Have you ever heard of The Ringer?
When famous sports blogger, podcaster, and TV personality extrodaniare Bill Simmons was released from his ESPN contract last year it sent shockwaves through the media atmosphere. By all accounts, there was a very large bidding war from the usual players from FOX to NBC. However, in the end, Bill went with HBO for his newest show Any Given Wednesday.
The relevancy of this story to Steemit doesn't lie in Bill Simmons, nor his choice to go with HBO. But rather, his curious decision for where to take his blogging talents: Medium.
Medium is a very slick, low barrier to entry platform for bloggers. Sound familiar?
Just like Steemit, it takes literally seconds to start a new account and create your profile. Just like Steemit, it takes maybe minutes to figure out how to write a story and insert any tags you would like to have on it. Just like Steemit, anyone can search a #sports tag and find any blog post in the ecosystem on sports. Here, however, is what Steemit does not have that Medium does:
A way to create your own publication.
Let's go back to Bill Simmons for a moment. For the sake of argument, let's say he took his blogging talents to Steemit instead of Medium. Let's also assume he writes a wide range of blog posts, some having to do with The Ringer some having to do with his own musings. As a reader, it would be incredibly inconvenient the way things are currently set up here at Steemit to go to Bill Simmons' profile and filter through his blog posts to weed out those that have nothing to do with the Ringer.
Take a look at my own blog, for instance. If I wanted to search for say, my posts on my Mathematics point of view, I either ctrl+f or manually search. Not very user friendly.
No big deal you might say, just add #theringer at the end of every blog post, right?
Wrong. Then anyone not affiliated with the blog could add that tag to their story and they would show up on the search as well.
Your Publication, Powered by Steemit
Visit The Ringer for a moment. Notice the custom domain theringer.com ? Notice the prominent medium logo on the banner for the page?
Medium has the option for a user to link their own domain to their medium publication. Even though its a custom domain, it still prominently displays the Medium branding, with a link back to the medium website. If the publication owner does not want that option, then its name displays as something like http://medium.com/*insert publication name here*.
When a user writes a post, it defaults as going to their personal blog, but that user also has an option to add that post to their custom publication, if they so choose. When readers go to that publication, all they see are the posts that are intended to be on that publication, not the others that writer might create.
Imagine the possiblities:
One of our most famous and most viral posters to this point, @guerrint, said herself in her first blog post to steemit:
I know Steem will be so much more lucrative than Youtube for ladies like me who want to spread their ideas and share their beauty techniques. I'm ditching my Youtube aspirations and going with Steem instead!
Replace "Youtube" aspirations with "Media" aspirations. You think there are other bloggers out there that wouldn't ditch Medium for a second if they knew they could migrate their publication steemit and have a chance to get compensated for every post?
Publications might go a long way to solving the problem of users gaming the system and creating multiple profiles
In the #curation section one month back, user @steemed penned a post I'm a Steem Whale Looking For Writers, in which he was looking for good writers to pay attention to with his hard earned Steem Power. User @markopaasila stepped up to advertise his blogging, but was shot down by @steemed because of his frequent posting in other areas:
Does this lesson mean that users should be looking to get multiple accounts for multiple points of view? For instance, take someone like me, who very seriously posts on topics like #fantasyfootball and occasionally likes to try their attempt at satire with #steemedbroccoli. Is this a bad thing for me to be doing?
I don't believe it should be the point of steem to create multiple accounts for your multiple musings. I believe @markopaasila should be able to live in a world where he can have his multiple blog posts under his name and be able to create a publication where his more famous posts can be backed by someone like @steemed.
Is this even possible?
I am just opining here becuase I think this would be a great feature and bring a lot more people to the community. It might just also help steemit scale even more for bloggers anxious to dip their toes into the steemit waters, but still want to keep their own custom domains.
I do not, however, know the scope of what it would take to code within steemit. Furthermore, is this something Steemit even wants to be? Since we are just in beta, I thought it might be worthy of a discussion.
What do you think steemit, Is this a good idea? Would you support having user created publications?
#steem #steemit #publications #blog #writing #curation #steemit-ideas #steemit-adoption