Steemit looks great, but does it put the cart before the horse?
This is my first steemit post! Congratulations to me! Unfortunately, I might not get a warm reception, because I'm starting off by challenging the system.
So I read Leah Stella Stephens post on Medium regarding Steemit, and I was intrigued. Leah, by the way, is an awesome spokesperson for the platform! The entire time I was reading it, however, I had this sense of deja vu. Todd Hannula wrote a response that completely nailed why I Had this feeling. He likened Steemit to Multi Level Marketing (MLM). I remember MLM. I dabbled in it in my youth (didn't we all?) and quickly learned that it's not all that it's cracked up to be. The problem is, MLM puts the cart before the horse. Its primary goal is to make money, and the products and services are secondary to that process. From an initial glance, I get that same vibe about Steemit. Making money seems more important than content creation. If this is the direction that the platform chooses to go, I don't see much success from the platform, as it will soon be overloaded with folks just trying to game the system or it will be filled with posts about itself ("make money from Steemit with this one weird trick"). That said, here I am! I signed up for an account, just to see what happens. Hopefully content and conversation will be king here, and I'll do my part!
If one were to read, view and listen to all of the content and reach the conclusion that none of it had value, then from that subjective position you would have a point. On the other hand if, like me you have gained enormous value from other people's contribution and accept that the time, experience, awareness or talent required to generate the content deserves a financial reward in compensation then you might find there is very little in common with an MLM scheme. I hope you find something of value here that might put your unease at rest. I would also say that no platform like this has ever (to my knowledge) existed before, so a degree of unease may be natural as everyone tries to understand it. All the best and welcome!
I was about to type a response, but I could not have said it better. Great explanation.
Thanks for your reply. I'm hoping that the reward feature provides the incentive to create better content. One thing Ive noticed is that once a social media platform reaches the monetization phase, quality seems to go into free fall. Steemit seems to be starting from this position. Hopefully they will buck the trend. I've been looking around some more and there is definitely quite some value to much of the content here. Keeping an open mind!
wow...i would have never even correlate MLM with Steemit in a hundred year. The only thing they have in common is that there is money involved in it...but wait, that's the case with any enterprise on earth, even charity.
MLM is a direct sale distribution system for products and services and it rewards it's distributors with a fraction of the commission on multiple levels. Again...there is nothing in here even resembling that model.
In Steemit, the best content rise to the top and is rewarded financially. It is all done via a game theory, economics and a voting mechanism.
Many people have a really bad relationship to money...which seems to be your case. Money is like a blank canvas, it simply is. If you believe it's bad, it's going to be bad. If you think that anything that is related to money is bad...it will be...for you. If you think money is a tool, that's what it's going to be for you. I was for a long time in the group that believe that money was bad and guess what...I was dead broke. Not that surprising.
Unfortunately, people will come with a hasty conclusions without ever actually checking the facts...which seems to be the case in that situation. So far on this platform I've learne about the concept of #basic-income #artificial-intelligence and I've even discovered about a really neat portable projector I could buy for a hundred bucks. Of course, people get excited with the prospect of making money from their content and will write about that but I can say that in only 2 weeks, the type of content has diversified tremendously from the "early days".
Thanks for your reply. I don't have a bad relationship with money. We've been very good to each other! The more I look at the site the more hope I have. I'll continue to keep an open mind.
ok, I am glad to hear that. It's really a giant social experiment that has never been tried before. It can be quite the mind bender for the un-initiated to blockchain, cryptocurrencies, inflation, stake-based voting, etc.
But hopefully, it will be like the lightbulb one day...you don't need to know how it works, you only need it to work.
I have my own skepticisms about the Steemit monetization model and inflation concerns, but I would say that it's nothing like Amway. We are posting original thoughts here, not marketing garbage products of big corporations. Also, there are no referral fees/bonuses nor any incentives for scamming friends and family. Also, individual posters are not paying anything to the Steemit website to use it. I'd say Steemit is strictly superior to Reddit in every way. If Steemit is MLM, then Reddit is slave labor.
I remember my mates Dad trying to sell me Amway, I was about 17, he was desperate.
I've been looking everywhere for a full range of kitchen products
hahahah