12 ms·

A Social Network Doling Out Millions in Ephemeral Money

111 points by denzil_correa 9y ago

nv-vn 9y ago
Pretty cool, but in practice Steemit's content is pretty mediocre. There are some high quality articles, but the front page is largely clickbait and articles talking about how successful Steemit is. I tried to write some programming articles (one of which got a lot of traction, actually) but I just got bored of doing that after a little while of getting barely any views. I think Steemit has potential if people begin to use it like Medium, but a lot of people are there as basically a business, running their personal BuzzFeed.
- ryanb23 9y ago
  Also, Steemit is just a terrible name.
  - lost_name 9y ago
    I agree and was curious why they picked it. I guess their reasoning is as good as any. > Steem is a form of esteem, which means to prize or value. Steem is also a homophone for steam, which is frequently associated with power, and a step further, steam powered trains gave influence to English idioms, such as ‘this conversation is picking up steam.’ The associations with prizing, language and empowerment only felt right. https://steem.io/#faq https://steem.io/#faq
    - kakarot 9y ago
      Still, Steem is an infinitely better name than Steemit.
      - QML 9y ago
        Copycat of Reddit (lol).
    - markbnj 9y ago
      But there is already a very popular service called Steam, so I think I would have kept searching for another name, personally. No reason to risk confusion.
- Kelab 9y ago
  what is your handle I'll try to follow
  - nv-vn 9y ago
    @nv-vn (thanks, will follow back)
ideonexus 9y ago
Took a look at the "trending" articles on this network. Most of them are about cryptocurrencies, followed by phishing-scam warnings, and finally a smattering of other content. This seems like a network built around the hype of cryptocurrencies that is hyping itself into value. I'm experiencing a lot of anxiety lately that I'm missing the cryptocurrency boat, but at the same time the more I research the possibilities I'm finding far less opportunity to invest and much more opportunity to get taken.
- nv-vn 9y ago
  True. There's a massive shortage of interesting content on Steemit in my opinion. I wish there were some way to convince people on HN to start blogging on Steemit because as a blogging platform it has a lot of potential (plus there's some money in it... I made ~$50 on my first article if I recall correctly).
  - tetraca 9y ago
    There's definitely some good/decent authors there, but they don't make that much money. Probably $10/article on an average day. Most people are at the mercy of a "whale" or some concerted author circle to actually make any substantive amount on an article that isn't some travel blog/ebegging garbage.
- rev_null 9y ago
  I think it's real value will take off when amateur pornographers figure out that they can make money on the site.
  - Kiro 9y ago
    It has already happened and those earn quite a lot but they are of course flagged as NSFW.
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  There's no substance. It's multilevel marketing. This is the top post: https://steemit.com/steem/@ned/explainer-value-flows-on-steem-with-smts-video https://steemit.com/steem/@ned/explainer-value-flows-on-stee... It's a great way to build a large audience of money hungry people, probably not a great way to build a community with any kind of value. Nice hair.
deevolution 9y ago
Its not any more ephemeral than the money that our government prints. In steemits case, they are the government and can arbitrarily "print" money. If the government of steemit crumbles, so will its currency. Just like any other government. Every single currency is ephemeral to some variable degree...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- tdb7893 9y ago
  I think the difference is that people don't see USD as ephemeral because the chance of the US government collapsing is about 0 while the chance of a cryptocurrency startup collapsing is definitely much greater than 0
- Kelab 9y ago
  no they are more decentralized than other cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ethereum
- deevolution 9y ago
  Holy crap thats alot of downvotes... I mean i was talking ephemeral on a pretty large time scale here, just to clear things up for all the people who apparently believe that USD is an absolute.
- neilwilson 9y ago
  Nobody is taxing you in Steem. Governments create money so you have the means to pay your tax bill. And by doing that they get you to create and give up real goods and services for the common good. A money system that works to enable transactions is one where hoarding it doesn't really get you anything. In fact it should cost you to hold a rainy day fund - as any insurance should. Cryptocurrencies try and pretend they are electronic gold bars. But they are not. They are ideas with a label on it. Some smart salesman has convinced people that there are only so many ideas with a Bitcoin label and that finite supply will make the price go up. So then people start hoarding them, and transactions for real things start to go down because nobody can get hold of the currency. So then somebody creates the same idea with a different label, which also has a finite supply... Classic fallacy of composition. Finite within the scope of the label, but not between labels. The world's fiat currencies are relative finite between labels - because there are only so many governments - but have a fully dynamic supply within the label. That focusses the currency on transactions, not hoards.
sp527 9y ago
So they’re still monetizing peoples’ attention? I suppose it’s more noble to pass proportionate value back to the creators, but that’s not a system Facebook et al couldn’t quite easily adopt if market pressure forced their hands.
- andrarchy 9y ago
  In fact, they could use a Smart Media Token to do so :). All joking aside, the structure of such systems are antithetical to the way large corporations operate. That being said if Facebook decided to replicate our model (our protocol is open source and it relies on an open and public database, which is obviously part of the reason they won't)and distribute profits back to its most valuable users, I would count that as a win. I bet they won't. I also bet they won't distribute nearly as large a percentage as we do (100%) because they have expensive data centers to take care of (I think the latest one alone cost $1 billion). New technologies with fundamentally different economics always disrupt large incumbents. It might not be likely, but it is possible and the potential rewards are large and accrue to the earliest stakeholders. Always. I'm not saying people should invest anything they can't afford to lose in crypto projects--whether it's time or money--but if I had listened to all of the naysayers for the past few years who dismissed bitcoin, then ethereum, and now steem, I would be much poorer in many different currencies and I wouldn't be part of an amazing team solving incredibly difficult problems every single day that give it an incredible competitive advantage against anyone who tries to do what we do. So I know Facebook can't do what we do because they don't have us :) Community Liaison, Steemit
hopfog 9y ago
I used to be involved in Steemit with some success, mostly by writing articles about the Steem blockchain itself and how to interact with it. The appeal for me as a developer is that you're working with an unrestricted firehose API. If you want to build something you don't need to worry about limitations or breaking some terms. You can build your own Steemit front-end if you want since the back-end is just another node on the chain. The community is really nice and I made many good friends. Regardless of the future of Steem I consider it a success and a tell-tale of real life applications for blockchains.
supermdguy 9y ago
This reminds me of the Brave browser and the basic attention token.
- Kelab 9y ago
  how is that the same thing?
- andrarchy 9y ago
  Great question! It is vaguely similar but different in many important ways. To be clear we do not see Brave as a direct competitor and wish them success. While they have referred to us as competitors, I believe that is a bit of an overreach. First of all, Steem tokens (and the Smart Media Tokens others will be able to launch on top of Steem in the coming months) can be transferred in 3 seconds with zero fees. This enables us to connect money to "likes" or in the case of Steem "upvotes." Brave is a pay-to-play system that uses an Ethereum token which is both slow (10 minutes) and has fees. Steem, on the other hand, is a protocol which anyone can use to build applications that leverage this crypto fuel engagement without adding paywalls or cognitive load. The crowd acts and money flows the most valuable members as determined by the stake-weighted vote of the users. In short, the Steem blockchain is protocol that the Steemit team launched and leveraged to create steemit.com but anyone can use it to fuel their app, INCLUDING apps that serve the same use case as Brave ... but with real-time fee-less transactions (i.e. better). If you'd like to learn a little more about how the system works you can check out the following video featuring yours truly: https://youtu.be/z-V6HnfbGUA https://youtu.be/z-V6HnfbGUA Community Liaison, Steemit
  - supermdguy 9y ago
    Thanks for clarifying the difference.
lowglow 9y ago
Despite all the criticisms here, this just validated Steemit as a real service that is now a real contender.
- Kiro 9y ago
  I don't understand why people on HN are so anti-Steemit. Disregarding the service is very patronizing to its users. It's obviously giving them something of value but HN is so quick on placing it in the same bag as some random scam ICO. Not saying the model is perfect though.
  - adventured 9y ago
    > I don't understand why people on HN are so anti-Steemit. Because people on HN that have been around a while, have seen a dozen variations of this come and go, all the way back to the days of Flooz. Steemit will pop and rot, for exactly the same reasons that not a single system like this has ever worked long-term. What Steemit actually represents is a signal that the crypto-currency mania is nearing an end for the initial speculative wave. The big dump comes next, in which most crypto-currency experiments that have attention today will die off. There's nothing special about what Steemit is doing. They're slapping the latest hype train on top of what has been attempted for two decades. It doesn't work for a fundamental reason and there's nothing Steemit can do about that. It doesn't matter if you use a clone of Bitcoin as your foundation or an arbitrary tokenX with a different set of rules governing it. Slapping Bitcoin on the concept doesn't change the underlying broken premise.
    - Kiro 9y ago
      You make it sound like it's some random social network with an unrelated token connected to it. That's not how it works. 1. Reward from blocks mined are distributed to the highest voted posts. This is all part of the Steem protocol. Only a small percentage goes to the actual miner. 2. The whole database sits on the blockchain. It's completely decentralised. 3. The incentive to have more Steem on your account is that your upvotes are worth more. This is both the blessing and the curse since whales become powerful curators. On the other hand it gives an incentive to hold Steem unrelated to the monetary value. That's why I don't see any dumping happening any time soon unless Steem skyrockets in value. I simply don't agree that this has been tried before. It's a different story, even if it turns out to be a failure in the end.
jordancampbell 9y ago
It's literally a Ponzi scheme. Where is the money coming from, other than speculation? It barely even hides this fact, given that all its content is about how to generate more content and keep all the wheels turning.
- Kelab 9y ago
  isn't that the same for all cryptocurrencies?
  - theklub 9y ago
    Yes
- noisypl 9y ago
  There is no money on the platform. Steem blockchain produce constant amount of STEEM tokens everyday (1 STEEM per block every 3s). Those tokens are distributed among all users according to votes of all users. We all know, that it is not so easy to write a post/comment which will receive tons of upvotes. So if you will spend 3 hours writing awesome blogpost, and after a week (voting period) you will endup having 3 STEEM tokens... question is, would you give away those tokens for free? Probably not for free... Also, there are people on the platform, which like to gather STEEM tokens. Why? Because if you have more STEEM tokens you have greater influence on the platform, your posts will have greater visibility, and you have more to say about who will receive more tokens next time. Price of STEEM tokens are determined by free market on bitcoin and concurrencies exchanges: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/steem/#markets https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/steem/#markets On exchanges people which do not care about influence on Steem sell tokens to people, which want to have influence on the platform. It is a free market in purest form. Don't believe? You don't have to. There is no need for trust on Steem. Eferything is open source: github.com/steemit/ Everything is transparent (blockchain explorers): - https://steemdb.com/ https://steemdb.com/ - https://steemd.com/ https://steemd.com/ - https://steemstats.com/ https://steemstats.com/
cujic9 9y ago
I expect that establishing an extrinsic reward (ie: money) will be hugely demotivating and actually diminish activity. Social media become a lot less fun when an hour's worth of effort "earns" you $0.07. Also, they should expect a tidal wave of bots and fake content. Think about the mess Twitter is in, now add a straight path to cash.
mark242 9y ago
What's the exchange rate between Steem and Flooz? Can I finally use my Flooz credits?
- buybeenz 9y ago
  Buy Beenz!
jv22222 9y ago
I built a knowledge sharing startup back in 2001 called Woyano. One thing we learned, as a general rule, it is difficult to effectively pay people to create good content on a social network. The best and most knowledgeable people want to create content based on intrinsic motivations rather than financial ones. One only need look at Wikipedia, Stackoverflow, Quora, etc to see intrinsic motivation inspiring good content. I guess the main point is that once you start paying people then the intrinsically motivated people aren't as likely to post on the same place.
- olegkikin 9y ago
  But there are many more people who would love to create things, and get paid for their labor. The "best" and "most knowledgeable" I know are all either employed or get paid in some way.
  - pdubbs90 9y ago
    Maybe the distinction lies in the filtering. Stackoverflow and Wikipedia have high quality because only people that really care about a subject (and thus usually know a lot) will invest time for free. Once you start paying people, the much larger audience of 'people that want money' starts posting and the good people get drowned out. Your friends who are employed were filtered by the hiring process. I imagine Google would be much worse if they hired everyone who applied.
    - CM30 9y ago
      > Once you start paying people, the much larger audience of 'people that want money' starts posting and the good people get drowned out. Yep. Seen this on a forum called Digitalpoint, back when they had revenue sharing for posts. In theory, that should have made people post higher quality content given the financial reward for doing so. In practice? It inspired thousands of people from third world countries to join and post uninspired gibberish for the chance to get their Adsense ID used in every thread they posted in. A site that already had problems with spammers registering and posting meaningless content for signature backlinks ended up getting flooded by people who saw it as a convenient get rich quick scheme.
sneak 9y ago
Hi there. Some of you know me from HN - this is where the bulk of my effort has gone for most of the last year. The team we’re building at Steemit is downright amazing, and the community around it is what keeps me going. Think reddit, but on a blockchain (the posts, comments, and votes are actually in the merkle tree in consensus), and the upvotes are real money - that’s where the majority of the token’s inflation (~9% per year, decreasing further over time) goes. It’s sort of like a censorship-resistant, distributed pastebin. You can put arbitrary json into the blockchain, which gets mirrored to hundreds of nodes, permanently, in three seconds. The Shadow Brokers have taken up blogging on Steemit. We call it censorship-resistant, but I can’t think of a way to meaningfully redact content already posted to this blockchain that anyone on Earth could practically implement. Our second annual Steemfest is in Lisbon 1-5 November and hopefully I will meet some of you there.
eurticket 9y ago
immediately presented with a sign into facebook popup
smcnally 9y ago
"A Wireding" reads like a Bene Gesserit activity, and it lacks the thump of "a Slashdotting." Either way, Steemit isn't handling it right now. ``` HTTP/1.1 503 Service Unavailable: Back-end server is at capacity Content-Length: 0 Connection: keep-alive ... It's not just you! steemit.com looks down from here. (http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/steemit.com http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/steemit.com) ```
- sneak 9y ago
  Someone DDoSed us. :(
andrarchy 9y ago
Hi, my name is @andrarchy, I'm part of Team Steemit and you can AMA :). This comment was originally intended as a response to aaron-lebo, but as it became quite long, I decided to post it here. Aaron-lebo says, "They're interested in their network getting big so they can make money. There's not much nuance to it. You can spin it another way but read the thread. It's a soulless money grab, and it's disappointing because they actually have decent software." He's right in a lot of ways and wrong in a lot of ways, but obviously I'm biased :). Regardless of whether we agree or disagree I want to thank anyone who even gives a moment's thought to what we're trying to do at Steemit. So thank you @aaron-lebo. What's right: We have decent software. Well, when it comes to offering a free social network that rewards tens of thousands of ordinary people all over the world for their content in a cryptocurrency that can be traded on exchanges and cashed out for fiat currencies, we're the only game in town, so I think we have a pretty strong argument that we have the BEST software. And knowing our engineers I have no problem saying they are the most intelligent, diligent, thoughtful, nice, and hard working people I have ever had the distinct pleasure of working with. IMO they're the best in the world and welcome proof to the contrary. One common criticism (not made by this commenter) is that most people "don't make a lot." First off I want to highlight exactly what this criticism is saying: some people on steemit make a lot. A lot of other people make a bit. A lot of people make not a lot. This is all true. But these types of comments invariably dismiss the difference that making $5 or $10 on a post (which MANY people DO make) can have on a person's life especially in many of the countries where our users are from like those in Africa, Indonesia, and more. But even with respect to more wealthy nations, I often find the critiques of how much our users make to be remarkably tone deaf. It is certainly true that not everyone can make tons of money on Steemit and you will never see anyone on the team saying anything to that effect. Steemit is definitely NOT a get rich quick scheme. It's only true that you CAN make money on Steemit and people do every single day. That's right, the Steem blockchain distributes thousands of dollars worth of STEEM every single day to users. In fact, ALL of the money created by the Steem blockchain goes to users who provide some service to it whether it's posting articles, comments, curating content, or running a node. Like every other major cryptocurrency/blockchain protocol, the fact that anyone is free to participate in it is part of what makes it anti-fragile. None of that Steem goes to the team, unless of course we do one of those things. I understand the content that is currently on the site might not appeal to many, but the amount of rewards are real (no one denies that) and who is receiving them changes every day. What I recommend is that people view the lack of diversity of content on the site as an opportunity to contribute something new to the platform. That's certainly how I looked at it when I started as a contributer on the platform and worked my way up by creating videos that helped explain the tech to the many lay-people on the platform. Eventually my videos got the attention of the people at Steemit and I was brought on board! That being said, we are still a small social network, so of course our content is not going to be able to match the bigger players. But if people want to look at the data for themselves, project our growth rate, and estimate when we will reach such scale they are welcome to. All the data is on the blockchain which is an open, public and decentralized database. What's wrong: We're not soulless. I swear we have souls! :) There are more than 30 people on the team at this point and statistically speaking it's just highly unlikely that we could ALL be lacking in what is typically described as a near human-universal. Unless, of course, you don't believe in souls in which case, yes, this statement is technically true. What I would say is that those in the cryptocurrency sector are often critiqued as being TOO ideological. We all openly advocate for decentralization for the purpose of spreading power (and money) among the people. That's certainly why I got involved in the field and have been blogging and vlogging on the topic for over a year, all of which is immutably preserved on the blockchain for your investigation ;). At Steemit we do want to make steemit.com as big as possible because we all have Steem, but so do all of our users. So, yes, they do too. But to claim that anything else should be the case is like saying that Facebook is better because ONLY Facebook shareholders benefit when Facebook grows. The idea that we are somehow more soulless than Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or any other social network that wants to grow because their model depends on eyeballs to sell ads to (notice any ads on steemit.com?) is pretty laughable. Yes, we have figured out a sustainable and scaleable way to align the incentives of the creators, developers, and users of an open, public, anonymous, censorship-resistant, and decentralized database protocol so that when it grows everyone benefits. We're not sorry :) One of the most frequent errors people make (and this is 100% understandable) is that for us it's ALL about growing steemit.com. This couldn't be more wrong. We are interested in growing use of the Steem blockchain protocol (just like the creators of Linux wanted to increase use of their protocol) and the demand for Steem. I'm not saying it's not selfish, I'm just saying it's not accurate ;). But let me be absolutely clear and I will happily hold myself accountable for this claim for all of time: this is because I believe that the Steem blockchain is a force for good. It is an open and decentralized database which is not controlled by any single person, corporation, or government, that anyone can acquire a stake in, that is free to use, that is anonymous, and that is censorship resistant. We see a lot of problems with existing social media solutions (like all of your personal information being held and profited off of by a private company with tight links to authorities) and we sincerely believe we have solved them with Steem. One can argue whether we are right, but I know our beliefs are sincere. PROOF: Smart Media Tokens That's exactly why we launched Smart Media Tokens. It was always our desire to get developers to leverage Steem to create their own applications that would reward their users with money while enabling them to retain control over their personal identities and protecting them from censorship, but through conversations with entrepreneurs and developers we learned that there were additional features they wanted. While steemit.com is incredibly important to us and the number of engineers we have working on that site is now greater than ever, we decided to also commit significant resources to designing the Smart Media Tokens protocol precisely because we want to encourage other platforms to leverage our technology. If all we cared about was steemit.com this strategy would make no sense. Once Smart Media Tokens launch, any site (including this one wink wiiiiiiiiiiiiink) will be able to launch their own Steem-like token with; customized parameters, the ability to allocate founders tokens, the ability to raise capital, and more. Shameless plug over ;). Yes, the system is designed to increase demand for Steem and that will benefit all current Steem holders, including the thousands of people doing the massively valuable work of contributing content to our platform while it is still growing. We are not idealists, but we're not soulless either. We are ambitious and hopeful technologists who are leveraging a revolutionary technology to disrupt a massively centralized, exploitative, and corrupt landscape. You're welcome ;) If you'd like to learn more, check out this video of yours truly explaining how it all works: https://youtu.be/z-V6HnfbGUA https://youtu.be/z-V6HnfbGUA Regardless of your view of steemit, if you've gotten this far, you're amazing. Thanks for reading!
cryptoctopus 9y ago
This tread is full of ignorant sourpuss who missed the boat. What people fail to see it that steemit is only 1 of many many websites being built on top of that blockchain. Youtube, twitter, instagram...they can all be built in their own little silos. With SMTs they will even be able to have their own tokens with their own economic models. Get your head around it. Steemit alone will soon pass you by on Alexa. https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ycombinator.com https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ycombinator.com / https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/steemit.com https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/steemit.com
bbit 9y ago
Steem is the future folks.
computerwizard 9y ago
I started working on a Hacker News interface for Steemit a while back. https://steemh.com/ https://steemh.com/
- bbit 9y ago
  I had this idea while ago . I have the steemitforum.com we should work together! email me: cryptoassets@gmail.com.
noisypl 9y ago
You should definitely checkout Steemit and other services like Busy.org or chainbb.com which are based on decentralized Steem Blockchain :)
Bi5h0p 9y ago
Andrarchy was trying to share something on this. I'm not sure if you've read it and wanted to post the link here for you all: https://steemit.com/steemit/@andrarchy/steemit-on-hacker-news-i-m-commenting-too-fast https://steemit.com/steemit/@andrarchy/steemit-on-hacker-new... On a side note - I am currently in the process of cashing-out my Steem tokens in order to purchase a 10 oz. bar of silver bullion - which would be my own little "proof of concept" that so-called, "Ephemeral Money," is actually a real and useful vehichle for creating REAL wealth. - Bi5h0p
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

111 points by denzil_correa 9y ago

Pretty cool, but in practice Steemit's content is pretty mediocre. There are some high quality articles, but the front page is largely clickbait and articles talking about how successful Steemit is. I tried to write some programming articles (one of which got a lot of traction, actually) but I just got bored of doing that after a little while of getting barely any views. I think Steemit has potential if people begin to use it like Medium, but a lot of people are there as basically a business, running their personal BuzzFeed.

ryanb23 9y ago
Also, Steemit is just a terrible name.
- lost_name 9y ago
  I agree and was curious why they picked it. I guess their reasoning is as good as any. > Steem is a form of esteem, which means to prize or value. Steem is also a homophone for steam, which is frequently associated with power, and a step further, steam powered trains gave influence to English idioms, such as ‘this conversation is picking up steam.’ The associations with prizing, language and empowerment only felt right. https://steem.io/#faq https://steem.io/#faq
  - kakarot 9y ago
    Still, Steem is an infinitely better name than Steemit.
    - QML 9y ago
      Copycat of Reddit (lol).
  - markbnj 9y ago
    But there is already a very popular service called Steam, so I think I would have kept searching for another name, personally. No reason to risk confusion.
Kelab 9y ago
what is your handle I'll try to follow
- nv-vn 9y ago
  @nv-vn (thanks, will follow back)

ideonexus 9y ago

Took a look at the "trending" articles on this network. Most of them are about cryptocurrencies, followed by phishing-scam warnings, and finally a smattering of other content. This seems like a network built around the hype of cryptocurrencies that is hyping itself into value. I'm experiencing a lot of anxiety lately that I'm missing the cryptocurrency boat, but at the same time the more I research the possibilities I'm finding far less opportunity to invest and much more opportunity to get taken.

nv-vn 9y ago
True. There's a massive shortage of interesting content on Steemit in my opinion. I wish there were some way to convince people on HN to start blogging on Steemit because as a blogging platform it has a lot of potential (plus there's some money in it... I made ~$50 on my first article if I recall correctly).
- tetraca 9y ago
  There's definitely some good/decent authors there, but they don't make that much money. Probably $10/article on an average day. Most people are at the mercy of a "whale" or some concerted author circle to actually make any substantive amount on an article that isn't some travel blog/ebegging garbage.
rev_null 9y ago
I think it's real value will take off when amateur pornographers figure out that they can make money on the site.
- Kiro 9y ago
  It has already happened and those earn quite a lot but they are of course flagged as NSFW.
aaron-lebo 9y ago
There's no substance. It's multilevel marketing. This is the top post: https://steemit.com/steem/@ned/explainer-value-flows-on-steem-with-smts-video https://steemit.com/steem/@ned/explainer-value-flows-on-stee... It's a great way to build a large audience of money hungry people, probably not a great way to build a community with any kind of value. Nice hair.

deevolution 9y ago

Its not any more ephemeral than the money that our government prints. In steemits case, they are the government and can arbitrarily "print" money. If the government of steemit crumbles, so will its currency. Just like any other government. Every single currency is ephemeral to some variable degree...

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
tdb7893 9y ago
I think the difference is that people don't see USD as ephemeral because the chance of the US government collapsing is about 0 while the chance of a cryptocurrency startup collapsing is definitely much greater than 0
Kelab 9y ago
no they are more decentralized than other cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ethereum
deevolution 9y ago
Holy crap thats alot of downvotes... I mean i was talking ephemeral on a pretty large time scale here, just to clear things up for all the people who apparently believe that USD is an absolute.
neilwilson 9y ago
Nobody is taxing you in Steem. Governments create money so you have the means to pay your tax bill. And by doing that they get you to create and give up real goods and services for the common good. A money system that works to enable transactions is one where hoarding it doesn't really get you anything. In fact it should cost you to hold a rainy day fund - as any insurance should. Cryptocurrencies try and pretend they are electronic gold bars. But they are not. They are ideas with a label on it. Some smart salesman has convinced people that there are only so many ideas with a Bitcoin label and that finite supply will make the price go up. So then people start hoarding them, and transactions for real things start to go down because nobody can get hold of the currency. So then somebody creates the same idea with a different label, which also has a finite supply... Classic fallacy of composition. Finite within the scope of the label, but not between labels. The world's fiat currencies are relative finite between labels - because there are only so many governments - but have a fully dynamic supply within the label. That focusses the currency on transactions, not hoards.

sp527 9y ago

So they’re still monetizing peoples’ attention? I suppose it’s more noble to pass proportionate value back to the creators, but that’s not a system Facebook et al couldn’t quite easily adopt if market pressure forced their hands.

andrarchy 9y ago
In fact, they could use a Smart Media Token to do so :). All joking aside, the structure of such systems are antithetical to the way large corporations operate. That being said if Facebook decided to replicate our model (our protocol is open source and it relies on an open and public database, which is obviously part of the reason they won't)and distribute profits back to its most valuable users, I would count that as a win. I bet they won't. I also bet they won't distribute nearly as large a percentage as we do (100%) because they have expensive data centers to take care of (I think the latest one alone cost $1 billion). New technologies with fundamentally different economics always disrupt large incumbents. It might not be likely, but it is possible and the potential rewards are large and accrue to the earliest stakeholders. Always. I'm not saying people should invest anything they can't afford to lose in crypto projects--whether it's time or money--but if I had listened to all of the naysayers for the past few years who dismissed bitcoin, then ethereum, and now steem, I would be much poorer in many different currencies and I wouldn't be part of an amazing team solving incredibly difficult problems every single day that give it an incredible competitive advantage against anyone who tries to do what we do. So I know Facebook can't do what we do because they don't have us :) Community Liaison, Steemit

hopfog 9y ago

I used to be involved in Steemit with some success, mostly by writing articles about the Steem blockchain itself and how to interact with it. The appeal for me as a developer is that you're working with an unrestricted firehose API. If you want to build something you don't need to worry about limitations or breaking some terms. You can build your own Steemit front-end if you want since the back-end is just another node on the chain. The community is really nice and I made many good friends. Regardless of the future of Steem I consider it a success and a tell-tale of real life applications for blockchains.

supermdguy 9y ago

This reminds me of the Brave browser and the basic attention token.

Kelab 9y ago
how is that the same thing?
andrarchy 9y ago
Great question! It is vaguely similar but different in many important ways. To be clear we do not see Brave as a direct competitor and wish them success. While they have referred to us as competitors, I believe that is a bit of an overreach. First of all, Steem tokens (and the Smart Media Tokens others will be able to launch on top of Steem in the coming months) can be transferred in 3 seconds with zero fees. This enables us to connect money to "likes" or in the case of Steem "upvotes." Brave is a pay-to-play system that uses an Ethereum token which is both slow (10 minutes) and has fees. Steem, on the other hand, is a protocol which anyone can use to build applications that leverage this crypto fuel engagement without adding paywalls or cognitive load. The crowd acts and money flows the most valuable members as determined by the stake-weighted vote of the users. In short, the Steem blockchain is protocol that the Steemit team launched and leveraged to create steemit.com but anyone can use it to fuel their app, INCLUDING apps that serve the same use case as Brave ... but with real-time fee-less transactions (i.e. better). If you'd like to learn a little more about how the system works you can check out the following video featuring yours truly: https://youtu.be/z-V6HnfbGUA https://youtu.be/z-V6HnfbGUA Community Liaison, Steemit
- supermdguy 9y ago
  Thanks for clarifying the difference.

lowglow 9y ago

Despite all the criticisms here, this just validated Steemit as a real service that is now a real contender.

Kiro 9y ago
I don't understand why people on HN are so anti-Steemit. Disregarding the service is very patronizing to its users. It's obviously giving them something of value but HN is so quick on placing it in the same bag as some random scam ICO. Not saying the model is perfect though.
- adventured 9y ago
  > I don't understand why people on HN are so anti-Steemit. Because people on HN that have been around a while, have seen a dozen variations of this come and go, all the way back to the days of Flooz. Steemit will pop and rot, for exactly the same reasons that not a single system like this has ever worked long-term. What Steemit actually represents is a signal that the crypto-currency mania is nearing an end for the initial speculative wave. The big dump comes next, in which most crypto-currency experiments that have attention today will die off. There's nothing special about what Steemit is doing. They're slapping the latest hype train on top of what has been attempted for two decades. It doesn't work for a fundamental reason and there's nothing Steemit can do about that. It doesn't matter if you use a clone of Bitcoin as your foundation or an arbitrary tokenX with a different set of rules governing it. Slapping Bitcoin on the concept doesn't change the underlying broken premise.
  - Kiro 9y ago
    You make it sound like it's some random social network with an unrelated token connected to it. That's not how it works. 1. Reward from blocks mined are distributed to the highest voted posts. This is all part of the Steem protocol. Only a small percentage goes to the actual miner. 2. The whole database sits on the blockchain. It's completely decentralised. 3. The incentive to have more Steem on your account is that your upvotes are worth more. This is both the blessing and the curse since whales become powerful curators. On the other hand it gives an incentive to hold Steem unrelated to the monetary value. That's why I don't see any dumping happening any time soon unless Steem skyrockets in value. I simply don't agree that this has been tried before. It's a different story, even if it turns out to be a failure in the end.

jordancampbell 9y ago

It's literally a Ponzi scheme. Where is the money coming from, other than speculation? It barely even hides this fact, given that all its content is about how to generate more content and keep all the wheels turning.

Kelab 9y ago
isn't that the same for all cryptocurrencies?
- theklub 9y ago
  Yes
noisypl 9y ago
There is no money on the platform. Steem blockchain produce constant amount of STEEM tokens everyday (1 STEEM per block every 3s). Those tokens are distributed among all users according to votes of all users. We all know, that it is not so easy to write a post/comment which will receive tons of upvotes. So if you will spend 3 hours writing awesome blogpost, and after a week (voting period) you will endup having 3 STEEM tokens... question is, would you give away those tokens for free? Probably not for free... Also, there are people on the platform, which like to gather STEEM tokens. Why? Because if you have more STEEM tokens you have greater influence on the platform, your posts will have greater visibility, and you have more to say about who will receive more tokens next time. Price of STEEM tokens are determined by free market on bitcoin and concurrencies exchanges: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/steem/#markets https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/steem/#markets On exchanges people which do not care about influence on Steem sell tokens to people, which want to have influence on the platform. It is a free market in purest form. Don't believe? You don't have to. There is no need for trust on Steem. Eferything is open source: github.com/steemit/ Everything is transparent (blockchain explorers): - https://steemdb.com/ https://steemdb.com/ - https://steemd.com/ https://steemd.com/ - https://steemstats.com/ https://steemstats.com/

cujic9 9y ago

I expect that establishing an extrinsic reward (ie: money) will be hugely demotivating and actually diminish activity. Social media become a lot less fun when an hour's worth of effort "earns" you $0.07. Also, they should expect a tidal wave of bots and fake content. Think about the mess Twitter is in, now add a straight path to cash.

mark242 9y ago

What's the exchange rate between Steem and Flooz? Can I finally use my Flooz credits?

buybeenz 9y ago
Buy Beenz!

jv22222 9y ago

I built a knowledge sharing startup back in 2001 called Woyano. One thing we learned, as a general rule, it is difficult to effectively pay people to create good content on a social network. The best and most knowledgeable people want to create content based on intrinsic motivations rather than financial ones. One only need look at Wikipedia, Stackoverflow, Quora, etc to see intrinsic motivation inspiring good content. I guess the main point is that once you start paying people then the intrinsically motivated people aren't as likely to post on the same place.

olegkikin 9y ago
But there are many more people who would love to create things, and get paid for their labor. The "best" and "most knowledgeable" I know are all either employed or get paid in some way.
- pdubbs90 9y ago
  Maybe the distinction lies in the filtering. Stackoverflow and Wikipedia have high quality because only people that really care about a subject (and thus usually know a lot) will invest time for free. Once you start paying people, the much larger audience of 'people that want money' starts posting and the good people get drowned out. Your friends who are employed were filtered by the hiring process. I imagine Google would be much worse if they hired everyone who applied.
  - CM30 9y ago
    > Once you start paying people, the much larger audience of 'people that want money' starts posting and the good people get drowned out. Yep. Seen this on a forum called Digitalpoint, back when they had revenue sharing for posts. In theory, that should have made people post higher quality content given the financial reward for doing so. In practice? It inspired thousands of people from third world countries to join and post uninspired gibberish for the chance to get their Adsense ID used in every thread they posted in. A site that already had problems with spammers registering and posting meaningless content for signature backlinks ended up getting flooded by people who saw it as a convenient get rich quick scheme.

sneak 9y ago

Hi there. Some of you know me from HN - this is where the bulk of my effort has gone for most of the last year. The team we’re building at Steemit is downright amazing, and the community around it is what keeps me going. Think reddit, but on a blockchain (the posts, comments, and votes are actually in the merkle tree in consensus), and the upvotes are real money - that’s where the majority of the token’s inflation (~9% per year, decreasing further over time) goes. It’s sort of like a censorship-resistant, distributed pastebin. You can put arbitrary json into the blockchain, which gets mirrored to hundreds of nodes, permanently, in three seconds. The Shadow Brokers have taken up blogging on Steemit. We call it censorship-resistant, but I can’t think of a way to meaningfully redact content already posted to this blockchain that anyone on Earth could practically implement. Our second annual Steemfest is in Lisbon 1-5 November and hopefully I will meet some of you there.

eurticket 9y ago

immediately presented with a sign into facebook popup

smcnally 9y ago

"A Wireding" reads like a Bene Gesserit activity, and it lacks the thump of "a Slashdotting." Either way, Steemit isn't handling it right now. ``` HTTP/1.1 503 Service Unavailable: Back-end server is at capacity Content-Length: 0 Connection: keep-alive ... It's not just you! steemit.com looks down from here. (http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/steemit.com http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/steemit.com) ```

sneak 9y ago
Someone DDoSed us. :(

andrarchy 9y ago

Hi, my name is @andrarchy, I'm part of Team Steemit and you can AMA :). This comment was originally intended as a response to aaron-lebo, but as it became quite long, I decided to post it here. Aaron-lebo says, "They're interested in their network getting big so they can make money. There's not much nuance to it. You can spin it another way but read the thread. It's a soulless money grab, and it's disappointing because they actually have decent software." He's right in a lot of ways and wrong in a lot of ways, but obviously I'm biased :). Regardless of whether we agree or disagree I want to thank anyone who even gives a moment's thought to what we're trying to do at Steemit. So thank you @aaron-lebo. What's right: We have decent software. Well, when it comes to offering a free social network that rewards tens of thousands of ordinary people all over the world for their content in a cryptocurrency that can be traded on exchanges and cashed out for fiat currencies, we're the only game in town, so I think we have a pretty strong argument that we have the BEST software. And knowing our engineers I have no problem saying they are the most intelligent, diligent, thoughtful, nice, and hard working people I have ever had the distinct pleasure of working with. IMO they're the best in the world and welcome proof to the contrary. One common criticism (not made by this commenter) is that most people "don't make a lot." First off I want to highlight exactly what this criticism is saying: some people on steemit make a lot. A lot of other people make a bit. A lot of people make not a lot. This is all true. But these types of comments invariably dismiss the difference that making $5 or $10 on a post (which MANY people DO make) can have on a person's life especially in many of the countries where our users are from like those in Africa, Indonesia, and more. But even with respect to more wealthy nations, I often find the critiques of how much our users make to be remarkably tone deaf. It is certainly true that not everyone can make tons of money on Steemit and you will never see anyone on the team saying anything to that effect. Steemit is definitely NOT a get rich quick scheme. It's only true that you CAN make money on Steemit and people do every single day. That's right, the Steem blockchain distributes thousands of dollars worth of STEEM every single day to users. In fact, ALL of the money created by the Steem blockchain goes to users who provide some service to it whether it's posting articles, comments, curating content, or running a node. Like every other major cryptocurrency/blockchain protocol, the fact that anyone is free to participate in it is part of what makes it anti-fragile. None of that Steem goes to the team, unless of course we do one of those things. I understand the content that is currently on the site might not appeal to many, but the amount of rewards are real (no one denies that) and who is receiving them changes every day. What I recommend is that people view the lack of diversity of content on the site as an opportunity to contribute something new to the platform. That's certainly how I looked at it when I started as a contributer on the platform and worked my way up by creating videos that helped explain the tech to the many lay-people on the platform. Eventually my videos got the attention of the people at Steemit and I was brought on board! That being said, we are still a small social network, so of course our content is not going to be able to match the bigger players. But if people want to look at the data for themselves, project our growth rate, and estimate when we will reach such scale they are welcome to. All the data is on the blockchain which is an open, public and decentralized database. What's wrong: We're not soulless. I swear we have souls! :) There are more than 30 people on the team at this point and statistically speaking it's just highly unlikely that we could ALL be lacking in what is typically described as a near human-universal. Unless, of course, you don't believe in souls in which case, yes, this statement is technically true. What I would say is that those in the cryptocurrency sector are often critiqued as being TOO ideological. We all openly advocate for decentralization for the purpose of spreading power (and money) among the people. That's certainly why I got involved in the field and have been blogging and vlogging on the topic for over a year, all of which is immutably preserved on the blockchain for your investigation ;). At Steemit we do want to make steemit.com as big as possible because we all have Steem, but so do all of our users. So, yes, they do too. But to claim that anything else should be the case is like saying that Facebook is better because ONLY Facebook shareholders benefit when Facebook grows. The idea that we are somehow more soulless than Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or any other social network that wants to grow because their model depends on eyeballs to sell ads to (notice any ads on steemit.com?) is pretty laughable. Yes, we have figured out a sustainable and scaleable way to align the incentives of the creators, developers, and users of an open, public, anonymous, censorship-resistant, and decentralized database protocol so that when it grows everyone benefits. We're not sorry :) One of the most frequent errors people make (and this is 100% understandable) is that for us it's ALL about growing steemit.com. This couldn't be more wrong. We are interested in growing use of the Steem blockchain protocol (just like the creators of Linux wanted to increase use of their protocol) and the demand for Steem. I'm not saying it's not selfish, I'm just saying it's not accurate ;). But let me be absolutely clear and I will happily hold myself accountable for this claim for all of time: this is because I believe that the Steem blockchain is a force for good. It is an open and decentralized database which is not controlled by any single person, corporation, or government, that anyone can acquire a stake in, that is free to use, that is anonymous, and that is censorship resistant. We see a lot of problems with existing social media solutions (like all of your personal information being held and profited off of by a private company with tight links to authorities) and we sincerely believe we have solved them with Steem. One can argue whether we are right, but I know our beliefs are sincere. PROOF: Smart Media Tokens That's exactly why we launched Smart Media Tokens. It was always our desire to get developers to leverage Steem to create their own applications that would reward their users with money while enabling them to retain control over their personal identities and protecting them from censorship, but through conversations with entrepreneurs and developers we learned that there were additional features they wanted. While steemit.com is incredibly important to us and the number of engineers we have working on that site is now greater than ever, we decided to also commit significant resources to designing the Smart Media Tokens protocol precisely because we want to encourage other platforms to leverage our technology. If all we cared about was steemit.com this strategy would make no sense. Once Smart Media Tokens launch, any site (including this one wink wiiiiiiiiiiiiink) will be able to launch their own Steem-like token with; customized parameters, the ability to allocate founders tokens, the ability to raise capital, and more. Shameless plug over ;). Yes, the system is designed to increase demand for Steem and that will benefit all current Steem holders, including the thousands of people doing the massively valuable work of contributing content to our platform while it is still growing. We are not idealists, but we're not soulless either. We are ambitious and hopeful technologists who are leveraging a revolutionary technology to disrupt a massively centralized, exploitative, and corrupt landscape. You're welcome ;) If you'd like to learn more, check out this video of yours truly explaining how it all works: https://youtu.be/z-V6HnfbGUA https://youtu.be/z-V6HnfbGUA Regardless of your view of steemit, if you've gotten this far, you're amazing. Thanks for reading!

cryptoctopus 9y ago

This tread is full of ignorant sourpuss who missed the boat. What people fail to see it that steemit is only 1 of many many websites being built on top of that blockchain. Youtube, twitter, instagram...they can all be built in their own little silos. With SMTs they will even be able to have their own tokens with their own economic models. Get your head around it. Steemit alone will soon pass you by on Alexa. https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ycombinator.com https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ycombinator.com / https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/steemit.com https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/steemit.com

bbit 9y ago

Steem is the future folks.

computerwizard 9y ago

I started working on a Hacker News interface for Steemit a while back. https://steemh.com/ https://steemh.com/

bbit 9y ago
I had this idea while ago . I have the steemitforum.com we should work together! email me: cryptoassets@gmail.com.

noisypl 9y ago

You should definitely checkout Steemit and other services like Busy.org or chainbb.com which are based on decentralized Steem Blockchain :)

Bi5h0p 9y ago

Andrarchy was trying to share something on this. I'm not sure if you've read it and wanted to post the link here for you all: https://steemit.com/steemit/@andrarchy/steemit-on-hacker-news-i-m-commenting-too-fast https://steemit.com/steemit/@andrarchy/steemit-on-hacker-new... On a side note - I am currently in the process of cashing-out my Steem tokens in order to purchase a 10 oz. bar of silver bullion - which would be my own little "proof of concept" that so-called, "Ephemeral Money," is actually a real and useful vehichle for creating REAL wealth. - Bi5h0p

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