Episode Highlights:
- 00:01 – Introduction
- 00:30 – Steemit
- 01:46 – Steemit’s Promotion
- 02:30 – Disappointed In Steemit
- 03:27 – Why I’ve Stopped Posting On Steemit
- 05:04 – Smart Media Tokens
- 05:35 – Steemit On The Coinmarket
- 06:44 – A Lot Of Work For Little Return
- 08:14 – Posting On Steemit, Not A Great User Experience
- 10:09 – High Effort, Low Reward
- 11:23 – Faq And Table Of Contents
- 12:13 – Steem Vs. Steem Power Vs. Steem Dollars
- 13:24 – Steemit Has Some Value, But Is It Worth The Current Hype?
- 14:44 – Conclusion
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Transcription:
00:01 – Introduction
Hey, what’s up guys, it’s Dan again from cryptocamacho.com, welcome back. Today guys, I wanted to kind of slow things down a little bit, I wanted to get your thoughts on something that I’ve been thinking about for a little while now, haven’t felt really good about what’s been going on and I really just want your take on this cryptocurrency that I’ve been kind of wrestling with for a while now, and what am I talking about guys? I’m talking about Steemit.
00:30 – Steemit
So here’s my Steemit account, you can see my Steemit account right here, if you haven’t visited it, please do, it’s steemit.com/@dscenterprises, that’s my Steemit account, I’ll put that link in the show notes, but the reason I wanted to make this video is because all I ever hear on YouTube, in the media, kind of all over Bitcoin forums and so forth, is that Steemit is remarkable, it’s going to revolutionize content management, it’s going to revolutionize social media, it’s going to become the next big social media platform, so forth and so on, and I have actually bought into a lot of that, I bought into a lot of that kind of hype, that FOMO, that fear of missing out, and really jumped on the Steemit bandwagon quite a while back. I started posting on Steemit in July 2017, so it’s been about seven, eight months and I haven’t really posted on Steemit for the last month and that’s exactly what I wanted to actually talk about now and wanted to really just get your guys’ experience on Steemit, have you guys been using Steemit? Have you had success on Steemit, whether posting or actually just using the platform in general? Interacting with the platform in general?
01:46 – Steemit’s Promotion
And I keep hearing all these different things of why Steemit is going to go to the moon, I mean if you just search for ‘Steemit to the moon,’ you’re going to find all kinds of different things, Steemit going to the moon, it’s a dollar, you’ll find countless posts about Steemit. Same thing on YouTube, if you go to YouTube and you just search for ‘Steemit,’ you’re just going to find a bunch of people promoting Steemit, so let’s just search ‘Steemit,’ you’re going to find a bunch…’the billion-dollar start-up social media giant replacing Reddit and Facebook,’ ‘how to transfer Steem,’ ‘5 reasons I love Steemit.’ All these YouTube gurus, Gerri Banfield, who is one of the biggest Steemit promoters out there, everybody’s talking about Steemit and how fantastic Steemit it is.
02:30 – Disappointed In Steemit
And, back then, eight months ago when I first started my Steemit account, I kind of drank that Kool-Aid, I was like ‘Yes! Steemit’s great,’ then I started using the platform, started posting to the platform, started interacting with the platform and, to be honest, I’ve been quite disappointed with what I’ve seen come out of Steemit. I am a big technology guru, I’ve been in technology for a long time, I’ve been in marketing technology for a while, I’m very familiar with content management systems like Drupal, like Adobe Experience Manager, WordPress, you know you name it, content management systems I know inside and out and Steemit is essentially a Content Management System/kind of social media platform, that kind of combines it all in one, that brings it to the blockchain and then incentivizes people to actually post and/or like and engage with posts and content on Steemit. And so, I decided to do a little experiment, I want to post on Steemit for an extended period of time and kind of just see how it works and to see what all the hype is about for Steemit.
03:27 – Why I’ve Stopped Posting On Steemit
I’ve done that, I’ve done that since July of 2017, all the way up to about a month ago when I stopped posting on Steemit because I just wasn’t seeing it, I just wasn’t feeling and seeing the value that everybody claims to be seeing, and I don’t get me wrong I definitely think Steemit has a place in cryptocurrency, I definitely think Steemit has a future, I definitely think Steemit will be around for quite some time and the price of Steemit coins may actually even go up in value over time, but in terms of the platform itself it’s not good, it’s not great guys, it’s not very flexible, it’s not easy to use, it’s not easy to understand, it’s not easy for new users to come on to Steemit and to understand how to actually use the platform, how to make money on a platform, how to get others engaged with the platform. To sign up to Steemit it, there’s some technical hurdles to get over, if you’re not familiar with private keys and things like that. The average user is just not going to do those things, think of people that go onto Facebook, they’re not going to save a private key, that if they lose they can never access Steemit again on their account, that’s just ridiculous, and I’m sure Steemit is going to change that in the future, but if you lose your private key on Steemit and you can’t access the platform again, and that’s just not a good user experience in general, so I’m just not convinced that Steemit is all that it’s cracked up to be, again I’m not trying to bad mouth Steemit, I’m not trying to spread fear, uncertainty or doubt or fod about Steemit, I’m not trying to knock Steemit it anyway, I’m just trying to speak from personal experience that Steemit it has not really lived up to my expectations and to what everybody else has been saying.
05:04 – Smart Media Tokens
I mean, there is one aspect of Steemit it that I think is very, very powerful, and that’s Smart Media Tokens, which I’ll get into in a moment here, and if they are successful with Smart Media Tokens (SMT’s), the way they’ve been describing and pitching, yes, I think there’s a big, big future in S M T’s. Smart Media Tokens in Steemit, but the platform of Steemit itself has a very, very long way to go in terms of just the front end U.I. and user experience of the platform, I think it’s not very good right now. Take any social media platform out there and it blows Steemit out of the water.
05:35 – Steemit On The Coinmarket
So, let’s take a look at Steemit really quick, I mean Steemit is twenty-fifth on CoinMarketCap, has a total market cap of about eight hundred eighty-six million dollars, so it’s not a small market cap, pretty high. Current price point is at about $3.55, that’s shot up quite a bit from about a dollar in the last few months, it’s gone up actually about to like seven or eight dollars, we’ll look at that in a second, it’s gone down because of the recent downtrends in cryptocurrency. If you go over my Coinigy blog, this is the chart on Steemit, it was trading down here for you know a dollar or less for quite, quite some time, then it definitely ramped up in the last couple months here, all the way up, like I said, to about seven, eight dollars, maybe even a little bit higher. Now it’s been corrected and now it looks like it might still be going up a little bit, I still think there’s a little bit of a downturn to go, I think the base right here, it needs to be broken before we’re going to see a huge uptick, although this is a pretty strong base right here, and so is this right here, so technically the base has already been broken in this case so you might see this jump back up to somewhere around here, maybe even somewhere around here, from a technical analysis standpoint.
06:44 – A Lot Of Work For Little Return
But this is not addressed my, I guess, concerns with the platform itself. I mean, when I go on the platform itself , I’ve posted 199 posts in the last six to eight months let’s say, and I’ve gained a total of 268 followers, not very great, not a really good number of followers, and these are very few interactions on the post, like if you look at the number of upvotes, the number of comments, very few. I mean, ten upvotes, not very many, zero, zero, I mean this is nothing compared to Facebook, You Tube, Twitter, any social media platform out there today. And I understand that this platform is relatively new, which is why I wouldn’t see a lot of engagement per se, but gosh, I would think there would be a little bit more than this, in such a long period of time with such a high number of posts. If you go over to my wallet or my rewards and you look at how much I’ve actually gained, so Steem power… Steem Zero, Steem power 71, Steem dollars, you know it is what it is, and my total estimated account value is $265, so that’s a lot of work and effort to put into post 200 posts, to get 250 followers and to have an account that’s worth two hundred bucks, I mean that’s a lot of work right. I’m not seeing a huge amount of return for the effort put in to actually build Steemit channel. I understand that my username is @DSCenterprises, were as it should be cryptocamacho, they don’t allow you to change that, again not a good user experience.
08:14 – Posting On Steemit, Not A Great User Experience
When you actually go to post on Steemit, just like any other WYSIWYG editor, you can go and you can post, they’ve only recently added this WYSIWYG editor in the last like, maybe three months, and before that there was no WYSIWYG editor, there was no, kind of, hypertext mark-up or HTML that you can use, it was all like just H.T.M.L. straight up, no WYSIWYG editor, which made it very difficult to actually make a post. For tags, the tags had to be in a very specific format, rewards, the power up, default decline, I mean, again, another just, kind of confusing aspect of Steemit and that the average user is not going to know anything about, and so again, not a good user experience. And so if I look at that aspect, again just not a very good user experience and what works with social media platforms is their user experience, they are super easy to use their addictive in nature, they attract people like magnets or flies to a light bulb, or shoot, flies on shit is, I guess, another way to say it, that’s not happening with Steemit, I mean I know there’s a lot of people joining the platform and when you first come to Steemit, you see all these ‘$750 for a post! Wow that’s great!’ $700 for a post, you think ‘wow, I’m gonna make a lot of money on this platform,’ then you start going in, looking at these users, right? This user has done 2,442 posts and they’ve gotten under a thousand dollars, I mean that’s pretty ridiculous right? They claim that these accounts were $39,000, I am sceptical of that, I’m not really quite sure where that is coming from, if you look at a few others, this one is probably a little bit less, this account has 500 posts, 471 followers with the wall at $23,000, so I just don’t know why I’m I account is rated so low, and maybe I’m not using Steemit correctly, maybe I haven’t figured out the best way to market and use Steemit, but all in all, I have not been impressed from a lot of aspects.
10:09 – High Effort, Low Reward
Now if you look at somebody else who has a massive following, like Haejin, you guys may be familiar with him, he does a lot of technical analysis in the cryptocurrency space, he has done 8206 posts, and he does have a large following of 24,300 followers, his wallet, if you go to it, you can see his account is valued at $281,000, he has 390 Steem Coins, which again I don’t know how they’re getting to the $281,000 value for this account, seems quite high to me, but this guy has posted 8000 posts to get here, that is not a small amount of effort, if you look at this guy’s posts are all technical analysis, there are videos, there are screenshots, a lot of work to do this. And so the reward payoff for Steemit, for the amount of effort you put in, to the amount of reward you get, it’s relatively low in my opinion, and yes you can bank on, in the future, in a couple years’ time this platform will grow out, your posts will gain following, you gain more engagement and therefore you’ll gain more Steemit Tokens, and the value of Steemit tokens will go up, I get that and I get that and why I still do, to some degree, believe in Steemit, I’m just not seeing where all the hype is coming from, I don’t see how this is such a great platform.
11:23 – Faq And Table Of Contents
I mean if you even look at like how…like what I was showing you before, Steem dollars, Steem power, Steem…like what is the difference between all this stuff? If you go to the frequently asked questions, or their F.A.Q. section, you do a huge table of contents, it’s not an easy platform to use. Yes, you get the same thing on Facebook, but there’s a lot more to Facebook, there’s an advertising platform on Facebook, there is an apple marketplace on Facebook to make apps, to configure apps, to use apps, all of this is on Facebook which is why their F.A.Q. and table of contents is much bigger. On Steemit, there’s not a whole lot to it, and if you look at their F.A.Q. section, I mean, It’s enormous! On just how to use the platform, just how to use the platform, it’s pages and pages of table of contents, which is fine, but again, not an easy platform to adapt to and use from a user experience standpoint.
12:13 – Steem Vs. Steem Power Vs. Steem Dollars
If you go and you look at the F.A.Q. on what’s the difference between Steem, Steem powered and Steem dollars, you can look through this, Steem is the base liquid currency token of the platform, so Steem is the token, the token that you can find on Coinigy, that you can trade on Coinigy, that’s what Steem is. Steem power is the measurement of how much influence a user has in the Steem network, the more Steemit power user holds, the more influence they can have, the value of posts with comments on. Steemit power is less liquid, so forth and so on. What does that mean? That doesn’t really mean anything to an end user without really digging into what Steem power actually means. Steem dollars, commonly abbreviated as SBD, are liquid stable value currency tokens, again it’s another token versus the Steem, but what’s the difference between Steem dollars and Steem? They’re both cryptocurrencies, but what’s the difference? And again, you can look through this, Steem dollars may be converted to Steem, but why? What’s the purpose? An average user, a non-technical user is not going to know that out of the gate, nor are they going to dig in and understand what this is. What is delegated Steem power? What determines the price? They’re just so much to this that it’s just not user friendly, from a from a user experience or an end-user standpoint.
13:24 – Steemit Has Some Value, But Is It Worth The Current Hype?
So again, not trying to knock Steemit, not trying to knock the platform, I’m just not completely seeing all of the hype and value that everybody else is seeing. I get it, that it’s supposed to revolutionize Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, all these other social media platforms but why don’t they develop a decent front-end? Why don’t they develop a user experience that attracts people to use the platform? Maybe they’re working on the back end, on the cryptocurrency blockchain side of things, perhaps that’s the case. Maybe they’re working on their Smart Media Token technology, perhaps that’s the case. You can look at all this right here on the Steemit platform, the one thing I will say that I definitely believe in with Steemit and think that it will carry Steemit it quite far, is their Smart Media Tokens concept and platform, a new way for publishers to monetize their online content and community based on battle-tested blockchain technology. So what S M T ‘s are, Smart Media tokens are, basically going to allow any user to create their own cryptocurrency or crypto token to essentially create their own economic ecosystem on their own blog or on their own website or with their own digital assets, and so I do think that there is a lot of value there, I think that’s going to be big, but I also think that it’s going to need to compete with a lot of others in this space, creating Smart Media Tokens, creating ICO’s, there’s a lot of people popping up starting to do this, so I think there’s a lot of competition there for Steemit.
14:44 – Conclusion
And again, I’m not against Steemit, have nothing against Steemit, but I’m just not quite seeing the value, maybe you guys can help me understand how to better market on Steemit. I’ll put this in the show notes, my link to the my Steemit blog and account, please go through, upvote, like, read through if you’d like, the different postings, I’d love to know your thoughts on this and I’d love to know if you’ve ever used Steemit it as a social media platform, not to make money necessarily on your own post but have do you used it just as a social media platform, to read news, to see trends, to engage with people? Have you ever used it like that? Or are most of the people using Steemit, content producers that are trying to make money by posting content on a new platform? I’d be very, very curious to know your take on that. Again guys, I’m Dan from cryptocamacho.com, if you haven’t subscribed to my YouTube channel, please do by clicking on that red button right in front of your face as you’re watching this video. I’d love to know your thoughts on Steemit, please comment, please comment and I would be very, very grateful and happy to know your perspectives on Steemit, and please prove me wrong, why Steemit it is the best next best thing to sliced bread! I’ll talk to you later, I’m Dan again from cryptocamacho.com, Thanks.
