I had this post written the other day, but then came the news of Justin's buyout before I published it. I held off from posting as it just didn't fit the mood. The post was about all the stuff I learned as a blogger on Steem. The aim was to attract new people to steem and I was going to promote this post across different social networks I am in. I have to say, being on steem has thought me a lot. There are many lessons bloggers can learn here and I still think it's an awesome place to be. But I'm still holding that post because I no longer know what I am inviting people too.
For a long time now I have also been using steem to add value to my business. I have these steem learn and earn activities on my blog which I had been pushing to my following. I have also added the steem logo to many of my videos and have funnels set up on free courses I offer. All of which promotes steem the blockchain and steem the coin.
I'm not too concerned about my investment. I don't believe joining the TRON network is going to devalue that (although I am often known to be wrong). But I am concerned about my professional image and reputation. Encouraging people to join something that could to change dramatically does not sit well with me.
It also makes shit of what I believed and what I told people. A decentralized platform where no one central organization can mess things up. We all have ownership and vote in the witnesses. Shit anyone can own shares in Facebook and they make decisions without the shareholders on a daily basis. Now, look at all of us on steem. We are confused because of the central organization.
I guess this was inevitable. Ned was always going to sell. It was just a matter of time. Distribution has been and still is an issue. I can feel how not decentralized we are now. And I feel a bit stupid because I knew all along there was a distribution problem.
I also feel a little in limbo and I'm not sure what to do. The more I read, the more confused I get. What are we now inviting people too? And where will we be in a year? I don't think anyone has the answers right now and having this rant is not going to solve anything. Dapps owners and business on steem must be as confused as I am, along with those trying to promote steem to the outside world.
Damn!!!!!!
Steem's only as decentralized as its stake distribution.
I guess Justin controlling around 20% of the entire pool isn't THAT centralized, but it would be something of a challenge to co-ordinate sufficient SP to block him if all of his steem-intentions turn out to be bat-shit crazy, especially as he's probably going to have a few fairly wealthy supporters come to the site on top of his 10s of million of SP.
It's a tough sell.
Probably best to just carry on as usual, without promoting Steem, until we know more.
I am powering down mind you, just a couple of week's worth.
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promoting steem worked well for me as I need to be active where people and traffic actually are, and that's not on steem. It kinda keeps me in the loop while I don't have as much time to post as I use to.
Fun times ahead, I need to go update my witness votes, I think I have a few free. time to make sure I use them (not like my SP will make any difference if Justin uses his)
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While my 'professional' image is probably not the same as yours (guaranteed,lol), I've kept my steem totally separate.
My website (which I thankfully did not promote here) has over a 10,000 visitors a month now, and even before now, would not have been comfortable hosting/promoting it here.
While I may sound like a broken record ( I bore myself for fucks sake! lol) the political environment/ethos, is one of 'progressive leftism', and that's not something to be connected to, in a long term business context. imo
Politics is downstream of culture, and the culture, worldwide, is changing.
The pendulum is swinging away from the last 50 years of socialist dogma.
It bothers me that Steem will be left behind in that change.
Steem may well turn to ice.
1 website
3 social media, crypto earning, accounts
10 affiliate websites style thing ( a bit crap, was an experiment)
1 Groceries shop
1 Food delivery service
1 restaurant-y, style thingy.
5 regualar sites promoting my services, (concerning various things).
Not one mention of steem(it) by me, on any of them.
mmm......
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10k views is awesome. You made the right decisions.
Would you believe I never seen steem as a being to the left. sure there are too many people trying to capitalize for that to happen.
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Stalin is very proud.
lol
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The future of Steem was never certain. What is known is that Steemit Inc have not been doing much to help it grow and maybe we need new hands on the tiller. Opinions on Justin seem mixed, but I would hope that he considers Steem as a platform worth supporting. Whether that involves trying to integrate it into Tron is not clear. I have mostly invested time in Steem, but I do not consider it wasted. I will wait and see what happens.
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I don't consider my time wasted either @steevc. Justin is known as a great marketer and steem could sure do with more of that. But bringing people here now, well I don't feel as comfortable with that now as I did.
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Maybe we can at least get some Tron fans blogging here. I noticed Tron does not have much in the way of dapps for them to use, but some serious money going through one of them.
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More users would be awesome, once they are human and not bots. I think we will gain tron fans and thats a great thing.
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Hi @paulag!
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Hi @paulag, a modest tip of appreciation:
$trendotoken and !trendovoter .
Also, please check out my Second Nonsense Writing Contest.
Thanks!
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Outside of people thinking Steemit is Steem and Steem is from EOS. I don’t know wtf to think other than many don’t know a thing about us which is quite clear.
Thankfully my content is not solely focused about Steem. If I needed I have quite a wide range of options for it.
The game I’m creating is also years away from being close to done. This means I’ve not even come close to needing to pick where I will launch it and how I’m going to monetize it from a development standpoint.
The people I engage with these days I do so on Twitter or Discord for the most part. Even then I’m following many so it’s not like I’m at risk of losing a connection with many amazing people.
In other words, things i value the most are not dependent on what one guy ends up doing.
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Lol I did see people say steem was EOS, like wtf. Even Justin from listening to him the other day seems to have no idea what steem is. Fun times ahead, yet again
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I'm starting to think that is part of his "charm."
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No alt coin is decentralized to its maximum it’s a relative term that we all just throw around like cat shit hoping it sticks to something the point is it’s just more decentralized than the traditional way
Give us SMT, open link, open seed, RC pools for dapps and more developer tools and let steem prove it can be a success or suffer the consequences of non performance and be absorbed
I’d say dapp owners should be looking to get into his pockets and leverage Tron too it’s the best for their projects! The more users they bring the more he looks good! Self interest at its finest
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It would be awesome if things just stayed as they are, with more marketing and more users. But these mixed messages about steem moving to tron and token swaps and blah blah leaves to much uncertainty for business owners. personally I love steem and the community. But with my business hat on, well it does not look to appealing now.
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I think everyone here has been through the ringer and are emotionally attached myself included but regardless of the name and blockchain if I’m totally agnostic the market will dictate the product changes and what will make it a winner it’s what Justin wants and what we all want!
We all learning here and only time will tell! This is new territory never been done in blockchain so let’s see where it takes us!
I was planning to build on steem this year so I’m pretty keen to see how this all works out
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"I was planning to build on steem this year so I’m pretty keen to see how this all works out"
What you planning and will this effect your plans?
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So I wanted to add my own front end and token under the your.nichemarket domain for people who want to share small business related info And review businesses and service providers in a long form medium which I feel is lacking
I want to open up a NFT marketplace for digital services like freelancing and ticketing and coupons on the shop.nichemarket so small businesses can use it as a marketing tool
I want to open contest.nichemaket so big and small businesses can run contests for various niche audiences and do give aways for any task they choose!
This will all complement my current site
But with all this now I’ll put it in pause because of costing and not wanting to have to redo work or be stuck because of compatibly issues
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sounds exciting. But this
"But with all this now I’ll put it in pause because of costing and not wanting to have to redo work or be stuck because of compatibly issues"
^^^ an issue for many right now.
Well I guess we will just have to wait and see
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Sorry, @rycharde you’ve reach daily limit of summon the trendo curation bot!
Support @trendotoken projects by delegating : 100SP , 200SP , 500SP , 1000SP , 2000SP
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From my perspective, I feel both strangely gratified and disquieted.
For the first, I feel gratified that my focus was on my work (in the sense of "my writing" and "my creation") before my interest in the Steem blockchain. Putting the work first means that this kind of situation doesn't actually affect the process of working – after all, my work is completely uninvolved with anything about governance or operation except for the presence of a platform and UI to interface with the work. The Steem blockchain acted/acts as a distribution platform for me first and foremost and the underlying token transfer/market mechanisms are purely gravy insofar as I get anything useful out of. As such, from the perspective of my creations, this really doesn't have much of an effect. I am not expecting to extract particular value from the operation of the blockchain.
The disquiet sets in when I consider how this is likely to affect the underlying interface with what is effectively just a database of my work over the last few years. It's not the only place my work has appeared, but I think that some of my best work has been published via this mechanism and it would be a shame for all of those links which have been distributed across the world to go dead or be unreachable – ironically the possibility of which (and avoiding it) is/was one of the greatest selling points of blockchain technology in general and not just Steem). It disquiet's me to think that some of the people whose work I respect will have to potentially find other platforms to invest their passion into, even if I disagree with the positions that they took personally as regards that platform.
In general, the key question is "what does Justin Sun expect to get out of the acquisition of the Steem blockchain?" After all, he has access to a perfectly functional token exchange blockchain which seems to be very successful among a certain type of digital application, online gambling. Dropping money for @ned 's stake in the Steem blockchain doesn't seem to actually buy him anything useful. There are a handful of digital applications with more socially acceptable uses here, there is a very lightly active social media platform, but that's it. What did he actually buy? The Steem blockchain doesn't even stand as a reasonable competitor to TRON in the marketplace, so that's not much of a reason to pick it up either. That is the question that we need to answer before we can make sense out of this whole thing and bring reason to bear on trying to figure out where it's going next. Until we can do that, until we know that, everything else is just made up.
Note that we can't actually take the word of the major players involved as to what their motivations are because we know that complete direct truthfulness has never been on the table with them, perhaps reasonably, perhaps less so. There should be no expectation of getting straightforward answers which reflect reality from either of the major players.
At this point, the big question is Justin Sun's motivation and we really have no way to know what that is.
I think it's interesting that the price of both STEEM and SBD had a momentary spike and now has dropped back into pretty much exactly where it was before the announcement. It could drop further if the overall uncertainty from holders starts breaking toward divestment but I suspect that HODL is going to be the order of the day for at least a few more days until some sort of direction gets really defined.
In the meantime, what people who really have businesses which are in any degree entwined with the idea of the Steem blockchain should do is consider whether the the business itself is primary or the Steem interactions are primary, and if the business interactions are the real business – think about how you can change your messaging to convey that. I'm not saying completely disentangle but I am suggesting that it's a good opportunity to reconsider how your messaging comes across to your audience and what you are actually promoting with that relationship. The Steem blockchain should be promoting you (abstractly), that is it should be providing your business value, and not the other way around.
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"think about how you can change your messaging to convey that. I'm not saying completely disentangle but I am suggesting that it's a good opportunity to reconsider how your messaging comes across to your audience and what you are actually promoting with that relationship"
^^^^ this......
and
"The Steem blockchain should be promoting you (abstractly), that is it should be providing your business value, and not the other way around."
But even taking off my business hat and looking at my personal account here on steem ( this account) I still feel uncompforable saying come to steem when steem might not be steem in a few months. Steem is complicated enought without trying to explain that oh in a few months you will have to do a token swap .....
Sure look, it is what it is and I guess we will have to see what tide the sun brings in (it would be way better if his name was moon)
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Steem was too complicated to pitch to other people at a personal level even without bringing up the possible future of the Steem token. SBD versus STEEM versus SP versus "voting manna"/RC – that whole side of things was both way too prominent in the social culture and way too prominent as a pitch from Steemit Inc. That is one of the many problems that we had in actually getting people on board even at the height of the value of the token.
What I said applies even to us from a personal perspective – we should not be looking to provide the platform value, we should be talking about and looking at how the platform provides us value. In a real sense, the Steem blockchain has fallen down on that outside of the value of the token over the last two years (and one could as sensibly and reasonably argue that they've fallen down on that as regards the value of the token over the last two years).
As much as a lot of people don't want to hear this – and that number may include you but this isn't judgment – the obsession with HODL and never moving token value off of the platform in order to exchange it for something that you could have got, by selling it for something you wanted, doesn't actually increase the inherent value of it in that sense of what it has brought to you in exchange for your work. I at least say "well, I sold some for Amazon cards when it had some real value and it paid for this new monitor in this really nice keyboard and my sous vide machine". I literally put my finger on what value it has provided me and I'm good with that. But if you haven't actually extracted value from the platform and you have invested your own money from outside of the platform, it might be time to seriously sit down and evaluate which direction the value is flowing for you personally.
When we invite people to join us on most social media platforms, it's because we know that they will be able to find our content, our work, our creations, more easily, more comfortably, or more conveniently via that mechanism. The work is first, our creations are first, and the mechanism of delivery exists to facilitate us. That is one of the things that both Twitter and Facebook got right at the beginning, they recognized that their job was to be useful to you and then get out of the way. The way people approach the Steem blockchain and the digital applications attached to it have that exactly the wrong way around for the most part and put us in this position where we either have to sell the platform in order to get people to see our content or accept that it provides a really small tool in terms of value for sharing our content.
(I wouldn't expect a token swap. I could be wrong but TRON has enough of a market And enough market liquidity that it doesn't look like there would be a whole lot to be gained by just adding STEEM to its mix. Unless Justin Sun was just obsessed with the idea of merging their governance architectures, a token swap would just be burning value in the overhead to reduce replication and redundancy of storage nodes. I'm not saying someone couldn't make that bad decision but I am saying it would be a bad decision.)
Judging from the number of grumpy people around here, I'd say the moon tide has been in for at least six months. We could make a real killing selling ice cream and chocolate bars.)
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I think the answer to this question of yours lies in the post that was rated Number 1 amongst Top-25 posts on Steemit - about how Steem Blockchain can lift those living in poverty, off the ground.
Don't look further than that for now and don't overthink too much, what can be just delusions.
So far we have the facts - our community's low barrier to entry allows for the parents to feed their children in the worst-off parts of the World - and that is inspiring!!!
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Imho, we need to take a deep breath and sigh. I think things will sort out for the better for us and Steem. At least Iam hoping ;)
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I think they will sort out too and this will all be good. I'm just impatient
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Have faith Paula.
Peace and Love
Atma
"Thoughts become things, so choose the good ones" - Mike Dooley
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Howdy paulag! Now that 6 days have passed since you posted this, are you still confused? Or just waiting to see what happens? I think there is alot of hope but I don't think anyone can count on anything at this point. I keep reading that Mr. Sun flies by the seat of his pants and many times makes rash decisions.
What is the sense from people that you deal with?
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yes a few days have passed and I guess I gotta wait and see what happens. What I am very surprised with is the level of toxicity I have seen from both Steem and Tron users.
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Oh! Very interesting, I haven't heard anyone talk about how Tron users feel about this. They think it's a waste of money to have bought Steemit?
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