What Steem looks like to a newbie

Hi, I'm very new to Steem and related projects/communities - I've been using Steem for like 2 weeks, but not new to the cryptocurrencies, so I've seen many successes and failures in this space in years. I tend to spend many hours each day learning, so these 2 weeks were spent mostly learning about Steem and related projects like DTube or Utopian.

I feel like even if not too many people see this, it would be quite fair to share my newbie experience before I forget what it's like to be new to this community. Be warned - this will be an opinionated review. I'm not trying to lie that I don't have opinions.

Comparing to other blockchain projects

As I'm investing money in different blockchain-based projects, it would be hard not to compare Steem to other blockchains. 

This is the part where Steem excels.

From my point of view, Steem is the most advanced project built on top of blockchain that has real world usage outside of just being a cryptocurrency. It has complex economy model that seems to work well for its usage. It's fast. It's flexible and different applications solving different real world problems are already running on it and they already have advantages over their non-blockchain counterparts. It has everything an investor can look for if they care about the technology.

Comparing to blogging/vlogging platforms

As a consumer of blogposts, videos and everything, I compare Steemit to Medium, Busy to Twitter, DTube to Youtube, etc. (Sorry about other apps I didn't mention). As Medium/Twitter/Reddit replacement, Steem does quite good.

Steem is excellent for blogs and daily/weekly news, or just a feed of nice photos to scroll through when sitting in a tram. Because people are getting paid a lot for short-term content, there's a lot of it, and thanks to curators it's often in a good quality.

We're mainly missing 2 things:

• The community is small - this could basically fix itself when other problems are fixed
• There's too many people writing low-quality content they don't really want to write, which they write anyway just because they think they might make money from it. This will be fixed as people learn this doesn't work well.

Both of these problems will basically be fixed by time, and by community spreading the word about it. That's why all of us should do their part and spread the word about steem projects in their communities.

Then there's still one difference which has 2 sides. Steem only rewards short-term value of content. Rewards are only paid from the upvotes scored during first week. 

The way it's marketed is that it's good, because it eliminates a risk of some post being so good it would keep getting loads of upvotes and rewards for years and in this way stealing from new posts. I wouldn't see that as a problem - if people still upvote a post years later, it has provided a lot of value to the community, and it's fair for it to get a lot of rewards. By eliminating these posts, you just promote posts which only have short-term value. Maybe the long-term rewards should just decrease over time instead of being zero.

This causes that for example when someone creates a tutorial for something, which people will be reading for next 2 years, it's usually a lot more profitable to post it somewhere with ads which provide long-term rewards than on Steemit. I don't think that's what we want.

But there's still a good thing about promoting short-term content. It makes a platform very suitable for everyday content we read casually, and it makes sure we always have some "new" content, even if it's just a slightly edited repost of some old post created just because the author can't gain money from the old post anymore. It promotes improving on old content.

Or maybe there could be another platform like Steem but with more emphasis on long-term content like tutorials?

DTube also has another interconnected set of problems: performance, stability and availability. These will most probably be solved soon by FileCoin or some other project which will reward people for hosting IPFS on their machines.

Starting with Steem as a consumer

As a consumer, it was relatively easy for me to start using Steemit and almost completely stop reading Reddit, Medium, Twitter. Content from there gets reposted (with slight changes) on Steemit anyway. I just had to check hot/new a few times and follow a few authors. 

It's harder to replace Youtube, mainly because of long-term content and the intelligence, performance and stability of the platform. I just open youtube and get my feed of videos picked for me based on what I watched before, without any effort required. Not the same as just following a few people. Going forward, we have to understand DTube won't replace YouTube anytime soon, and it should complement it.

At work we have a timer which starts a song from Monty Python every Friday at the same time and it works reliably. We never have to wait for it to load, and it never pauses in the middle of a video. That would really ruin the whole experience. On DTube, sometimes it does. DTube just needs some system of rewarding people hosting content before it's able to have this level of performance and stability.

Starting with steem as a curator

As a curator, you're basically a consumer deciding which content is top quality and upvoting that, which content is mediocre and just ignoring it, and what shouldn't exist (like spam and scam), and flagging that. Curators are reading low quality content so that other people don't have to. They are getting paid for it. It also works very well within the capitalist ideology - people basically vote with their money to reward authors providing best content. But when starting as a curator without lots of money, you don't have much influence. It's good, because it helps avoid pepole troll-voting, but it's hard to start making money as a curator. Basically first you have to either invest money earned from your real job to buy Steem, or start gaining money as an author.

Starting with steem as an aspiring author

I know I'm not the only one thinking like this: Sometimes I wanted to write about some things just to share my opinion, but never did it. It felt like a waste of time which I could use to do something that earns money instead of writing. Having a real chance of earning at least some money from writing makes it feel a bit better. Having a community of curators who try to find good content from new authors makes it feel a lot better. That's why I managed to convince myself to spend some time to write this.