There is a lot of negativity surrounding steemit.com and, hence, STEEM, of late. The difficulties with the interface dropping posts, comments, and missing upvotes is well documented. These are legitimate issues that must be corrected if steemit.com is ever going to be more than a blip in Internet history.
That said, we are a long way from being MySpace. There are parallels people are drawing which are totally absurd. When you look at where steemit is versus MySpace when Facebook entered the market, there is no comparison. To start, steemit is using cutting edge technology, the blockchain. MySpace did not have this advantage. Secondly, steemit is like no other social media site out there in that it actually pays people to contribute. These two factors make steemit unique at the moment.
Of course, that does not mean that steemit.com will not end up in the trash basket. In the tech world, things change quickly. There will be other social sites built upon the blockchain while offering their currencies for participation. This is obvious. What is interesting is @ned freely embraces this idea. In fact, his goal is to "tokenize" the Internet. He seeks to give other social/commenting sites the ability to create their own token and do the same things as we are doing on steemit.com. At first glance, this might appear to be a bad thing for STEEM but it is not.
The long term value of a token is what is on the underlying blockchain. Bitcoin is prices so high compared to others because there is more on the bitcoin blockchain than anywhere else. Bitcoin also has more developers creating stuff than the other blockchains The SMT concept ensures that there will be a ton of development on the steem blockchain. While the likes of Wall Street Journal and NY Times have the money to create their own stuff, there are a ton of blogs with under 20,000 daily visitors/commenters. These sites do not have the wherewithal to develop something like this from scratch.
Enter Smart Media Tokens. Now all bloggers and site operators have an open standard to follow to create their own tokens while monetizing their sites. What is the potential market for this? Considering there are tens of millions of sites out there, I would say it is enormous. How many need to join this blockchain before the value of STEEM goes through the roof?
What about steemit.com? I am still optimistic on that. I could be mistaken but I do not believe this is the red-headed step child. @ned and the rest of the development team is still committed to this site. Yes, there are issues with it at the moment which are being worked on. It is crucial to remember, this is still in the Beta phase. The final product is not out yet.
Human emotions run to extremes. Many were optimistic about STEEM when I joined a couple months ago yet now the sentiment is that it is dying. The post comparing steemit.com to MySpace proves this. We simply are in a phase where people want to focus upon the short-term negativity.
One other thought that I would be remiss if I did not mention. Blockchains value comes from the developers. What is actually tied to the blockchain is what is important. Many seem to overlook this concept. While I am not aware of all that is going on with this blockchain, I know there is development. We all know about DTube and the other interfaces developed for steemit. Well, today, @igster posted an article about something, I presume, he put out.
A decentralized, blockchain based question/answer site similar to Quora on the steem blockchain. How big is Quora? What about Yahoo Answers? Here is just another example of a product put out by a developer that adds value to the steem blockchain since it is tied directly into it and uses STEEM.
The steem blockchain most likely has more transactions going through it than bitcoin or ethereum. This is huge. We see scaling issues with those chains, something that is not a problem on steem. Yes, there are technical difficulties of late that need to be addressed, which, ironically, @ned put out a post saying that is what the developers are doing.
Development and transactions...reasons to still be super bullish on STEEM.
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Nice post! I personally think Steemit has the potential to make Facebook look like MySpace. Not that I have anything against Facebook, but Steemit is a revolutionary platform.
I am posting my posts through the application , I really get annoyed because I waste a lot of time.
Yes it is frustrating....I have been using busy.org more.
Steemit must grow and it's up to everyone of us to work towards it. That's why the blockchain is decentralised. We can all contribute our quota
May please I invite you to go through the large collection of recent posts and comments by people who are being turned off by the payout levels of the up-voting system, and then bring back a summary/synthesis that allows you to support your bullishness about the "post here and get paid" mantra?
I want to see Steemit and Steem succeed as much as the next guy, since I bought a block of money here and promptly put all of it into Steam Power with no plan to power down soon -- which means a certain amount of confidence in the long-term future for Steemit.
At the same time, though, those of us who are coming from various writing communities need to join our hands and help fix the problems in the reward system. For one thing, we need a much more comprehensive approach to the issue of how to stimulate and reward authors than one where we most often offer them two dollars of "payment" for three days of work. There is undue focus on dollar payments, in my opinion.
My bottom line point is that as we head into the SMT era, let's roll up our sleeves and help to fix the defects in the current reward system.
why would an idependant blog want their own token, there would be thousands of valueless tokens competeting for space, its redundant
I would say there will be both. Some sites will simply piggy back off what steemit set up while others will go the route of the individual token. Many sites do not have the resources to bring a token to market....it will be easier for them to just use STEEM.