In a previous post, Take Yourself Seriously -- Your Time And Energy Are GOLD, I wrote a little bit about the Attention Economy, which, in a nutshell, is the commoditization of human focus.
Intangibles
As Kevin Kelly points out, the modern attention economy is increasingly one where the consumer product costs nothing to reproduce and the problem facing the supplier of the product lies in adding valuable intangibles that cannot be reproduced at any cost.
In a traditional economy value is based at least partially on tangibility: qualities such as “inherent value” are so ingrained into our racial psyche that it’s difficult for people to even think about the nature of money for too long without suffering cognitive dissonance.
Kelly identifies 8 of these intangible values of the Attention Economy in his work, Better Than Free:
- Immediacy - priority access, immediate delivery
- Personalization - tailored just for you
- Interpretation - support and guidance
- Authenticity - how can you be sure it is the real thing?
- Accessibility - wherever, whenever
- Embodiment - books, live music
- Patronage - "paying simply because it feels good",
- Findability - "When there are millions of books, millions of songs, millions of films, millions of applications, millions of everything requesting our attention — and most of it free
How Steemit fulfils every intangible value
Immediacy
Steemit is a platform that has 0 fee to start up (in fact, you’re given an interest-free loan!) and users are able to generate leads for their content using a native platform and monetization is automatic.
There is no bank to give you permission or review the nature of your income. It is simply there, ready for you to access, because you provided valuable content that people curated.
Personalization
Clearly… Steemit is a social media.
It’s all about YOU.
You create and customize your profile, make whatever content you feel like, and present it to a network of other individuals for consumption.
Step 3: PROFFIT
Interpretation
The Steemit network is one of the most helpful I’ve ever known.
If anyone has a question, there is an inherent incentivization to be helpful, and so people’s questions are answered eagerly and enthusiastically.
Let's not kid ourselves: some of the best performing posts on Steemit are about Steemit; explanations of the latest developments, how to use the system to perform better, how to network and gain a following.
Authenticity
As with any propper blockchain project, transparency and open development are key factors to the very nature of the protocol.
Individually, you can see exactly with every user how much skin they have in the game (wallet) and how well received they are to the broader community (reputation).
Embracing authenticity is a winning strategy.
Embodiment
People are constantly creating different content -- someone from any walk of life can be satisfied with what they find on Steemit.
If you are interested in something, odds are there’s someone making content about it here.
Patronage
On Steemit, patronage is about as painless as anything I’ve ever seen before.
It literally costs you nothing to give your direct financial support to content creators that you like.
Nothing is depleted from your funds for curating content, and it feels great to be able to pay others for work that you support.
It’s a complete win-win-win.
Findability
Steemit SEO is surprisingly good.
There have been many times where I’ve looked up something on google and found a Steemit article as one of the top results.
If you google “how tall is barron trump”, you will see my article, 2 Reasons Why Barron Trump Might Look Awkward as the 5th result.
Currently, this article sits at over 66,000 views, making it the second most successful work that I’ve done.
If you were to compare to an other social media, if you create content for Steemit it probably has a much great chance of being found.
Steemit seems to have been built FOR the Attention Economy
It’s easy for certain innovative technologies to accidentally fall into a particular economic system, but Steemit seems to have been custom-built to maximize all of the intangible qualities of the Attention Economy.
The legacy social media firms have an opposite approach: they understand EXACTLY how valuable your attention is, and they scrape that data and sell for billions of dollars.
Social media of the future, such as Steemit, Gab, and Minds, all understand that in order for them to succeed, they must provide that value BACK to the users -- the content creators -- the very things that make their platforms interesting and their businesses profitable -- in the form of incentivization and cryptocurrency curation systems.
If you are here now, I congratulate you for being an early adopter of the future of money itself.
Tell me what you think
This is one of the most interesting topics of our time. Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.
