform. Then we would have to commit substantial amounts of capital. Like $30,000+ and then STEEM would have to make a big comeback to $2 levels or so for our investment to be worth it. It makes it a tough play and the question when the price drops is WHY is it down that low? And also there is always the worry it would just keep going lower. When it went to $0.07 I thought that it was likely finished and the founders had screwed up the platform with the most potential.
The biggest problem with STEEM all along was the distribution from the beginning was totally messed up. And like we have seen with other projects they have done air drops and with EOS the ICO is lasting an entire year because in crypto you have to have a wide distribution. STEEM never properly addressed the situation so a lot of people feel like it is a hopeless effort. @rulesforrebels has 68,000 YouTube subscribers and has put in a massive amount of effort on here and hasn't given up but he is lucky to make $0.25 on each post. To me that starts to be a red flag. He has invested in some STEEM Power as well. It just isn't enough. There have only been a small handful of content creators who were able to build anything significant here. You, @rok-sivante , @pappa-pepper and a few others. All great content creators.....etc. From new people coming in it seems like a very tall order to really build anything. Even for myself I can't spend as much time as I do on here and not use some of the money for bills. If I can make $200+ / day on here then I can skim half of it and keep the rest building. When it dips way below that then I'm losing ground on the account and can't really maintain any kind of power.
Solution: It has been mentioned before but I think their should be a series of air drops based on people's reputation, amount of comments, etc..... The problem with the Golos drop was that if you were a God King here then suddenly you were a God King on Golos. So they suffer from the same distribution issues and they are still on a exponential curve for the power.
Solution 2: These major 3rd party developers like @good-karma and @jesta should be given substantial funding from STEEMIT Inc. Enough to be working on this stuff full time. STEEMIT Inc is holding so much of the power that one of the only ways to really get other people feeling like they are more invested in this platform is to enable them to keep spending their time here. Sounds socialist...etc but you have to realize that when a capitalist comes here they might turn around and leave because they don't see a good investment and a good opportunity for them to capitalize.
This platform in my mind is one of the most promising projects in the crypto space. From a price perspective it is hard to find that balance because while buying more STEEM Power creates demand for STEEM most new users and users spending a ton of time creating content need the money for bills for their efforts so it then weights on the price. I feel like the platform could continually go in these surge / sleeper modes but will continue on for sure.
"but you have to realize that when a capitalist comes here they might turn around and leave because they don't see a good investment and a good opportunity for them to capitalize."
Yep. I've been dabbling a bit here. And I've been looking at a way to make it profitable.
A. Ain't no way I'm going to plow tons of time and effort creating content when it's only going to earn for 7 days AND somebody with more than me can trash my account/rep/earnings for any reason he deems worthwhile.
B. I considered/did the math on renting delegated SP, to boost my visibility and accelerate growing my account/popularity/etc. But the math/investment again just doesn't work out ESPECIALLY because somebody bigger with an angry hardon about 'self voting' can 100% destroy my account and the invested $ put into renting delegated SP to accelerate my popularity and visibility.
Interesting to watch this steemit thing, but until steemit changes some things my time/effort is safer and more profitable on my own business/platform. Or said another way, steemit currently isn't a safe investment of time/effort/$.
Yeah I get your feeling for sure. The numbers are kind of hard to work usually unless you anticipate a big rise in the price.
I will say this. Steemit is getting better for sure from when I got on in July 2016. And the community effort has done a lot of good for people.
I can certainly understand working on your own business / platform instead of working within someone elses. I mean shit..... Electroneum which I just looked into last night freaking raised $40 Million and all they did was clone Monero....... I was like WTF?????
People are in it for the easy money which is why they $40 mil. A bigger problem with Steemit is that there is not revenue income to back their payouts, and until they have one it is simply a ponzi where you pay people from the rewards pool created from thin air.
Youtube, twitter, everyone has ad revenue. Here there is no revenue, except new arrivals
Yeah I get that thinking but the purchase of STEEM power as a mechanism to get exposure is the "ad revenue". Think about all the Tai Lopez ads you have seen on YouTube. He pays it to get exposure to gain a bigger following and sell his business seminars and materials.
Well the same thing goes for individuals on here or companies. Look at this account. They kept pushing their posts up to the trending page to market.
https://steemit.com/@bookingteam.com
What is being sold is exposure. If you have enough power you will end up on the hot page or trending page. In Ponzi's there are fictitious returns being pitched that don't actually exist and the money is just coming from new investment. But with Steemit I can guarantee that if you purchase 1,000,000 Steem Power you will be on the trending page for every post which will get more eyes, likely more upvotes, more followers....etc. So there is a tangible result that can be tracked and seen not just fictitious returns being reported
But you can pull all of that out. It will take you 3 months, but you can. You need a revenue generation model above and beyond that. Every day Steemit prints 64000 dollars. You will burn through that million in 20 days. There is no cost, like a annual renewal fee or advertisement where the money is sunk. You are still getting Steempower for that mil, if it was the price of an advertisement you will be getting 0.
What? No.
As brian said, the price of the steempower is the advertisement costs.
And that 1,000,000 SP is still in the system (even when pulling 'income' out...and some of that income would stay in the system to increase the SP count...and there are other benefits involved that are good for steem, like the upvotes to others, the delegated steem to curator groups, etc.
Yes the original investment can be pulled out after 3 months, but that's three months it's still in the system...and pulling out the original investment can lower the price (thus one gets less back) of steem, which incentivizes the investor to keep it in and use it, which supports the platform.
Steem needs investors and people that want to profit, because they drive innovation and new users to the platform.
I notice that people don't like anybody profiting from steem, but if it's not a profitabe platform/business, then it will die, and the people that will be sad/mad are the ones (partly) responsible for killing that which gave life/growth to the platform.
The more users, the more profits available, the more steem price rises, which creates more users and more investors/participants, which creates higher demand for and interest in the rising price of steem, which.....
So you are saying any Steem I buy will be worth less in 3 months, because i leave some of this income in the system
I would love do see delegated air drops.
Any support from Steemit Inc in delegated SP for example would be a tremendous support if the newly built communities would get some. In turn they would be able to do incentive moves, attract more new people there at the same time increasing number of Steemit members. All other points were also based on seemingly great knowledge of the platform.
I feel like a little bit of the delegating has been going on. I know @ned delegated his power to a few people recently but then I think he retracted it. I feel that if it looks to individualized then it looks like they are picking a favorite when doing it. If there was certain criteria determined and everyone was getting a blanket STEEM Power boost not just delegated power that would be interesting. I don't think it will happen though even though the numbers could support it. Just in the @steemit account alone there is $69,000,000 of value. Again not saying that it would ever happen but what if they took $10,000,000 of that value and blanketed the most active 10,000 accounts with equal Steem Power. That would make a lot of people really feel good about being part of this community and seriously change some lives in certain parts of the world. Yeah the price might slightly suffer for awhile if people cashed some of it out but an act like that would go a long ways.
He had to retract because all of them apart from @surpassinggoogle were selling their votes...
I like this idea a lot!
We have the tools to monitor these accounts for activity/vote spread/etc.
I wish the idea could be put to @ned - and we have an account called @mrdelegation (or something like that...)
Like you, I have almost resorted to punching a hole in the wall with my fist! It has so much potential, and when i see people crapping on it, it MAKES ME VERY MAD.
It really does have so much potential and we have certainly realized a lot of that potential and it continues to get better all the time for sure. It is a big concern of mine though the general crypto community seems to not like it for a lot of different reasons. @jerrybanfield will put up YouTube videos about it and he sometimes gets more thumbs down than thumbs up and you look at the comment section and people are hating on him and the platform really hard. It is a major concern from an investment perspective because all the negativity surrounding it can make it look like some "whale hang out" or some scammy system that people don't want to spend their time.
In reality even if people don't want to blog and all that it makes sense for every crypto trader to have STEEM accounts just to be able to run to the STEEM Backed Dollar during pullbacks and store the coins off an exchange in a location where they control the keys.
I have been in crypto since 2013 and STEEM suddenly was the realization of future crypto that certain people used to talk about then. Where you could send coins to a human readable address instead of having the long Bitcoin style addresses..., Fast transactions times, little to no fees. STEEM is an unbelievably good system in a lot of ways.
We just keep having to fight for it. I would like to say it is ours now but that day hasn't quite came for someone like me. I'm more like a little puppy scratching at the sliding glass door wanting in.
thanks for your epic post. I will respond soon when my energy is back up....this post wore me out...and i tried to respond to everyone...
you just made over $10 in comments, because your reply is here twice! ha ha, i just noticed...
I tried to reply on Steemit and it gave me the broadcast error. So I replied through ChainBB and didn't realize it went through twice!
I was thinking... I know we have steem whales where we can see those that hold the most SP; is there a way we can see the top 500 most prolific users on Steemit? Then we can match them with a whale that could delegate them SP for 30 days and that gives them time to build a following then they can move on to the next user for 30 days, etc. is there already something like this?
Yes we can get a hold of this data.
I think there are many good points in this post and the replies that could be compiled and put forward - who and how is the next stage. I did try with my 'delegate' post a week ago but we need someone with a bit more ooomf perhaps?
Yeah, I definitely think we need to come together as a community and prepare for the worst. I think the only thing that will help Steemit survive is if whales delegate so @ned should be getting on that ASAP or All is lost. In the meantime if anyone here has ties to whales they should reach out and plead the case.
Yes I think delegation is key for growth, especially if the whales are sleeping!
There is SteemWhales.com I believe and I'm trying to go there but it isn't coming up. But I think on there you can see who has the most comments and highest reputations look at a lot of data. There are certain projects out there like @curie where being a newer user you have a good chance to get upvotes and this a trail of bots will upvote you as well but a lot of the upvote bots and delegation of power is done individually.
SteemReports.com is a great site for checking people voting habits. I don't see why the whales don't analyse some of the curation of users and decide who brings the best value to the platform through their CURATION and not their own posts. And check periodically that they are still voting in ways that are good for the network.
If I were a whale I would seek users who don't vote for than 5% (of their weekly total) on any particular accounts including their own. Then I could take a VACATION knowing my capital values are growing because I invested in the right people!
Wow, somehow I didn't know about SteemReports.com This is awesome!
Thank you for the information! I think it would be great if we could reach out to those people some way, and ask them to join the movement. Maybe @ned can help?
Possibly. It looks like he currently has 500,000 Steem Power delegated to others