Why Efficient Content Discovery And Rewarding Is Key

I've read posts where the question has been posed whether Steem should be thought of as a content discovery platform or a casual platform. Obviously, it's going to be both as many large stakeholders prefer to support quality under #newsteem whereas posting casual content that rarely has any value except to the posters and their friends is completely fine as long as it is not excessively rewarded.

The reason Steem has content rewards in the first place is content discovery. The moniker Proof-of-Brain suggests that. The blockchain generates new STEEM at a steadily declining rate and 65% of that inflation is given to authors and curators who split it 50/50. Despite the fact that from a consensus perspective Steem is a Delegated Proof-of-Stake chain where stake-based voting is used to elect witnesses who sign the new blocks, from a "mining" perspective it is a Proof-of-Brain system where the total inflation exceeds that directed at witnesses, Steem Power holders and developers/marketers/etc. (Steem DAO) by a factor of three. Two thirds of the total inflation is given to content creators and curators. Now, that's something obviously meant to have value because otherwise it's just excessive inflation diluting the value of everyone's stake.

You may ask which one is more valuable, content on Steem or the social network. I will say content because the social networking happens entirely on chain whereas content on Steem is accessible to anyone with an internet connection. The casual/social networking type of content is only valuable to its authors and their friends. High-value content, in contrast, has the ability to draw the attention crowds larger by orders of magnitude than those interacting on chain. It has value to internet users who will never need to be onboarded. Think about that. It has never been easy to onboard people to Steem even during the price surges. I personally find that astonishing. But that's the way it is.

Now, I've heard arguments downplaying the importance of content quality. People have said that it's a numbers game. That the most valuable networks are those that have the largest number of users. That is absolutely true. But if onboarding the masses is the goal, then earning money can't be the main attraction for the new users. It's simple mathematics. Consider the valuation of Facebook. It's currently 513 billion dollars. The number of accounts is about two billion. That gives a ceiling of about 250 dollars for the value of the average account. The company has physical and intellectual property that has substantial value, which is why the actual figure must be lower. The median value of an account is lower than that as the accounts of well-known individuals or valuable businesses must be orders of magnitude more valuable than the average. Facebook stock worth the median account on Facebook only pays dividends worth a few dollars per year.

Paying Steem users substantially for merely networking socially makes no economic sense. The good news are that they will do that without any monetary compensation whatsoever. Hundreds of millions of people are busy doing that online at this very moment. Earning dollars from making a casual post can be thought of as an early adopter bonus available to the users only for few short years. Forget about attracting the masses through tokenizing the web to help them make money by creating content. The users who will benefit financially from the tokenization of the web will be the creators of high-value content and a very small number of early adopters (that is, us, if this thing pans out). The benefit of tokenizing the web for all the rest will be the ease of money transfer afforded by every site being integrated with crypto.

Most people are so incapable of recognizing opportunities that it takes dragging them by the ears to bring them to Steem and get them to listen when the amazing benefits of making several dollars a day from doing what they on the internet for free is explained to them. Most won't still take the opportunity. Screw that. Focus on making Steem the most financially attractive platform on the internet for quality content creators. Make onboarding as easy as possible for their fans and other casual users. Mercilessly wipe out the pending rewards from shitposters and circle jerkers. Delegate to projects like @curangel and follow their upvoting and downvoting trails. When rubber meets the road, there simply won't be enough money to go around to distribute it to low-value contributions. This is how you justify the existence of content rewards in the first place.