Entering Clone Wars Stage

Probably far less spectacular than the Star Wars series homonym, it appears a plethora of Steem clones have been created to wage war against the original.

^Source

Some look at this as an opportunity to catch the first wave in a birthing platform. That's actually a good thing. Unless a platform turns into many platforms, after all it's a plethora of them. I mean a plethora of Steem clones, I don't have a term to describe the entire social media ecosystem.

For the regular user, this is a mere illusion. That being in as many places as possible creates you a greater coverage. Unless you pay someone to take care of your social media account(s), your time is still finite, and places where you want to spend it socially online, growing.

It is obvious where this leads to. Less time spent on each of the platforms, less consistency on either of them, less attachment long term to any of them. Only jumping from one to another.

That also leads to more morally (and sometimes legally) questionable actions from these platforms, in order to keep or grow their userbase. After all it is war.

And when we are talking about a clone war, the clones must offer something better than the original, that can be easily explained and the effects seen.

Usually it will only work for the short term, after which problems start. It is easy to promise something, it is hard to keep that promise over time.

Every once in a while, a clone finds something that sticks. On the long term. The deal is Steem is open source, so everyone can copy its code. The clone must also be open source, as per the conditions of the license. Which means, if developers on Steem, or Stemit itself want, they can include the new development from the clone into Steem.

Clone wars are beneficial, but the major benefactor is really the Steem blockchain, which gets more attention as the original blockchain, and also development from outside the ecosystem which will help to its growth.

The most to lose have regular users, I'd say, who jump from one clone to the next, full of hope every time. They waste their only limited resource they have, time, and with every failure, hope. And that affects them everywhere, including on Steem or in real life.