Steemit: The Good Side of a Pyramid?
This is the second post on my thoughts about Steemit and how it will succeed or fail. You can find the first one here: https://steemit.com/steemit/@page-traveler/steemit-defeating-the-tragedy-of-the-commons
When last I wrote, I said that I wanted to talk more about pyramids. Here goes...
This idea – the idea of a platform that pays directly for content and engagement, without advertising, without data mining – is so freaking cool. It still just blows my mind that this is a thing. However, we really need something to make it work.
We need an audience. We need the bottom layer of the pyramid, man. This platform just doesn't work if everyone on it is equally a writer and a reader, because you need to get more "likes" that you have to give in order for it to be worth the trouble of writing anything. This is the same problem that destroys pyramid schemes: If you don't have a downstream, it all falls apart.
But wait! Is this really a problem, or is it just a reality? When you take a closer look, a lot of things work this way. We couldn't have as many people writing books as reading them. We couldn't have as many people running restaurants as eating in them. As long as Steemit has people coming to enjoy the content, not just trying to earn steem, we're golden.
Okay, find. Now, how do we do that? I think there are three keys, and I'll save the most important for last:
Low barrier to entry. I talked about this a little in my last post, but it has to be reasonably easy to get an account. People who hope to earn money with steemit will wait a week to get verified. People who are just being an audience can go a dozen other places and be accepted instantly.
A safe environment. This can't be seedy. (Okay, it can be a little seedy – but we need to be talking third page of Google seedy, not dark web seedy.) This needs to be somewhere that is safe and comfortable for what we might call "normals," because if we need high numbers, we're never going to get there without them. That means really stringent NSFW marking. Frankly, it probably means content warnings for drug related content, too. (Yes, including Miss Mary Jane). It means content that is accessible to a wide audience, on a wide variety of topics, and easy to navigate. But most of all...
It means content that is GOOD. I sometimes see posts that seems a little, uh, overly short. Yeah, there's stuff you can do with mutual likes and alliances that might make that profitable. But by and large, we need to be giving a wider audience a reason to be here. As for me, I can't promise to be interesting all the time, but I'm going to do my best. ;)