I've been considering Patreon as a platform for my music for several months now. However, my friend and contemporary, @jessamynorchard, convinced me, with much fervor, that Steemit is something that I should check out. I'm doing that now. I believe testimony speaks for itself about the potential for creators.
That said, @bacchist , I find your assessment to be correct as well - the site seems foreboding, almost uninviting to the average user. Luckily I hearken back from the days when 28k modems were "high speed" and AOL reigned supreme, so it's not so scary to me. I would dare say there is benefit, though, in that foreboding.
Boo me all you want, but when Facebook was new and mostly unavailable, it was a bit of Ivy League non-sense to most. I lived in Boston and worked in Cambridge from 2003 to 2007, and I had a number of Harvard students as friends. Facebook was all the rage, but completely limited to their community. It wasn't until 2007, 2008 that it became available to the greater populace, at which point it was already a well oiled machine with unlimited potential for growth.
As I peruse Steem, I see Facebook, but without the lies and the greed. I see Reddit done right. I see Xanga (yea, again, I predate the web) with financial incentive.
For me, as a creator, this is another experiment in furthering my art, my audience, and my independence from the standard income structure requiring me to have an unrelated day job - expending energy which could be spent creating. I'm curious as to where the journey will take me. It should at least prove to be a fun adventure with many lessons and new friends. That is always worth my time and effort.
I think it's super important that those of us who have been around since the early days of AOL and have been through the entire AOL to epinions to Xanga/LiveJournal/Diary-X to MySpace to Facebook and beyond are part of the ongoing input and development of the Steemit platform... don't know about you, but I've seen dozens of "great ideas" die in the gutter because the same (avoidable) mistakes were made that caused the previous failure.
I also see Steemit's potential to take some older models and "do them right." This is social blogging/social content... Steem is Xanga "e-props," except with real world value. We have the peer-curation process that drove the good parts of epinions. And Themestream. Facebook was actually pretty cool, once upon a time. We have "Reddit done right." We also have the potential for a "version" of the different curation platforms, when they bring in "Communities." We can add our own versions of "the best of" YouTube, Crowd funding, streaming radio, an eBay-like marketplace and more.
If we can keep the decentralized idea without ending up at "fragmentation" (so many independent apps it becomes a giant mess) Steemit has the potential to become a whole new type of web ecosystem... not only contributor built and driven, but also (potentially) capable of taking a step in the direction of offering a source of (very) basic income to many people.
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