Steemit is not Tsu

I know a fair few people on Steemit were previously on Tsu. The site has been changed to a static message now, but for a while it was looking like the future of the web, much as Steemit does now.

Tsu was kicked off in late 2014 by a company with offices in New York. They had a charismatic CEO in Sebastian Sobczak. He managed to get lots of high profile media coverage for this social site that would give most of the advertising revenue to users. What you earned was based on views of your posts, so you needed some combination of lots of followers and shares by popular people. You also earned a percentage of that made by anyone you recruited and a diminishing percentage from those recruited by your network.

For a while it was looking really good with millions signing up. Of course the incentive to recruit helped that and many who joined never really did anything. The majority were never going to make much as you need a lot of views on ads to make anything. A very few people made thousands. They managed to sign up some assorted celebrities at the start, but most of those did not stick around too long. For some of them the potential earnings might not be enough to justify their time and they could reach a much wider audience on other services.

By the time it closed down last year I'd managed to make over $200. I withdrew $200, but I also spent a lot on buying music and art from other users as well as donating to charities. Charity was a big part of Tsu. Verified charity accounts had the potential to make a lot of money and I know some did. I don't consider my time wasted there as I made a lot of friends and had fun.

Tsu shut down when their investors pulled out. I suspect that the 10% of ad revenue that they kept just wasn't enough to cover costs and the prospects were not looking good.

I think I joined Steemit almost immediately after Tsu shut down. I was attracted by several factors:

• No adverts. Steemit does not rely on advertisers at all.
• Using cryptocurrency. This is obviously a hot topic these days. I'd been looking into Bitcoin etc and this looked like a cool way to earn some crypto. Those running the Steemit site and hiring developers are funded by the Steem they make. Those in at the start had the opportunity to build up enough SP to guarantee them a good income.
• Decentralised. Using a blockchain means there's no private database behind the site that can be shut down. As long as there are enough witnesses to make the blockchain work then it can't be killed off.
• No central control. Although Steemit Inc has some licence over the branding of Steemit and largely decides the direction of development they do not moderate what people will see. It's up to users to flag bad content.

I wanted to point out some of the ways Steemit differs from Tsu. I'm having to think back to how Tsu worked. It's only a year, but things move so fast on-line that it's easy to forget some details. So please excuse any omissions and pick me up on any inaccuracies.

People complained about the 'favoured few' making all the money on Tsu. The founders and the top accounts could share a post and make it much more. Well a similar thing happens on Steemit except it's not purely about views. You only earn from votes and the whales can confer big rewards with their votes. There are 'curation guilds' and other groups who can have a big influence too with their collected SP. You will see certain names on the Trending page each day, but you really need the support of whales or guilds to get there. There's an incentive to vote on potentially popular posts to earn more, but this doesn't always favour smaller players even if their content is outstanding.

On Tsu you became influential by building a big following. That was likely to accelerate as people would follow 'celebrities' and this was partly in hope of getting followed back or gaining a share. On Steemit it's mainly about how much SP you hold. Some gained a lot in the early days from their posts or by buying it. Some will have done that then the price was really low, but I know some did so when the price was reaching all time highs of around $4. They still have a way to go to have a chance of recouping that investment.

Tsu allowed for a single image or video on a post. You saw a lot of 'pretty picture' posts and a lot of those were copied from elsewhere. Steemit encourages longer form posts with flexible formatting. It could do with a friendlier editor, but It's not that hard to learn some Markdown.

In the earlier days of Tsu various people had their accounts shut down after accusations of trying to game the system using scripts of bots. There is widespread 'click fraud' around the web anyway, but this was expressly forbidden by the Tsu terms. A lot of those people denied any wrongdoing. I really don't know if they had intentionally broken the rules or if their enthusiastic use of the site was mistaken for misuse. Or maybe they just upset the management in some way. Bots are pretty common on Steemit and are allowed. They can be used to tactically vote for maximum reward or to highlight plagiarism. I think it's should be humans doing the curation to ensure good content, but it's interesting to see how people explore the potential of bots.

I think flagging on Tsu would highlight posts and accounts for the team to check out and make a decision on. With Steemit it's purely the community doing this. If enough SP is behind the flags then a post will be hidden by default and the author may find their reputation sinking so they struggle to get anything seen. I know some feel this was unfairly done to them, but we've seen other whales step in to counter the flagging in some cases.

Steemit has not seen the rapid growth that Tsu had. In the case of Tsu a lot of that came from places like Pakistan after local celebrities joined up. Sites like this have massive potential to provide a good income for people in poorer countries, so that should be good thing. In the case of Tsu some thought it was a problem as ad views in such countries are worth a lot less than places like the USA, but it was still more money coming in. What we tended to see was a lot of 'comment spam' with comments that just said 'nice' when a like would mean as much. I think they applied filters to reduce this, but we still got a lot of pointless comments such as 'nc'. I think this was largely in the hope of getting a follow. I just don't do 'follow for follow' as I only follow those with good content. I had over 5500 followers when Tsu died, but this was meaningless as I doubt more than a few percent even looked at my posts. I have a lot less here, but I know a good proportion are active and I get very few spam comments.

On Tsu you could only withdraw your funds once you reached $100 and would have to wait whilst checks were made that you had not been breaking the rules. For most users this was going to take a very long time and I expect some didn't get paid if they were caught plagiarising or other wrongdoing. On Steemit you can withdraw as soon has you have some Steem or Steem Dollars. That can be transferred to an exchange in seconds and then it's up to you how you use it. You can trade for other cryptocurrencies or even get your local cash, although there are likely to be fees involved.

With any site like this there is going to be a 'dash for cash', but on both sites I've found great communities of people who are out to have fun and do good. The charity work on Tsu was amazing and I'd love to see more of that on Steemit. I'm not aware of many charities on here yet. Both allow for transfers to other users. I think Tsu planned to apply a small charge to those to supplement their income, but I'm not sure if they got to that. I was eager to see a market in Tsu$ for goods but it never got that big. Steemit has the same potential and we are starting to see some projects for that. It will always be free to transfer Steem, so we have an alternative to things like Paypal that works across borders.

Tsu had great potential, but the business didn't work out. Steemit transcends business and should be able to keep going forever. Even governments can't shut it down, but there's always the potential to block certain sites. You can already use Steemit via several different sites, so it's more robust. I don't know how easy it would be to block access to the blockchain, but Steemit seems more immune to censorship than any other service. It may be possible to use it via Tor or other encrypted, anonymised channels.

Steemit has a few challenges yet. They need to find ways to allow lots of people to sign up without having the available Steem drained by fake/bot accounts.

Anyway, there's a few thoughts. I'm interested to hear from other former Tsuvians on how you think Steemit is better or worse.

Tsu is dead, long live Steemit!

I'm Steve, the geeky guitarist.

Mine cryptocurrency in the cloud at Eobot, including Steem. You can earn as you chat using WowApp. If you use these links I get a small reward. You can recruit others to do the same.