Steem, a new digital currency created to incentivize the use of Steemit, a new experiment in social media, has exploded in the past few days, taking third place after Ethereum, with a current market cap of more than $200 million, but can this actually work or is it just a fad?
Ned Scott, CEO of Steemit, speaking to CCN described the platform as: A social media website built completely on the public Steem blockchain, which brings all the benefits of cryptocurrency and immutability to social media. Beyond that, users get paid to post and vote, similar to how miners are paid by Bitcoin. The platform has attracted increasing interest with now more than 2,000 active users posting and voting. In the past few days, it has begun attracting mainstream attention due to its experiment in incentivizing content production and voting (curation). It has even attracted a following with some users, such as pfunk , saying that they find the platform “fairly profitable, fun, complex, [and] challenging”: “I think its biggest effect is that it encourages creativity with an interactive community and financial incentive.” I signed up a week ago under aquentson to better understand the experiment and experience it first-hand. Although I tried to see if I could undertake some curating, I did not really find anything compelling, therefore logged out. The user experience leaves much to desire with the submission process requiring far more clicks than reddit and users unable to link a headline directly, but these UX problems may be fairly easy to solve. Incentivizing quality discussions in social interactions through money is a far more difficult problem.
From a technical perspective, the voting algorithm is fully public. To game, it requires about two minutes for anyone who can code. Although Steem’s whitepaper , which is bereft of […]
