We all know that the marketing for steem has been very limited throughout it's short story. The @promo-steem group put in good work to bring in new users globally, but there has been no big drive or budget to go beyond this.
The recent (and long predicted) moves by 'big tech' to censor and erase dissenting voices from their platforms has accelerated in the last few days, with facebook removing over 500 pages that they falsely claim to be 'spam farmers' effectively, but where in truth many of them offer valid political and activist commentary and actual real world activities. See my post on this here for more details.
Add to this the recently leaked document from Google entitled 'The Good Censor', which lays out the agenda of 'big tech' to move away from 'liberty/freedom' and towards 'civility' (in this context aka 'censorship') - and we have the beginnings of a huge trigger for large numbers of people to leave these mega networks for competitors. See my post on this here for more details too.
Steem Powered Sites Can Solve This Problem
Given that the causal factor here is largely censorship, the Steem blockchain is in a truly unique position to benefit by receiving many of the users who are upset with being denied free speech and the inherent disrespect and dishonesty involved with the situation. No-one likes being trolled, but being trolled by large corporations under the guise of them 'standing up against trolling' is too much for many people to bare and they WILL look elsewhere to connect with people online. Steem's strongest feature, as far as I am concerned, is not it's ability to pay for posts - instead, the best feature is the high difficulty that any group has in censoring posts on the Steem blockchain.
While it is true that posts can be 'hidden' by being downvoted by Steem users - these posts/comments are not actually completely removed and can be viewed by anyone who elects to click on them. The ultimate repository of the post's content is the Steem blockchain (a distributed database) - which is independent of steemit.com, busy.org, steempeak.com, d.tube or any of the other sites that make use of it. Any of these sites 'could' elect to block a post, but the post itself will still be accessible via the blockchain for those who need to access it. This is a dramatic improvement over the centralised, hierarchic and domineering situation we experience with the current social network/empires of Facebook and Google.
Some of the pages removed from Facebook have millions of followers, many of whom will be outraged that the people they admire and want to hear from have been silenced in an unfair way. Just imagine the boost that Steem would receive if these people elected to come and use Steem instead of Facebook.
There are currently between 30,000 and 60,000 active Steem users (last time I looked) - if even 1 million of these many million users came to Steem it would drastically change Steem's present and future.
Selling Steem's Censorship Proof Features to the World
In my opinion, the uncensored nature of Steem is one of it's strongest selling points and yet it is rarely even mentioned when discussing Steem. I feel this is because most people either haven't experienced that they have been censored or simply haven't noticed when they really have ben censored since no-one informed them and they never checked back in Facebook etc. to find out if their posts were visible to the world. It took me a few years to realise that the comments I was writing in Youtube weren't visible to other users as they were being 'sandboxed', which is a code word for 'censored'. You can see Facebook removing my comments in realtime here.
This hidden strength of Steem needs to be made more prominent now and this is an ideal opportunity to do it. Millions of people are being exposed to the shadowy world of corrupt and covert censorship online - so we need to inform them that a solution exists.
My suggestion is that we do the following.
Plan To On-Board New Users To Steem Who Abandon Facebook/Google
Collaborate with liked minded Steemians to build a support team to put this plan in to action.
Produce text, memes and video content to highlight the situation and promote the key selling points of Steem powered sites - focusing clearly on censorship resistance. Links should point to key posts on Steem that educate about ways to socially connect with like minds via Discord and Steem.chat - plus all the other features of Steem and related Steem powered sites.
Distribute this promotional material via all available, practical channels - targeting those users who have been affected on Facebook and beyond. Free options include posting to groups on Facebook and Google+ - as well as posting blogs, links and vlogs to Youtube and personal profiles on social networks with appropriate tags. Twitter is a good option due to the many users who are prominent free speech activists who gladly retweet such things.
Distribute to @promo-steem members to allow them to further the reach into local areas.
Inform new users to tag their #introduceme post with a custom tag, perhaps #SteemIsUncensored or something similar to allow them to be identified and guided/helped once signed up to Steem.
Suggested Keywords: #DeleteFacebook #WeChooseFreedom #SteemIsUncensored
Options for providing accounts to new users:
- Find Steemians with high Steem Power and resource credits who are willing to power this project by providing claimed accounts and maybe to delegate 3 Steem Power per account to ensure the new users can interact on the blockchain. Pool the accounts and organise a way of distributing them to new users and manage it, including delegating small amounts of steem and removing that delegation if the account is used for spam.
- Point new users to the standard options of signing up via Steemit.com or paying for an account via the third party services listed on the registration form of steemit.com.
People/Resources Needed
We need people to create promotional text/media, people to help with the signup process and people to work on social networks to promote the message. Ideally we would use an existing Discord group for this, with a new channel being created for this purpose.
Ideally we need some people to help who are proficient with using social media to spread messages in ways that don't annoy or get them censored / blocked too.
Comments?
What do you think? Can you help in any way? Let us know in the comments below.
Wishing you well,
Ura Soul
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