What is Steem?

This post is primarily a response to @whatsup's post where she's sharing her thoughts on Steem and looking towards the future.

There's a lot that's been swirling around my head about Steem lately and I figured I'd just bring it all into a post rather than leaving an insanely long comment.

I'm left looking around at Steem and wondering who we are and what we are trying to accomplish here.

My next posts will be focused on trying to find a new vision. We do not reward engaging content that well. We aren't really even trying to onboard people to a social media site. (Some apps are, but not Steem as a whole)

More and more of the reward pool is going to fund projects and I am not really sure that is a bad thing.

I'm thinking Steem isn't a social network at all. It is a group of Apps. Some of those apps continue to focus on Content, while others are going in different directions.

I think the era of Free Votes for the concept of rewarding content will continue to slowly fade. We need to find a new vision as that vision is naturally fading away. More and more of the reward pool is being delegated and funding various projects and then redistributed back to some users. Most of it has nothing to do with content.

That doesn't have to be a problem. It could be a natural development.

So most of this I agree with, but some parts not so much. The more I've learned about Steem I agree that it's not a social network. That's just one application. Given the functionality of Steem it's an intelligent first application. Also given one of the greatest challenges for any cryptocurrency is going to be distribution, I think it's actually a genius application. The stakeholders having the power to distribute the newly minted Steem means that what direction we go in is completely in our hands. That's incredibly powerful. We can continue down the social media track(which I think we should btw) or we can take Steem in a totally different direction. Frankly, we can do both, no problem. The possibilities of what we can do is only limited by our own ability and willingness.

Steem is like a set of legos. The thing that was on the box for us to reference was social media applications, but nothing is stopping us from taking those same building blocks and making whatever we want. For example, I was reading @pennsif's post about how we might create committees for Steem to facilitate different initiatives. Basically creating some sort of organizational structures so we can actually get stuff done.

My first thought was "Damn, that's going to be hard". I feel like there's so many challenges to overcome with that. How do you elect the people? What happens when someone isn't doing what they're supposed to do? How is work evaluated? With no one actually being "in charge" how are disagreements handled? I could go on like this for a while. So I was thinking about solutions and I thought, well how can we leverage the tech that we have at out disposal? So disclaimer, this isn't like an actual proposal just a brainstorming session I had with myself.

So what if there was an entire Dapp dedicated to this? What I envision is any user creates an initiative, some "thing" they want to get done. They create roles, responsibilities, decide rules on elections, terms, whatever. They launch/post it and people can start applying for the roles. Who gets what role is either assigned by the original initiative creator or via stake based voting or one person one vote voting, the original creator could decide that too. Also if someone likes the initiative, they can copy everything, but change the parameters and launch their own initiative, these two could compete to get whatever work done and whoever gets it done gets it done. Maybe they both do. Financing could also be a parameter that the initiative creator sets along with how it's distributed to the contributors.

At first I was thinking this would be a great use case for an SMT, but it could actually all be done with Steem as well. Is the initiative funded via the reward pool? Via donations? These are all part of the initiative creation process and could be used to persuade people to support one over the other. As a decentralized community, I think we have to find creative ways of dealing with organized chaos, and the more I ran this random idea through my head, I couldn't see any real areas where the TECH was the limitation. Of course it would be a ton of work to build that entire structure, but Steem itself could be used without an issue.

All of that is just an example to speak of the incredible amount of variety and diversity that we have here with this technology. The limits are really just our own imaginations.

So what about the idea of rewarding content creation? I still think this is also a good application of Steem not so much because I feel anyone "deserves" this or that or whatever. It's a bit more pragmatic for me. I think that use case makes Steem the lowest barrier to entry cryptocurrency. There are parts of ALL cryptocurrency that are really hard and not user friendly and Steem isn't exempt from that, but as times goes on all of this will get easier and easier, and as it does, this blockchain has the highest probability(IMO) of being greatly adopted because earning it is easy. Earning a lot will and should get more and more difficult, but earning "some" should continue to be easy. Once people have it, then that will give them a reason to figure out what they can do with it. Right now, there's only a handful of things you can do with it, but everyday people are working to increase what you can do with it. I think in the future all of these things will work together for the betterment of Steem.

So in the end answering the question "What is Steem?" Has an answer, but it's not simple, or elegant, or particularly informative unless the person asking already has a certain literacy in cryptocurrency and blockchain technology, so I agree, we should shift it to What is Steempeak? What is Fundition? What is Steem Monsters? What is Busy? What is Esteem? What is Dtube? What is DSound? etc.

Every Dapp is still in pretty early stages, the entire crypto market is still in early stages, but when we're building Dapps that don't require people to know that much about or care about crypto(Which is the road we're on IMO) We'll start to set ourselves apart from the rest of the herd and really be able to demonstrate the true value here.