Let me start by saying, I’ve been signed up for Steemit for a whopping two hours ago now and this is my first post. Before you skip this or dismiss me or troll or downvote (is that an option?) or whatever it is you Steemers do (is that what you call yourselves?), hear me out because mine is the very same first impression potential users of this platform are encountering every day. I am a marketer, data scientist, and data engineer by trade and am a firm believer in first impressions. I know from personal and professional experience that the old idiom “you only get one chance to make a first impression” is undeniably real and of dire importance to this community if it wants to market itself to people outside its base and become the world-changing platform I believe it seeks to and can become.
First, a note about me: I am here because I am already drinking the cryptocurrency and blockchain Kool-Aid and that’s fine however, that’s not necessarily enough to keep me around. I work for a Fortune 50 tech company and while I won’t go into anymore detail than that, the purpose of me saying this is not to boast in anyway but to explain how I find myself interested in cryptocurrencies and blockchain as an optimistic technologist. Simply put, this is a necessary view when your day-to-day has you acting as a cog in a machine which produces annual net revenues which--if your company were an independent country--would put it in the 30th percentile of world nations in terms of GDP. You have to hold these beliefs because you are in a way part responsible for the extreme consolidation of wealth in the hands of the wealthiest people in the wealthiest nation in the history of the planet. You have to believe that the disruptive technologies you and your company help produce and encourage are going to help in the long term with the free spread of information, empowerment, social consciousness, and eventually greater equity across the globe. You must buy into this idea or the work that you do is soul crushing. Now, let me get to my first impressions of Steemit:
The posts here way over index on self-promotion, pyramid-scam sounding Steemit evangelism, and cryptocurrency fanboydom (“fanboydom” copyright papaknee 2017; and yes, gendered language is intentional--these posters are probably at least 90% dudes). Let me illustrate with a brief summary of the first 20 posts I encountered on the “trending” tab as a brand-new user (who follows no one with no history on site). I will categorize each per my own initial reaction:
Let’s start with the bar to the left, what I’ve categorized as “cryptocurrency fanboy.” I will admit that I am nominally interested in the posts about cryptocurrency however, I am not generally representative of the addressable public and there are a million other sources of this information (if it had to estimate, about 10,000 Reddit threads and Bit-/Alt- coin new sites I could follow and get arguably better news from). This is not a compelling enough reason to stick with Steemit.
Next, let’s talk about the next bar and all these posts I’m seeing like this: “My 1000th Follower - and a Huge Give Away,” “Pimp Your Post with this Simple Cheat Sheet! Just COPY and PASTE!” “How to gain over 100 followers in less than 1 week on Steemit.” You guys ever heard of Herbalife? It’s amazing! You can be your own boss and enjoy discounts on great products and have the satisfaction of spreading the wealth around to all your friends too! No seriously, I made $50,000 last month and quit my job and you can too just by enrolling in my simple “Ten Easy Steps for Freeing Your Soul From the Daily Grind and Becoming your own Empire” free training series. You heard of Mary Kay? I’m gonna clog your (pores and) Facebook feed up with intolerable videos of me applying makeup to myself and make you watch… You get the picture I think. I am a skeptic by nature so posts like these turn me off.
Now, let’s talk about the good stuff I saw in my first two hours on the site. I saw one interesting post with art. I saw introductions of people from lands foreign and interesting to me. After some serious scrolling, I saw people sharing intimate real-life struggles in a very honest and powerful way. These were however the exceptions and not the norm as you can see from the chart above.
I may be totally wrong about Steemit--and please let me know if I am--howeber, when I first heard about it and did some light research, I immediately was struck with how revolutionary an idea it was. A blockchain-based media/social platform which although the website is not decentralized today, at least is in part and could hypothetically be fully democratic and out of reach from censorship and/or corporate owner/sponsorship. A vision for a social platform which doesn’t require corporate investment in the form of product placements, ads, or have to sell your data to third parties because the platform itself generates value for the users that choose to share their ever-varied and infinitely interesting lives. That’s the vision for Steemit that made me raise an eye, whether real or imagined. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the sense I got in my first impression.
I point this all out because maybe there is value in the community taking a measured approach to the content it chooses to promote and also think longer term about how it seeks to increase its user base (i.e. take over the world and have all boats rise in the process). Curious what others think on this and what plans maybe are going on within the community to welcome more diverse folks to the platform and perhaps even pool resources into marketing/reaching out to other communities (with smart contracts and community investment maybe? Let me know, I’d love to help).
Yours truly (if nothing else),
papaknee