Is this the successor of steemit?

I haven’t been on steemit for long. But I already read quite a few articles criticising the platform. Recently I’ve come across Narrative, a token on the NEO platform. While far from perfect, reading through the whitepaper, I realised that it could be a great improvement on steemit and golos.

More structure

Steemit is decidedly chaotic. It’s hard to find material you’re interested and even then, contents seem to mix. You even have different languages in the same page, which is just a waste.
Narrative tries to put some order with the concept of “niches” which are basically manually curated channels around a topic people can join. This seems to be their key improvement.
They also plan to add channels for the single users (albeit not immediately) and lastly a system for brands to have their own moderated channels.

Narrative’s narrative in a table

The team behind Narrative has a track record of building companies that engage users having founded Social Strata and Hoop.la. They have rating of 4.1 on trackICO and 3.6 on IcoBench. There is not a lot of hype for this ICO which can be a good thing.

The following table is the core of their whitepaper. It’s very informative for people familiar with steemit and Facebook.

	Narrative	Steemit	Facebook/Medium
Governance	Users	Users	Corporation
Economic Motive	Reward Users Who Add Value to Network	Reward content creators primarily	Profits for corporation through advertising sales
Content Moderation	User-Elected Moderators/Tribunal	None	Corporation
Transparent Moderator Actions	Yes	No	No
Can User Export Own Data/Content	Yes	No	No
Network Rewards (Revenue For Users)	Yes	Yes; though not as extensive	No
User Tipping	Yes	No	No
Who Controls Advertising	Users	N/A	Corporation
Who Has Executive Authority On All Content	Users	Users	Corporation
Advertising on Brand Channels	None	N/A	Yes
Immutable Financial Transaction Records	Yes	Yes	No
Payouts To Users In Both Crypto and Fiat	Yes	No	N/A
User Reputation Scores	Yes	No	No
Content Scores	Yes	No	No
Moderator Pools	Yes	No	No
iOS/Android Apps Available	Yes	No	Yes
Web Version Available	Yes	Yes	Yes
Advanced Search Supported	Yes	No	Yes
Users Can Delete Own Content	Yes	No	No

For sure this kind of comparison are useful but they can be biased. While this is just a proposal, there are already a few points that raise suspicion.

Economic motive

We all agree that “Profits for corporation through advertising sales” is correct and evil, but the difference between steemit and Narrative is a bit foggy here. It’s true that in steemit not only content creators but curators as well get rewards. Moreover steemit is just a piece of a larger puzzle in which different condensers and sidechains distribute rewards and new tokens from inflation in many different ways. Narrative tries to shift this a bit more towards content creators.

Content moderation

This is a huge difference with STEEM and it’s braking with the traditional view that blockchains are necessarily censorship-resistant. In fact, with smart contracts, it’s not hard to enforce moderator roles. In my opinion this is a great experiment and it may just create a vibrant and creative community. There are many other blockchains out there, it doesn’t add much to create yet another censor free beacon.

Transparent moderator actions

Bots are the de facto way to moderate content on steemit (and by extension whales). This creates a bit of mess and it doesn’t give me a feeling of justice. @grumpycat looked like a jerk at the beginning but then I understood he was doing good; but no, it’s a jerk. @cheetah is most probably good, but that’s just arbitrary, copying things is actually better (according to pirates). Having a tribunal like Narrative proposes may seem evil, but at least is not chaotic: it’s lawful evil.

Can user export own content

This is 🐄💩. If it’s a blockchain of course you can export. You just need to get the right software. On the other hand, I think you can export some stuff with Facebook, but not things like connections or chat logs.

User tipping

While this is a nice feature that’s not found on steemit, it’s easily implemented on condensers. So I would say this row of the table is misleading. Maybe they refer to the fact that you cannot transfer SP, which is fair.

Who controls advertising

There is a question here I could not find answer to. How do they plan to show advertising to the users? If this is a blockchain it should be trivial to build a client that does everything plus hide advertising. Can anybody from Narrative answer this?

Payouts To Users In Both Crypto and Fiat

This feature seemed unnecessary to me at first, but you have to be real and admit that many people just don’t care about crypto and they want fiat money. Basically they are saying, you pay us, the organisers a cut of the inflation, we offer this service that converts our token to fiat.
It makes sense, instead of having the NRV Dollar token, they just convert in dollars and remove a lot of moving parts from the system.
I personally don’t like this, but again I don’t like FIATs. Still, I can see how this may help expand the network.

User reputation scores

I would love to have this feature in steemit. I don’t know if I would use it but at least I would stop complaining that’s not there. Give me the stars! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

iOS/Android apps available

While technically correct, steemit is just a condenser, there is at least one app for steem: steepshot.

Users can delete own content

This is contentious. What does it even mean delete own content? It’s hard to delete things from the internet. People publish screenshots of Facebook all the time. Having a blockchain that can delete stuff? I don’t think so.

Conclusion

Narrative is a really interesting project. Can it deliver? Probably. I decided to put some money in their ICO. If you pay around €6’000 they give you a 48h headstart to claim a niche, which could reap some income.
This seems to be a very solid project and I would be happy to see it thrive and eat some marketshare from Facebook.