RE: Letz Make It Happen - Steem To The Moon
Ah, brainstorming! Per classic business tradition, we'll need to create a Mind Map! (That's not on me, I hope, I'm terrible at those.)
If we go back to basics, it would be nice to have a group of actual marketers and psychologists on hand to figure out what could be done to attract people who have no interest in crypto. Higher level applications, specific dApps are something for developers to consider.
The amateur psychologist that I am, I'm driven to ponder where STEEM fits in on the Maslow's hierarchy of needs, where it was once and where it is right now.
We used to be as low as Safety Needs (and lower is better in this case), providing Financial Security to some degree. Many of STEEM dApps provide potential monetary rewards directly or through tokens, but how much work do they require compared to activities that offer similar monetary rewards? Plus the future of tokens is still up in the air. Without an influx of investment or advertising this level seems like a dead end for the time being.
Social Belonging, now that's where STEEM had the strongest showing -- its social circles and dedicated followers are why the platform is still held in some regard by outsiders in this flagging market.
But it's often been said that STEEM's interfaces are poorly adapted for a "truly social" platform, is the layer where STEEM has the greatest potential still held back?
Ah, To Be Continued
I'm not sure if the Maslow's hierarchy suits for this purpose. But the culture is different than on platforms where the users are only the product. On Steem, the users are the product, the owners, the content producers etc. etc.
Ah, you see, that's why we need professional help. But, I as a marketing amateur approach this from a very basic framework because it's the one that neatly explains why people don't care enough about content ownership:
Users being the owners of their product matters to them when they are already on the top of the hierarchy. An artist who is willing to starve for his art is a common stereotype, but a rarity in real life. And most people aren't very artistic. Self-actualization is only the narrow top of the Maslow Pyramid and unless ALL of their lower needs are taken care of (at least to a degree), self-actualization is a limited draw.
Facebook automatically wins over freedom as long as it satisfies a persons need for love, belonging and personal contact. For example, that's why a surprising number of older people will willingly invite Facebook Portal into their homes -- to improve contact with their loved ones.
Further study and discussion is required, but in pure marketing psychology, I'm afraid content ownership is a good offer only to those who've already been rejected from/censored on popular platforms.
Good points. What do we have left? The profit motive? Facebook made about $4.3 billion last year. They have two billion users. The masses won't put up with any of the inconvenience of having to deal with all the keys and stuff in exchange for $2 per year no matter how poor they are. So, the profit motive is out. Freedom from censorship? That only interests the political fringe or assorted weirdos. Forget about it.
My conclusion is that no Steem app that tries to be the next Facebook or the next Reddit is going to be very successful if the target audience is people not into crypto. Fortunately, Millenials seem to be a lot more into crypto than older people.
Will that mean that no Steem apps are ever going to break into the mainstream? I don't think so because there are areas where ownership of content is crucial. One such huge area is gaming. SteemMonsters uses custom JSON to store objects on the blockchain. Steem works well for storing digital assets. When money is involved, I think many users prefer retaining ownership of their digital assets. For storing digital collectibles or data where proof of authorship or authenticity is needed, Steem can work well. E-commerce is another area where apps can be Steem can be successful. The reward pool(s) are/(will be) built in tools for rewarding users for activities. When buying and selling are involved, a lot of people get greedy and may go to great lengths after all manner of bonuses. ¨
Finally, we shouldn't forget visitors who are users without accounts. Those people are an important part of the traffic. That's where quality content may come in.Oracles could be used in conjunction with SMTs to tailor rewarding systems to maximize quality. Once we have SMTs implemented, that is.
I have to support your conclusion regarding complete traditional social network replacements -- it doesn't help that we can't afford the visual design R&D budgets those systems have.
Regarding the use of Steem for digital asset storage, well the promotion of this application, it would help if the (utopian-io?) community developed basic open-source plugins (and/or JS libraries) for some of the existing engines and plopped them into the plugin repositories out there. I'll have to look around and see if there are any available already.
And when it comes to visitors without accounts, I'm again reminded of the need to support advertisement or sponsorship in some form.