I have been on Scorum for a year now but haven't blogged near as much on here as I have on STEEM, WhaleShares .....etc. There are a few reasons for that. For starters with crypto prices down in general a lot of times it is hard to justify doing too much work over on STEEM where there are more people and I have a bigger following. When I post some random thing on STEEM I'm able to put that out on WhaleShares, WEKU, BearShares....etc. With the content filter on here I can't just copy and paste that stuff to this chain. I actually agree with the content filter though. It prevents low effort posts that just strip value away from the reward pool. That being said the price of SCR has continued to fall overtime making it hard to justify putting in a lot of work on blog posts here.

Most the the content that I create on my YouTube Channel isn't about sports so it doesn't make sense to post it here unless I talk about Scorum.

https://www.youtube.com/brianphobos

I continue to watch the price of Scorum as now it is under $0.005 which is interesting because there is no inflation for the time being. Other chains that had no inflation like Nano and IOTA also have been hit hard except they don't have an immediate use case or actual platform to get on and participate on. One thing I have realized this bear market is that any crypto where it is "too easy" to earn more of it ends up really getting its price beat up. I doesn't matter if that is from massive airdrops, staking it, or blogging. People are trying to earn more to either live off of or to try to stack more ETH, BTC, LTC.....etc. So lesser known crypto projects can really take a huge beating.

Alexa Rankings

The Alexa rankings and traffic to this site seem to be increasing in general but oddly enough more than half the traffic is actually coming from Argentina and another 19.4% is coming from India.

An increasing SEO funnel is important for the sites future but it would be nice to see a more widespread distribution of people going to the site.

SCORUM, WhalesShares, STEEM Comparisons

Everything that has played out on the different STEEM Clones has been very interesting to me. For starters STEEM's inflation rate was way too much at 100% to start out with but then they took it down to 10% reducing 1% each year which lands it at 8.59% inflation but then having the STEEM Backed Dollar threw everything out of wack and the effective inflation rate ended up being over 17% for the last year which is insane compared to current inflation rates of Bitcoin and Litecoin of under 4%.

Scorum having 0% inflation at the current time with a content filter to help prevent plagiarism and low effort posts seemingly should have protected the price from falling so hard. As the bear market has continued I think a lot of people become concerned that liquidity will dry up and the money won't be worth anything once we get to the next bull run. I can understand this thinking in general.

WhaleShares has done something that in a lot of respects is pretty crazy in my opinion. They made it a tipping platform where you can allocate money to your "Tipping Wallet" and sort of manage your own reward pool. Tipping online rarely works to any capacity. The ingenious thing about STEEM was the rewards were being funded through inflation so it was a little bit of a hidden thing until someone understood it more.

Scorum has no inflation and the reward pool is being paid from funds allocated when the genesis block was created. The reward pool is supposed to refill from advertising money but the site really isn't getting enough traffic to make a significant impact on ad revenue generation. It is an interesting concept but there are a couple of things that sort of counter act each other. If the prices aren't higher than people don't feel it is worth their time to blog and if the content filter is strict like it is then the effort threshold is higher which is good from a quality perspective but then from creating a larger SEO funnel not as much content is being put up so it doesn't keep pulling in more and more users from around the world.

Positives

There are tons of positives about Scorum compared to STEEM and the STEEM clones. I honestly think it is the best user interface out of all of them and there is no inflation on the coins. As far as supply it is the most limited supply of all the other blogging platforms like this. Also there is BetScorum for commission free sports betting which could seemingly be huge. Oddly enough it hasn't seem to take off in an extreme way for some reason.

It is unreal how dormant the activity around a lot of these crypto projects can get when we aren't in a bull market.
What could turn the tide?

It is hard to say what will happen when the reward pool runs out. I would imagine people's blogging activities will really go down the drain if the rewards just shut off like a light. If there are Google Ads put on the site it will look more tacky for the time being but it could at least produce some revenue that could either go back to the reward pool or go into an account that will vote for people who are the most engaging on this platform. Like those who are commenting, upvoting, posting....etc the most.

There basically has to be a way to funnel in outside funds which then in turn is used to buy SCR whether that is through advertisements or from a subscription service. Or something so special that a person has to buy SCR to participate in something really cool whether that is a tournament or some kind of arcade style game.

What could turn the tide?

It is hard to say what will happen when the reward pool runs out. I would imagine people's blogging activities will really go down the drain if the rewards just shut off like a light. If there are Google Ads put on the site it will look more tacky for the time being but it could at least produce some revenue that could either go back to the reward pool or go into an account that will vote for people who are the most engaging on this platform. Like those who are commenting, upvoting, posting....etc the most.

There basically has to be a way to funnel in outside funds which then in turn is used to buy SCR whether that is through advertisements or from a subscription service. Or something so special that a person has to buy SCR to participate in something really cool whether that is a tournament or some kind of arcade style game.

Power Down Cycle

I believe that the creator of DTube is right about the premise of a power up / power down to not actually provide any price stability essentially. At this point the SCR price is in a long tail. If the power down was taken away all together there could be an additional dump but there would be a lot of price discovery in a very short amount of time. With under 30,000,000 coins and some of them essentially being lost by investors, I think that the price would sort itself out fairly quickly. Right now it is hard for people to invest in something where their funds will be stuck for up to a year. I know some people will say "I'm in for the long haul" but people want to be able to move in an out of assets easily if they want to.

Conclusion

Finding the right answer is tough to be honest. Successful cryptos need wide distribution and they have to have a way to drive demand to them but not be so easy to get that they just get collected and sold real fast in a race to the bottom. They also need liquidity to survive otherwise it is suddenly worrisome for investors because if they put money in they fear they won't be able to get the money back out.

What do you guys feel about all these STEEM clones? Will STEEM or any of the clones solve the issues all of them have ran into?