Eyeballs are largely a property of a web (or non-web) application, not a blockchain. The white paper and in many ways the whole Steem community both confuse the two in very significant ways. There are many logical leaps in these assumed models that are poorly supported if at all.
The only thing a blockchain can really ever do is pay people money (or tokens) according to a variety of rules. Apart from that, it is impotent to interact with the world in any way, eyeballs or otherwise.
I'm not convinced that people influence people's eyeballs by buying Steem, or at least the model by which they can do so has not been clearly explained in the white paper or otherwise. They can influence who gets paid, but that isn't the same thing at all.
Why do you think 'eyeballs' wouldn't play a (big) role on a blockchain application like STEEM(it)?
Imagine for example I am writing an article about Steem Monsters (or any other business built on STEEM). Then I think it does matter if 50 people are reading it or 5000, if I assume that a certain percentage of the readers gets interested in Steem Monsters and decides to buy Steem Monsters cards with ... STEEM! :)
Apart from that, as many well informed poeple (including you) are so eager to test the planned HF changes, I would say "Yes, lets try it now, don't lose more precious time (apart from testing) and just see what happens!"
Then at least we cannot say we hadn't tried it out ... and then I really hope my scepticism proved to be wrong.
Well the simple fact is you can't, as a typical user, "look" at a blockchain in and of itself. You are always going to be using some sort of application and the application is effectively a gatekeeper on eyeballs.
For example, steemit.com has started showing "featured posts" which have nothing to do with the blockchain, that is just whatever their company management decides users should look at, and those posts I believe get far more eyeballs as a result.
Yes, of course the programmers of the different apps have quite some influence, but apart from that, if there are more users altogether on a blockchain, business owners (investors) have a bigger pool of potential customers (my example was Steem Monsters). If the products of the businesses are paid with the currency of the blockchain (for example STEEM) that should originate in more demand and thus a higher price of the currency (at least that would seem to be logical in my eyes).
Sure more usage can correlate with higher value. That's not at all the same thing as 'eyeballs' though.
I meant we should care about getting/retaining as much as possible users which means more 'eyeballs' as well (English is not my mother tongue but I translate 'eyeballs' here with people who view content, advertisements, articles about Steem Monsters etc. - tell me if I am wrong) which should lead to more usage as well.
Yes, if someone is buying STEEM that doesn't influence people's eyeballs, but if there are more eyeballs (= more users) there is a bigger chance of more people buying STEEM. Therefore I think the formula more users = more value still should work even on a blockchain based platform.
And that's why we should care about the effect every change has on (potential) new users.
That's the premise being claimed above which I am questioning. In a lot of ways we seem to agree.
Passive users and active users alike increase the value of Steem.
Why do you think Steem has value if it ain't what I highlighted?
Well almost every single cryptocurrency has some value even the most nearly-defunct ones with abandoned development, semi-broken blockchains, etc. They almost never lose all value.
As far as why it has specifically the value that it has I don't think its much different from any other cryptocurrency. People speculate that it may have greater demand in the future for a variety of reasons, or that it may have less. The process results in a price.
But I'm not sold on it having anything to do with influencing eyeballs.
Steem is different than most other cryptocurrencies as most of its inflation doesn't go to pay for the security of the network but to the content creator.
Linear reward introduced a loophole which was explained in the original whitepaper. We talked about this at length already so I'll leave it to this.
This loophole gives the possibility for opportunists to extract a growing amount of value for a negligeable amount of work. This is at the expense of the whole network value.
For the reasons you mention here, I think my STEEM is not Steemit post may have been one of the more important contributions I've made here. It seems the community (and investors/speculators trying to evaluate STEEM) are still stuck in this discussion without a resolution. The utility of STEEM (unlike most other cryptocurrency projects) is no longer based on wild speculative dreams. It's being demonstrated right now, and some don't like that.
Utility of steem is a joke at this point because most users used centralized bullshit. Developers have to build real technology first.
Without smart contract technology, building truely decentralized applications is difficult (though not impossible).
Curious, do you run your own front end to the Steem chain locally? If so, what do you use?
We run our own front ends. We ran into many problems following the herd per say , from centralized front end development. (i've gotten more people to deploy front ends, but it isn't a solution to have them only on the VPS servers) Web apps seem to be an extremely locked down ecosystem that isn't very p2p friendly.
Next logical step is running the chain locally with a front end/webui talking to localhost , and that is what myself, powerpoint45, techcoderx, and vaultec have been working together with.
Only times I use the full stack locally (more people should have this access and would run steem blockchain on their hardware) is when i'm logged into the witness node on smoke and need to broadcast a transaction per CLI. This is why we need Witness GUI for DPOS as well as front ends for posting data into the chain.
https://github.com/dtubenetwork
https://github.com/techcoderx/ipfsVideoUploader
https://gitlab.com/vaultec/dtubepermanente
https://github.com/powerpoint45/dtube-mobile-unofficial
At no point is this Steem blockchain's fault. It's front end and backend developers who missed the point/access of what BTC core wallet (full nodes) achieved, as bitcoin has over 10,000 live copies online. Steem only has 125.
This comes from lazy development , not pushing hard enough , (even to the brink of failure) innovation.
I often wonder what it would look like if people built integrated hardware solutions. Something like a raspberry pi complete with the full blockchain ready to go, you just plug it in and you have a full node available to you locally. Maybe @anyx's api could be used as well.
I don't think Steem has really demonstrated much clear utility. It has properties which can be useful as you described quite clearly in your "STEEM is not Steemit" post, but its user base has stagnated so it isn't really demonstrating that such utility has much appeal.
I think a better narrative than speculators "fearing" utility is something like earnings reports on stocks. Sometimes the demonstrated utility falls short of expectations and this causes the story to adjust downward and the price falls, but sometimes it exceeds expectations (or points to even greater possibilities), and the price increases. Unfortunately Steem has not really demonstrated the latter.
Obviously, when there is a excess of hype and expectations are 'to the moon', it is more likely that 'earnings' (or demonstrations of utility in the case of blockchains/tokens) will fail to meet them, but the opposite does sometimes happen too.
I was more thinking along the lines of "We're going to build project X that will do Y!" where X doesn't exist in reality yet and Y is just a set of features (not a promise of future economic returns). If X does get built and it does functionally accomplish Y, then it's no longer speculation. Then it's more along the lines of what you describe in terms of evaluating it as a real project with expectations of profitability and utility value.
I'd say Steem is built, and it does functionally exist as a social media application on the blockchain which rewards people with tokens of value. Many other blockchain projects still haven't been built out to do the thing they claim they are going to do. Many more are today than in 2017, but I still think there's a disconnect between pure speculation in the space and evaluating a cryptocurrency project against other competitors in that market vertical.
Ultimately, I agree, the value hasn't yet been demonstrated, or we'd see more people buying Steem and powering up.
In practice, it's still speculation for a very long time. The speculation is over how much it will grow. Building a blockchain to do Y may demonstrate it can do Y, but from a value perspective, that is little more than a proof of concept until it demonstrates that it can grow large and attract a large amount users and economic value. It's barely one step forward from pure hype, and if the proof of concept demonstrates some problems with the concept or growth potential, that's a negative not a positive. It's not a given that such a proof-of-concept will be a negative in this way, but in practice many are, for various reasons, some totally legitimate (like most high risk experimental ventures fail, but that doesn't mean trying them was a bad idea) and some not (naked hype and fraud).
Steem curation can be displayed as a reflection of the most valuable content according to the shareholders.
This has value for the community, aspiring authors and curators.
There are clear incentives for the community to have a window on what are the best-paid posts and the more Steem someone has, the greater their influence on the platform/pay.
https://www.docdroid.net/0TuBFv2/steem-whitepaper.pd
Maybe. For those who are personally involved with dedicated curation of reward payouts, very likely yes. For major investors, maybe (depending on their own views on how important it is what particular payouts are made, some will care and some won't).
For many users, they may be happier looking at whatever Steemit thinks are the best posts to 'feature' or content that meshes with their own personal interests regardless of payout (possibly by app-level targeted curating, or just the user's own decisions of what to look at), or they may not even have a choice if their preferred UI (for whatever reasons) takes a different approach to showing content or doesn't even show 'content' at all (as with some of the games now reasonably popular on the blockchain).
I don't know how much demand there is for influencing the eyeballs of power curators, who are the only ones who can actually be counted on to have their eyeballs directed as a result of on-chain curation. There might be a bit more demand to influence the eyeballs of major investors (since that is a relatively valuable demographic to advertisers), but it still depends whether the investors care about payouts for their eyeballs to be focused on that content.
Saying 'curation' generally isn't specific enough, because Steemit does their own curation when they decide what posts to feature and what advertisements to place on the pages and where to place them. This curation exists alongside the curation of payouts and the former is more directly in line of users' eyeballs.
For users of UIs and apps that have their own policies on what content to feature, or none at all, those looking to reach those eyeballs will simply buy advertising from the app or UI operator, as with Facebook or non-blockchain games. Having a blockchain behind the UI doesn't change anything here.
The best way to capture people's attention is to let them express what they value. This is done through curation. Displaying the results of curation refines the process and create virtuous cycles.
People's attention has value. Capturing people's attention has value. We can account for irrational behavior but it can't be predicted.
See my other reply. I really believe that the biggest problem is simply that we have elevated this whole content and curation mechanism into something that it supposed to be a big deal on its own, when in reality it isn't.
It isn't that it has no value on its own but it really needs to be just a small piece that starts the ball rolling on building a larger community with its own vibrant economy that does much more (which makes the costs of paying content an acceptable means to an end). When it becomes too much of the focus and only a small part of the story for where Steem is going then, the fundamentally unfavorable economics of it all become dominant and value just bleeds away.
The attention economy was never a good story here. Attention has value but it has financial value that can be monetized only to the extent it can be tolled off, as sites like Facebook do. That's not a good fit for a blockchain economy which is built around permissionless access.
It's true that eyeballs are not property of a blockchain, but what if we make it one?
We can easily solve this problem in a centralized way.
Step 1: Steemit, Inc stop using ads for personal profit.
Step 2: They start selling the ad spots by auction to the advertiser who is willing to burn the most STEEM. (They can even take a small cut if they are that greedy).
Step 3: Bidbots are obligated to burn at least 20% of the profit they make, if they don't, then steemit, Inc downvotes them to death. This will create a good sink for STEEM. Centralized, yes, but effective.
Step 4: Price of STEEM obviously falls less than it is now, and rises higher if helped by speculation. Steemit, Inc which holds millions of STEEM is now happy because they made more through increase in price than by selling stupid google adsense ads.
Step 5: Encourage Dapps like Dtube etc to use ad spots and sell them by auction to the highest bidding advertiser (again burn most of the steem). Those apps will help the price of steem, which will benefit them, benefit users, benefit Steemit, Inc. THIS IS THE STRONGEST NETWORK EFFECT EVER.
Step 6: Dapps that help steem in absolutely no way are also downvoted to death. Centralized but effective, again.
With the exception of (6) none of these can actually be enforced in any plausible way. (6) should probably happen but even without any access to the reward pool, dapps can still build business models (for example around selling ads, services, etc.) which don't contribute much if at all to the value of Steem
Can’t be enforced but it’s possible to go in this direction through discussions. You are more influential than me so getting to you is one of the best things I can do.
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When I say not enforced I'm really saying that I don't think they will work out because without some form of enforcement, people and companies will find ways to cheat, although they will usually dress it up in less negative terms than that.
A couple of years ago Ned was talking about the attention economy and some concept (never fully defined) of how ad revenue would be shared with the content creator, the reader, and/or with Steem as a whole through burning.
But when the rubber hit the road and they started selling ads, they just decided to keep all the money in the name of 'sustainability', and there isn't a damn thing anyone else can do about it.