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I spent my whole day on Saturday crafting the biggest article I've ever written. The environment is a topic I think about daily, and I really like the angle of pushing the features of the particular electric vehicles to help that cause. It also gave me a great opportunity to test out the Narrative blockchain.
Initially I really liked the concept of Narrative. Every single post is required to have at least one approved and purchased Niche. Every Niche has a moderation team to ensure the post is up to a certain level of quality.
Steem has way more spam than most of us realise, mostly in the aim to grab from the shared reward pool. Narrative, on the other hand, will grab the highest 80% of posts at the end of the month, and reward the Tech Team, Niche Owners, Niche Moderators and Content Creators. This reward comes from the advertising revenue generated by the platform.
I really like that whole approach, it should mean that only quality work is rewarded.. and Niche owners are financially incentivized to go out into the work and get people to create for their niche. It also means that work doesn't have to be up-voted only in a 7 day window, which suits longer, more in-depth content better.
Unfortunately, during development, there was a couple of red flags raised for me. The first was that the Development Team had grabbed some of the most valuable Niches for themselves... Niche's like Sports and Real Estate were snapped up before the users had any chance. Another flag was that the moderators are only allowed to reject a post if it doesn't fit their Niche. They can't reject on the grounds of plagiarism, quality, etc.
Some of the articles with a lot of comments where saying that there was no quality work on Narrative... and so my goal was to smash that!
Saturday evening, after spending the whole day, I posted my article to both Steem and Narrative... and totally logged off. On Sunday morning I logged on to see if I had broken the internet... and....
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I had no comments on either platform for my work. No engagement whatsoever.
I was super disappointed... but some crazy amazing coincidence, @coruscate did a post about Tesla on Sunday, and by being a total link floozy, I got some engagement. Super excited! That's 1 for Steem.
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By asking for some help from some amazing Steemians that I've developed friendships with over the last year, my article got a bit more traction on Steem... since my tags were so specific, the curation services on Steem struggled to find me.
Narrative has the exact same problem. Only very popular Niches get any engagement, and there is no toolset to search for longer articles, or even follow particular authors. You can only follow Niches.
Obviously it's not fair to compare a brand new platform to one that is 3 years old... but I think the fundamental differences are the make or break. Steem is open source, Narrative is closed. The only toolsets available can only be developed by the Development Team, advertising revenue can only be generated by the relationships of the Development Team... the Niche moderation and ownership doesn't work if the Niche owner doesn't even care about their Niche. People had to pay for Niches, they were $75 USD each for a year... and I think a lot of people might have thrown that money away.
As far as I know, only two readers have seen my article on Narrative, and although I'm extremely biased, it could also be the most comprehensive article written (mostly) for that site... I've gotten one comment which was nice.
People will always go to where the people are... we're not on Steem because it's a slightly different Instagram, we're on Steem because there is nothing else like it. For Narrative to be successful, it needs people. To get people it needs quality content.. but there's no way to find that quality content unless it's somehow becomes popular, or it happens to pop up in a Niche that you're already following.
I think that first payout will be very interesting.. and because I don't think it's an actual blockchain, there might not be any way to see what's happening under the hood. My prediction is that Narrative doesn't overtake Steem or Medium, and just becomes it's own little Niche platform that will reach an equilibrium determined by how much advertising revenue it can generate and how much it can pay out to it's more popular creators and Niche owners. It might just duel with Publish0x.
