RE: What If Steemit Stayed a Niche
There's a lot to unpack here. First of all, what does mass adoption mean? The total number of users of all Steem apps is around 10k. That's literally nothing. Steem would still be niche if it had a total of 10 million users. At that point, however, it would be a totally different kind of platform.
Steemit, the app, is unlikely to attain mass adoption as it is now. It looks crude and simple like 2004 Facebook. I think the idea is to introduce the SMT protocol and all the tools to websites with already existing communities as a way to monetize and/or gamify their user experience. Take Steem to people where they are instead of bringing them over to Steemi(it) and integrate them with our existing user base directly. It's very difficult to foresee how successful that will be because there are so many different kinds of websites and communities out there with vastly differing needs. What SMTs aim to be is a turnkey solution that can be offered to website owners without them having to do a lot of software development on their own to create a token system. I'm guessing there are lots of small sites that could see it as a game changer that could be interested in adopting STEEM if it offered to them at a reasonably low price and hassle.
True. I am not sure 10 million active users are in our future anytime.
We will see and time will tell about the success of SMTs. I wonder now if communities should have been done first. I am sure Ned was not doing to invest time/money into Steemit when he had Destiny already planned.
I may be called a Kool Aid drinker but I still thing Voice has a better shot a mass adoption.
I do much appreciate your thoughts and your well reasoned responses.
It's difficult to imagine now. I imagine the block sizes should be enlarged. I think the current maximum is something like 64k.
Destiny seems to be dead and buried now. The BTC and alt capitulation a year ago seems to have done it in. I haven't heard a peep about it since. Bernie gave Ned an earful when he announced Destiny would be developed.
Could be. But I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing because if Voice becomes really popular, the advantages of blockchain based social media will be touted by every horn.
Thanks.
You are so right with this comment, @markkujantunen The craptastical look is one of many reasons I stopped using steemit over one year ago and switched to dApps that PAY with upvotes and look so much better. It's quite amazing they do not update the interface when literally 1M people off the street could do it for cheap and in less than a week.
Without changing much in the way of functionality, things like the layout and the CSS could be touched up very inexpensively.
Not all of the other front ends host their own RPC nodes (back end servers you can use to query the blockchain and post transactions). Some do. But Steemit runs those that have the most traffic.