The Vampire inquiries: Why be a Steemer

In my last post @paulag mentioned that it can be difficult to explain to people why they should use Steem, something I am sure many struggle with. The obvious answer is of course "the money", but as we have seen from the last couple years, once that "money" gets taken off the table, the will to carry on diminishes rapidly for those who only came here for it and never learned of other values.

At least for me, the "money" is irrelevant and while many have the expectations of some kind of monetary gain, the original slogan of Come for the rewards, stay for the community still rings true. What many failed to learn of course is that the rewards have never gone away and have likely increased as price has fallen away due to a lack of competition.

Sure, it might not be worth it to post for many people in comparison to what they could buy, but if the importance of ownership is learned and Steem is able to tap into the developing marketplace of digital ownership, it may very well be financially worth it later. If you are living in a first world country, it is likely that you could buy much more Steem than you are currently earning from posting, engaging and curating, but in order to benefit from Steem in the years to come, one has to own Steem. This means either buy off the market or earn from the pool and hold.

For those who are unwilling to do one of the first two and the last of those three things, benefiting from Steem is going to be limited, as it should be. To benefit from investing one has to have skin in the game in some way, shape or form and value will of course go to those who have invested themselves.

One of the downfalls of Steem is that it is often positioned as something very familiar, which is great but often fails to pinpoint what is quite different. As I said to Paula,

Training is often hard to sell some companies when they believe that they are proficient enough that they don't need it, without knowing what they don't know. Steem is the same, people think they know what it is before they have any idea about what it is -
"just social media, right? I have been on that for years"

Most people come in here with assumptions about what Steem is and act accordingly without spending time to discover what makes it special, and it isn't the rewards, it is the entire economy that is being generated that makes those rewards have some kind of value. The ecosystem of Steem encapsulates an economy, development projects, investment opportunities, gaming services, self-publishing platforms, content delivery, content, consumption, goods and services and all kinds of other transactional relationships that make any currency have value.

Most importantly though, it offers the chance to own and actively use pieces or shares in these by having Steem powered up to help the transactions have value. For example, a one STEEM vote may be worth more when directed toward or away from one piece of content over another, in the same way 1 dollar could generate more if used to invest into an appreciating vehicle than on an ice cream left to melt in the sun. The beauty of Steem is that every transaction holds value and all of the transactions are able to be influenced by the community in some way, even if only slightly. For a simple example, selling puts downward pressure on value, buying puts upward - and each transaction either way is going to influence all other tokens and all dynamics of the entire system.

As I said in the last post, for the first time in history we have access to an unlimited resource that is able to be managed as if there is scarcity, the digital environment. It really is only our imagination that limits the digital potential and the consideration of what it means to be valuable and therefore, what is valuable. Not only is this a first, it is combined with a technology that requires no government or borders and can be handled by unknown people on a mass scale at a global level.

People like you and I.

Most of you don't know me, I don't know most of you, but here we are trading non-centralized tokens that have some value for goods and services including the content that we create. At the scale and distance we are doing this and the fact that we need not trust each other to do it, this is unprecedented on earth over 2 million years of human evolution. What we are doing is evolving and redefining what it means to be a society and what it means to be in relationships with each other.

Just another social media.

No, it isn't just another social media and while it is possible to replicate other social medias on Steem and behave as if it is the same, it is fundamentally different because of the direct marketplace we have created that has no ownership, no middlemen extractors at the foundation level. Steem is a platform, yet it doesn't rely on a single entity to operate or protect it and it takes no profit for the capabilities it provides as all rewards are distributed to those who use it.

This is difficult to understand for most people in the current world because it has never existed before, which means people focus on the familiar and what they know - the aspects that are not where the value lays. Facebook is valuable because of the data it sells and what it can push out to its users through leveraging that data, but the ecosystem that is built around those two billion users can exist happily on Steem without the costs of middlemen and the risks of centralized governance driven by single-entity profiteering.

The idea of the value of digital real estate is unfamiliar too as again, this hasn't existed earlier and after 30 years of the public internet, people are accustomed to getting it for "free" as the true value and costs have been hidden from view. To most, digital ownership seems ridiculous, as most do not see that it can actually be owned as most have no idea about blockchains and the unique tokenization that runs upon them. The majority of this world still believes money has value without understanding that it is in concept only and, they do not own even a tiny amount of it, it is all owned by a central entity.

Understanding the difference between Facebook and Steem is difficult if viewing it only from the perspective of the surface level social media aspects. Understanding the value of Facebook is difficult if only looking at pictures of people's lunch and selfies without delving into the entire ecosystem below. The problem is that many come into Steem expecting some kind of value but expect that all of the back end requirements in order to generate it is done by someone else, someone like Facebook. The value that the owners of Facebook enjoy as their profits go to them because thy are the ones that have created all of the funnels for transactions to flow into them, whilst on Steem all of that value gets distributed to all of the people of Steem, investors, creators, witnesses, developers and consumers.

Steem is an energy return system, not a energy Vampire like the centralized platforms. Te importance of this might be difficult to explain to many now, but with the gradually increasing realization of how harmful these centralized platforms have become and how powerful their grip, the more important it is to differentiate Steem away from being similar and push the true competitive advantage it has, it isn't the value of the Steem token, it isn't the rewards, it is the ownership of digital experience and through that ownership, an independent economy can be created and sustain itself.

While people would rather see more familiar social media content on Steem and this is happening though the applications and SMTs, perhaps it is also important when onboarding people to make sure that one at least tries to convey what the real value proposition of being on Steem means.

Instead of begging the centralized masters to improve their behavior, own the new digital world.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]