On Friday I had someone I greatly respect say something very enlightening about STEEM... I think people on Steem should hear. That same day I wrote this post... but just got back to going through it and getting it ready to post.
If you enjoy my ramblings follow along...
OF NOTE: me and @asgarth have been spending a week working on https://peakmonsters.com/ ... but https://steempeak.com has been on my mind alot and taking a short break to really think about priorities is always good
First I should say I took the image in Bolivia back in 2012
WHO SAID WHAT?
I was talking to my brother about a bunch of stuff... he asked about the conference I spoke at (SteemFest) and my trip to Thailand. I told him for that presentation I interviewed a bunch of my youtube friends to see what they thought of the tech we can do on Steem.
Perhaps you should understand, My brother goes to the youtube conferences that I'm a photographer for and where I know a good amount of the attendees... I've introduced him to many of those youtubers or he knows their work so he was likely very interested in what they said. He has studied Youtube and listened to the top speakers and writers about building an audience.
Also I'll brag a bit... My brother is the most talented of all the Jarvies... he puts my talent level to shame. He is presently building a Super Car, a legit beautiful ferrari like car... by hand. He has designed it and he's doing pretty much everything from electrical, to designing, to modeling and sculpting the full size car and making molds for the body panels and all the mechanical work to make it go vroom vroom. He's built houses, painted beautiful painting and sculpted and created most anything he wants to create... He's also very passionate about freedom of speech and philosophy etc.
EXPLAINING WHAT YOUTUBERS WANT
I know i haven't done a proper post about my survey of youtubers and my presentation ... my presentation from SteemFest is online as a video and I should find it and share it.
I have talked to my brother plenty about steem in the past. He's known about Steem for just shy of 2 years ever since I was just a n00b trying and failing to explain it. He's always been more or less "That's nice" and it felt more like he'd get around to it when he had more time or we got things on SteemPeak polished up. I wasn't pushing it, just like I don't push Steem to my Youtube or Photography friends because our feature set is not there yet and our UI is still lacking a few key things that will bring RETENTION.
What I did begin to realize is that my brother and and any Youtuber I talked to could care less about the "free money" of the Steem rewards pool because they knew (as we all should know) that Youtube had the potential to make much more serious money (tens of thousands of dollar) and interact with way more people. Last year I didn't really understand that leading with conversation about the reward pool is a loosing proposition because if you set that up as the "Champion of Steem" and that champion was dependent on 13 cent Steem (aka a few dollars in rewards) ... well your champion is not very ideal at all. In fact many youtubers may turn off ads on their videos up until it brings in legit sums of money.
However in this phone call: I explained many of the survey results from the Youtubers then I explained what we're working on right now with COMMUNITIES. I was honestly just excited to share the results of what I found out in the survey, wasn't trying to "Sell Steem"
Your proposition should be good enough that you shouldn't have to sell you should be able to explain and they see the value without you pushing it?
THE BEST THING EVER ABOUT STEEM
Ok enough of the pretext
I basically explained that someone could follow a content creator on Steem and unlike FB, Youtube, Instagram, Twitter, Patreon... that connection would be INDEPENDENT and unbreakable ... meaning no company or site could severe that connection.
OK that's AWESOME... Every content creator likes that.
That's now the main thing I LEAD WITH when talking to content creators and they love it.
But when I said our latest project on the blockchain and on SteemPeak was working toward making an interface for communities and that communities would have a similar property.
And why would communities be cool when we have FB or Reddit you ask?
Because you can create a community that is YOURS and No company and No website can take it away from you and it's not tied to only one website.
Aka... Subscribers make a direct connection to the Community and no dependency in a company or website.
And he didn't just say... that's nice. He made it a point to say something like:
That is literally the best thing you've ever told me about Steem.
Why? Because he immediately began to calculate how that was different than FB and Reddit and Patreon. How he and people with similar interests could build something that companies and sponsors would value instead of seeing companies demanding money for access to.
So that was a fun day for me. I've worked on SteemPeak for about 18 months now... we've had discussions and I've mentioned how it would help him and I've thought about just helping him post content for him so you all could see the progress of the Car. He may be the most talented person i know but he doesn't have a huge following and so probably the idea of going and convincing users on a new platform that has a tiny amount of people (compared to youtube) probably overwhelming and not really that viable.
But you can tell people:
"You and people you know can create your own community based on subjects you guys have in common... this space is yours and the subscribers can't be taken away from you it's only their choice. We at SteemPeak are just there to serve you and create tools to make your life better in hopes you'll use OUR interface to YOUR community."
I feel like that's what he heard... and he was all over that. In fact so excited I made him an account @jjarvie because now it's time.
THE MORALS OF THE STORY
I feel like what I learned today is:
Stop talking about Reward Pool stuff.... it's fine but it should literally be like point #5 or #6 when talking about Steem. An afterthought at most. "Oh yeah and you can also make a couple of dollars from time to time"
You don't even need to talk about Steem-currency or economics at all to begin with.
If you're talking to a content creator that has had success or understands success in social media. Talk to them about INDEPENDENCE. Talk to them about how they can be in control of their own destiny. They already know how to make money because of eyes on content.
Don't tell them they can come somewhere and everything will be provided... you won't appeal to the successful people. You'll appeal to the leaches and lazy people or those who are easily misguided into thinking that there's an easy way to lots of money.
Tell them they can control their destiny and this time around the companies will stay out of their way.... this time they'll have ownership of their connections and their communities.
Tell them their influence will be valued by companies like steempeak instead of having to pay to reach their community (aka facebook) ... they'll be the ones making the money instead of paying the money. And that's not so much a discussion about how they'll get rich it's a statement of valuing what they bring to the table.
It's still gonna be a hard sell for now because we simply don't have the pool of individuals Youtube or Instagram have... no getting around how important that is to them. So we likely have to give them a reason to bring their users here. Why? Well, again, one of those reasons is the independence of knowing those connections aren't dependent on another company or site. But also we have some very interesting things the blockchain can provide as well.
IT'S NOT ABOUT THE PRICE
That's what I'm learning more and more about Steem.
It's NOT about the price of Steem...
It's not about the price of Steem...
It's not about the price of Steem...
repeat after me....
If we can't use and take solid advantage of this amazing technology and the blockchain and find success -> then we really don't deserve the price of Steem to go up.
I think there are reasons why Steem the platform can be more successful now than it ever was with $3 steem.
We have some amazing things that are presently diamonds in the rough. We need to chip away the edges work on our message and presentation and realize the actual solid foundations that people will come and stay here for. Price of Steem (any crypto) is blatantly inconsistent... if we make a foundation on that ... that house will fall whenever it's not healthy. We make it on solid things that we know are great and here to stay... we can build on that foundation and then maybe reap the rewards of a price increase.
Price of steem shot up because of speculators... now we can work toward things to have users and large apps slowly create real and sustained demand. Slow and sustained growth.
Am i saying everyone should be flocking to Steem right now... nope... as for User Experience I think there are things lacking. It's not intuitive enough and there needs to be a reason for big time creators to create and lead their subscribers here. We have a bit of retention problem but that may because all we told them was about reward money and they realized it wasn't very much.
BUT SOON... March... April? (wild guess)
I'd like to see https://steempeak.com/ get done with the bulk of it's present To Do list by around that time.
RECAP: COMMUNITIES + INDEPENDENCE
If I ever say ownership i mean non-dependency, you own your account and no one can take that from you... you have the keys... you're not dependent on someone else.
Independence is what will happen with communities.
You aren't independent if you fully rely on any particular company or website if there is dependency then what have they received that sub-reddits and facebook groups haven't provided?
We can't start off the offer with unstable crypto-currencies and new tokens they are complicated, they are unfamiliar. Also there aren't solid examples yet of tokenized communities, nothing yet to replicate. Full time content creators are savy... When someone makes something successful they'll learn how to replicate but no one has yet with all the tribes out there so far. But you know what they've seen plenty of ... People growing communities.(all over the internet)
There are a lot of people who have that skillset of building communities. LARGE ones... like tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people. Give them a tool like we're starting to create ... give them tools like SteemPeak is planning on.
Then when they have a good community going give them things like letting them sell promotion on their community.
MY ADVICE TO STEEMIANS
When communities system gets active. Don't just create a name for a community ... create an actual community. There's a difference.
"No my dear: you didn't create a COMMUNITY you created an account and gave it a title"
And if someone created the name of a community you like... who cares? It's about who actual WORKS HARD AND SMART and creates a community governed in a way that will make people want to be there. But working smart sometimes means working together ... good community leaders know how to work with others.
THE END
And to those who read the whole thing I'd love to know what you think... but if nothing else just let me know if you read it. haha
Here's another Bolivian City
Well this was a huge golden nugget of wisdom and needs to be shouted from the rooftops.
Well i shall shout your testimonial to the top of the comment section with my 100% vote
A great piece that deserves every little ounce of attention it can get on this platform, which is why I resteemed it.
I have come to the conclusion that the rewards are relatively unimportant in attracting new users on multiple occasions. In 2017, I talked to a number of friends of mine about Steem and started to get them to join it. Smart people who talk to each other daily on Facebook about a variety of topics and most of those people have even blogged back in the day. One of them told me amateurs do stuff for love and they shouldn't do it for rewards.
I brushed that comment off as nonsense. If only Steem had existed since I started using the internet... But clearly, getting the rewards hasn't motivated a whole lot of people to join Steem. But there is another aspect to this. Vast riches and enormous power over information has ended up in the hands of a tiny number of individuals thanks to the success of a few global social media giants. What this means is that mega corporations and their ultra-rich owners are getting rich on the back of billions of people going about talking to each other by eavesdropping on them and manipulating them based on a panoptic view of what is going on and powerful data mining. This is a really perverse situation that would've inspired writers of dystopic scifi in the 20th century.
There are plenty of well-meaning people on Quora, for instance, who want to share their knowledge with those who need it and do it purely out of a desire to help their fellow human being. It's completely fine that these people want to help others without getting paid for it. But the problem is this arrangement is not without pernicious financial consequences. A slice of the value of every great answer given is transferred to the top of a tall and narrow pyramid. It's like a charity organization taking a large cut and getting filthy rich while at it. I totally get it that a lot of the users wouldn't want the money or at least the kind of money accessible to them wouldn't be enough to attract them to any significant degree. But what if that money were donated to a good cause and transferred on the blockchain in a completely transparent manner? What if Musing, the Quora equivalent Steem app, were to allow people to log in using their social media accounts or email to use a guest account whose earnings were given to a good cause like hiring lawyers for poor people who cannot get proper lawyers or something like that instead of going to a bunch of rich people who own Quora? Just asking.
Thanks for sharing your sentiments in return glad you liked it. We do indeed have the opportunity to change a few of the rules (expectations) for social media... it's very interesting.
@subtlescopes is the latest addition of mainstream social media influencers who were pissed off by Instagram doing a number on him. He decided abandon Instagram and his quarter of a million followers and join Steem today.
I definitely think the rewards pool thing was a negative thing for the longest time. Now that Steem is much closer to being worthless than it was, say, a little over a year ago, it's easier to not think about the payouts as there aren't any, for the most part. I made a couple of cents on all of my posts, and that's fine. That's more than I ever made posting on Facebook, and I don't expect a few posts I make about a game to pay my bills or anything. I've been consistent about posting, though, and I do get some decent votes here and there. So while I'd say I agree that the focus should NOT be the rewards pool, the message should be that even if that's your goal, expect it to take work and time, like anything else in life.
With people becoming increasingly annoyed with Google, Facebook, and Twitter, I think the focus should be on the other aspects you've so wonderfully illustrated. I shared this post on Twitter, anyway... hopefully someone clicks on it.
Well i think reward pool still has a place and I'm trying to figure out the balance with providing it a place on the UI and not making it too much the center of the UI.
On another note i think that for large content creators there is a usage for rewards pool... it's for them to get a decent amount of steem so that their vote is seen as motivating to their viewers. They can use votes to influence action.
All those things are INFLUENCE and if having some voting power even if it doesn't change a life is still influence to do some good and that's what they like and that's also what their sponsors pay them big money for. So reward pool isn't for creators to earn from as much as it's a tool to interact with their audience ... well that's my opinion.
Stunning photograph! And I love the independence aspect of Steem as well. There is a lot of opportunity for artists to freely express themselves and I know many others will see how impactful that can be as well. Then we aren’t doing things for the brands but for their betterment of life in general.
I agree, true owner ship and control over your own community is a huge selling point.
But I also see the point that yet we don't even have a great example of an existing successful community that will go live when SMT and Communities are here.
It's true there are very few real world standard successful communities on Steem. We need to invite people who have actual experience and success building LARGE communities.
Well, that is the best thing i read in the last weeks Jarvie, nice!
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Glad you liked it that really does make me happy. Good to know others feel the same way about Steem and how much potential we have and how our potential has the ability to be independent of the rewards pool feature.
I feel like points 1 - 7 almost deserve a post to themselves.
So many people miss this and the value that Steemit creates outside of the value of Steem. I've read a few articles and talked to a few people over the past month that are really starting to try and take advantage of that value while the price is down to grow their following and "value" of their account.
Keep up the great work!
Glad you liked those points. I'm sure future posts will continue on some of these themes.
This is awesome. I had a similar conversation with my son yesterday. He and his friend are just starting to grow their audience on Instagram and YouTube and I told them that they should also come here as well. He told me that they spent $20 promoting one of their Instagram posts for a week so that it could reach like 1500 people so far. I explained how he wouldn’t need to pay anything to promote within Steem and that there is already a group of car enthusiasts on the blockchain and that with communities, it will just become easier for all of them to find each other. Long story short, I created them an account and they are going to be starting to create here as well and have been looking at investing into crypto as well and will be starting with Steem.
Fantastic and can you post their account link please?
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Sure. It is @modified.dream. He hasn’t done anything yet though. He is going to wait until the weekend and then I am going to help him get set up with threespeak and make an intro post.
I agree with your brother's comment.
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read.
@tipu curate
Upvoted 👌 (Mana: 0/3 - need recharge?)
Also... i decided to burn 11 steem to promote this post for 5 days on https://steempeak.com/
Yeah... but then
A wild CADawg Approaches
Hi @jarvie!
Your post was upvoted by @steem-ua, new Steem dApp, using UserAuthority for algorithmic post curation!
Your UA account score is currently 6.436 which ranks you at #184 across all Steem accounts.
Your rank has not changed in the last three days.
In our last Algorithmic Curation Round, consisting of 93 contributions, your post is ranked at #6.
Evaluation of your UA score:
Feel free to join our @steem-ua Discord server
The best thing about Steem are the people. Even without the announced communities we built them, around common interests or hobbies. Sure, you have all kinds of people, but on the whole steemians are communicative and the manners better than in other corners of the internet.
An example is the secret santa organized in the German-speaking community - behind all the accounts are real people, human beings with a vast array of ideas and knowledge.
I agree with your assessment.
I started awhile ago shifting to 'we can store anything in the blocks for free' (since you stake to get RC, then power down and sell the stake, you now have a "free" hosting solution.
I like INDEPENDENCE as well.
I pretty much like anything that isn't 'come make money', and I think you have given better reasons why in this post than I ever have.
Thank you for what you do, keep it up!
That's also the thing I've realized since I learned about tribes and eventually hives. That'S what's going to make or break steem in the long run. Another thing I feel that we need is killer Dapps. Steempeak is the killer Dapp for blog-style content consumption and hopefully Dtube or another app becomes good enough for legitimate video consumption eventually.
I read it. That first pic is awesome BTW. Amazing photo.
I am a pretty big fan of what you've accomplished with Steempeak so far, and looking forward to seeing what you have in mind next. I strongly agree with your feelings about Steem and how to present it. I didn't come here for tokens. I came here for censorship resistance, for that independence you realize is the foundational value it brings to creators.
What I have to say isn't said to pander to corporations, governments, or other cartels, and folks that crave pandering over factual information tend to block me sooner or later. I need that independence to keep speaking truth to my fellows, and all creators do. Technocrats are censorship factories, and propaganda mills, and I have zero interest in such platforms.
Keep making Steempeak the ideal means of speaking the truth, and I'll keep kicking in that 5% of my rewards. Hope your brother posts about that bespoke auto. Should be pretty cool.
Thanks!
Glad to hear from you on this subject and glad you liked the post.