I haven’t been paying attention to ‘what’s occurring’ on steemit for the last month, due to my house move. However, the upside of this is that a break typically gives you a fresh perspective on something, as is the case with steemit/ steem.
What I’ve realised is that the ecosystem is pretty fundamentally flawed… having now moved up to dolphin level (near enough), there is basically no incentive for me to produce quality content exclusively for steem, or really even bother to engage with anyone else.
This doesn’t mean I’m going to become totally passive, or become some kind of selfish wanker (only up to 50%, honest), all I’m saying is that the steem ecosystem in no way incentivizes the kind of behaviour which would benefit others or the long term health of the blockchain.
The statistics suggest that investors are pulling their stakes and that fewer people are using the platform
according to both @penguinpablo and @arcange’s stats - steem is either stagnating or declining according to every significant indicator. People are gradually pulling out of the platform.
I understand this - this is an entirely rational response to the problems on steem and the inability of ‘us’ to sort out these problems.
And no, it’s not just because crypto is taking a beating.. Steem has declined about 20% against BTC in the last months. Trust me, I know, because I wish I’d waited before investing another grand or so over the last few months!
Overall the platform works much better for investors rather than quality content producers
I hummed and hawed about the ethics of delegating half my increased stake in steem, but TBH it was the right move….it’s now growing passively by about 1 SP per day. In terms of % return on my time, this is obviously infinitely better than my producing actual content.
Haejin is still earning a fortune, so abuse still works
I noticed @thejohalfiles flagging various of Haejin’s posts and thought that his days might be numbered, but no, he’s still getting decent payouts, although he does seem to be posting less.
Proposed hard fork changes to combat these problems have been delayed again
According to this recent post by @therealwolf SMTs and oracles are no longer scheduled for the next hard fork, and they may not even surface until next summer!
NB - if you ever need a perfect example of cynicism this post is it - in which @therealwolf basically condemns the current incentives system, but at the same time he runs a voting bot which profits from this system.
Use of applications other than pure blogging seems to be increasingly popular
Applications such as @steemmonsters and @steemhunt are increasing in number and more and more people are getting into them! This seems to be the current future of steem.
It also makes sense to make use of the video apps, @dtube or @dlive - TBH everyone should be attaching churn videos to every post in order to get the chance of a massive upvote from one of these accounts. With @dtube the chances are no one will ever watch said video - even if they wanted to it, it probably wouldn’t play back, and then even if it did it’ll disappear shortly. (Of course that may all be moot because the problem with @dtube is that ATM it’s so shit that I can’t actually upload anything to it!)
Steempress-io is a godsend
I’ve had some nice payouts from @steempress recently, but I’m a bit concerned that by relying on this I’m basically proving that steemit is a bit shit.
The fact that it’s so much easier to post to Wordpress and then have that post to steem a week or so later, it’s not exactly an advert for the blockchain is it?!?
Conclusions
I’m still going to stick with steem… It’s still a great platform for meeting and interacting with all sorts of oddballs.
It's also still the right platform for publishing my quirky stuff about early retirement stuff, self-tracking, and general rants, and it’s also the obvious place for reflecting on steem itself.. Hopefully they’ll be something positive to shout about soon. I’m a bit sick of seeing my passive gains nullified by steem’s declining value!
Image source - modified from @penguinpablo - https://steemit.com/steemit/@penguinpablo/weekly-steem-stats-report-monday-july-30-2018