I have not been with Steemit since the very beginning, nor have I had the discipline to whip myself into posting. It's been about a week since I joined Steemit and in the mean time I've been busy with my non-SNS life and urgently telling people around me about Steemit as a solution for the problems they face.
In the real world I am a creator: I am a professional dancer, a translator, and a cultural content creator. When I am forced, I squeeze out work but for the most part I am always working on not only my art but my craft until I am satisfied. Once I am fully content then do I present my work for others to see. Call me a perfectionist but I know create because I love creating. I want my work to affect posterity until an improvement comes along and dethrones my work. Like what Ira Glass said:
Maybe it matters less for artists in the fine arts and musicians, but for dancers, there have been no such rights whatsoever. This really started to become a concern of mine with the rise of videos. Currently when dancers perform (we mainly have this problem with companies - big gigs), many times we are asked to sign a waiver of our "artwork" in order to get paid. What this means is although I am paid for my performance, the content created by my performance and the rights associated with the video and my "likeness" is not mine to own. If the video gets 100,000 views none of it returns to the artist.
In an ideal world, artists would be educated and well-informed to avoid being taken advantage of on top of having access to lawyers who would make sure to fight for them. Unfortunately in the real world, naive artists around me are often abused and taken advantage of. I'll talk more about this in a future post but to put it simply, right off the bat I saw Steemit as being valuable for the simple fact that issues dealing with copyright and having ownership of my art is resolved.
Here is a video of me grooving out with another dancer friend of mine:
Steemit is revolutionary for everyone who is involved in doing something creative because for the first time everyone gets paid directly up front and even afterwards whenever their art is referenced. This truly incentivizes artists to produce quality art knowing they will be paid.
Earlier today I replied to @kendope and his https://steemit.com/writing/@kencode/re-do-you-know-a-foreign-language-crowdvoting-it-s-payday post. In the process I realized I had overlooked something very important which happens during the process. Creation of an art or the completion of a project is rarely pursued by yourself. I thought what @kendope did was extraordinary because he actually took the time to work the math and to pay everyone back for their contribution after they had worked on his project through Steemit.
But take for example the video I posted above. While I am featured in it, a friend of mine also dances in the video and he was responsible for operating the camera and editing the video. There is constant cooperation which takes place in content creation. So far, if there are two creators involved in the process the rule of thumb has been to upload the video to whoever has more followers because more followers = more views.
I am certainly there will be many more cooperative projects taking place on Steemit in the future because this platform is that powerful. My question/suggestion is: is there a way to automatically payout the respective creators for a single post? Isn't this precisely the function of a smart contract?
Take for example the video I put up. There are:
- 2 dancers (A and B)
- 1 cameraman (A)
- 1 video editor (A)
The way things are now the account which received the payout for the post sends the other user their cut of the payout. I think it would be an improvement to Steemit if you can set a ratio to ensure payouts go to separate accounts like A:B::7:3 and then the payouts will be provided to all parties involved in the content creation automatically.
I used to code, I don't do it anymore and because of that I have no knowledge of gauging how easy or difficult this might be. If someone has already suggested something like this please send me to the particular post. Originally this post was to be a simple reply but as this possibility initially attracted me to blockchain and to Steemit, I thought now is as good time as ever to start a discussion and hear people's thoughts about this.