I’ve lived in Minnesota now for twenty-four years. The Columbus I left in 1995 is a different place than the one I revisit. Last week my wife and I traveled back to Columbus, Ohio to surprise my father for his 79th birthday. Still, each time I go back to visit my family I encounter a certain sight, a smell, or a sound that makes me remember my past and what the city used to be.

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“You can't go home again. You can't recover the past.” - Thomas Wolfe

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I wish I possessed the wisdom it takes to understand this quote when I was younger because I may have done a few things differently. The younger version of me didn’t have a clue about so many things. It all comes back to perspective. As we progress down our path of life we begin to realize that each stage of our existence has its strengths and its pitfalls.

If youth’s Achilles’ heel is a lack of wisdom then the prevailing weakness of middle-age is to look at the past as being better than it was. I’ve noticed that a certain sort of melancholy descends on you in middle-age, a filter that gives a different, and sometimes deceptive, perspective on things. Our aging brains tend to conveniently forget about all of the previous pains in the ass and bad times that we suffered through and only remember the good.

I think this is the reason so many people start chasing different aspects of their youth in middle age. Some buy that hot red convertible, others opt for that cosmetic surgical procedure that promises to take years off their appearance. None of this ever works in the long term. After all, we can’t go home again...unless we have a time machine.

How This Applies to Steemit

All this got me thinking about the turmoil of the past few weeks here on Steemit. I think it’s safe to say the few of us first-wavers (users who joined in early-to-mid 2016) who are still active miss the old days. Back then we all thought Steemit would change the world. There were far fewer bots, followers engaged deeply with posts, and the payouts were epic.

The difference was, back in those first few months, there were probably just a few thousand users. Steemit had to evolve to prepare for more users and ultimately mainstream adoption. The problem was, in many ways, the platform was left to evolve on its own instead of growing according to logically engineered business plan. It’s clear that the “free-range” approach to business development didn’t equal longterm success.

In Search of the Killer dApp

There is lots of talk both on and off of Steemit about a “killer app” that will take blockchain and cryptocurrency mainstream. I think the answer lies in a certain social media company with the initials F.B. Due to privacy concerns and ideological reasons many people are searching for ways to leave Farcebook (misspelling was intentional). The trouble is, there is no single competitor out there who offers everything they do in one package.

To leave the FB ecosystem you’d need to sign up for many other platforms for things like photo sharing, social media posts, messaging, etc. and then convince all of your friends and relatives to do the same. Plus most of these other platforms still make their profit from selling user data. The Steem blockchain is already built and separate decentralized applications like Busy for social media posts and Steepshot for simple photo sharing have already been born. A private messaging dApp that mimics all of the features of FB Messenger would be another great offering.

Could it be that the killer dApp we’re searching for just involves putting pieces that are already in existence together? One solution could be to design an interface that stitches all of these existing (and future) dApps built on the Steem blockchain together in way that results in a single and seamless user experience, offering everything that Facebook does. It could even be called Stitch as in “stitching people’s lives together." It seems like most of the puzzle pieces are already there, the real challenge lies in figuring out how to marry the pieces together.

This is just an idea I came up with while writing this post (that was going to be about something else entirely). I'm sure there are hundreds of better ideas buried in the brains of our varied user base. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m no developer and there might be a good reason why this idea wouldn’t work but it could be worth exploring. Steemit still has the potential to go down in the history books as being more than than an ingenious idea that never reached its potential.

I believe we should utilize our greatest asset on this platform, our collective braintrust, to solve the puzzle that's before us. Whatever the solution, the years have taught me that the answer to the most complicated things are often right there in front of us.

Submit your own ideas using the #savingsteemit tag.

Thank you for reading,

Eric

(Gif sourced from Giphy.com)

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*I am an American novelist, poet, traveler, and crypto-enthusiast. If you’ve enjoyed my work please sign up for my author newsletter at my website. Newsletter subscribers will receive exclusive updates and special offers and your information will never be sold or shared.

Alarm Clock Dawn, one of the first full length novels published on the blockchain, and the book that started it all for me can be found HERE. Or Click Here to read it for free on the Steemit blockchain

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