My experience with Musing.io

I made a post a few weeks ago (I can't find it now) where I asked people what alternate means of making money they knew on the Steem blockchain or similar. I was immediately pointed by two people toward Musing.io.

I was a bit doubtful at first. I checked and it was about asking questions and answering them. I worried that I would make a new post every time I asked or answered a question, but was relieved when I was told that they are just comments somewhere.

I joined at once and started answering in my style (generous bulks of high-quality comments) every question I saw. I was surprised when I saw the size of the upvotes, varying from 0.65 to 2.15 STU in value. In one day, I made around $13 in just comments, which is way more than I could ask of any day of normal participation (new posts and comments on random threads).

However, even though most of the time people make the effort to create high-quality answers, I've found a wild surge of bad questions. How can a question even be bad? I would have asked before, but after seeing all of these "What is Bitcoin?", "Will blockchain to see away free?", I realised the downside to a monetary reward to people for asking questions. People ask to ask and are not genuinely curious about what they inquire about.

It's still a fun place to be in sometimes. I like to go by every day and answer a few questions. It makes me feel a bit fulfilled, like I did something productive. But if I want a question genuinely answered, I don't think of Musing first. It's still very small and I won't get the answer I'm looking for. I'd still go to a specialised place like StackOverflow or to my friends and ask about the topic.

Does it have a future?

I'd say this is a hard question to answer. The place is profitable now because there aren't many people yet. If they ever get an invasion of people looking for pennies in exchange for bulk trash, the upvotes will be watered down and it will not be a viable place to live off of.

This is not inherently bad. Just like Steemit, it's not supposed to be a treasure mound but a place that incentivises interaction in exchange for a small reward. But at the same time, I don't spend all my time sending out comments everywhere because it's not that profitable. I choose places that have a potential for sufficient reward in exchange for my time.

I say this because someone argued a few months ago that only efforts done for free can be genuine, and that something that is paid for cannot be "genuine" (be it art or interaction). I can't accept that because that would mean that the people who have jobs in charity don't really want to help people but do it for the money (some do, but the potential still exists for generous people to charge for their good deeds).

This takes me to the point that I wanted to make, which is that, by design, Musing will become less profitable as it grows. There is no incentive to make it grow. If I make a publicity campaign for Musing, I will be decreasing my potential for reward. It is not like plain Steem where, if I invite more people, I am making my share be worth more and am not negatively affecting my potential reward. There is limited SP. Perhaps there could be a proportion of [New Investors]:[New Musing Users] that would make the rewards grow as people join, but I see this as unlikely at this point. Making Musing grow would water the profitability down.

This means that only those that are genuinely interested in Musing and are not in need of those rewards will make an effort to help the userbase grow in size. On the other hand, it also means that right now, when the rewards are relatively high, many people from places with lower incomes will be joining. These places are also places where English is not the first language.

Musing will first grow from these people who have in average a lower education and a lower possibility to interact in English. Then, it could reach the first world masses, but it will be filled with content that will be considered low quality. High-quality content could be rewarded more and highlighted on the front page, but right now, I don't see any magic happening in the near future.

So I do think that Musing will grow but, first, it will grow with users from Venezuela and probably Pakistan, India and Nigeria, and then it may be adopted elsewhere. I don't know if it will ever be a viable solution for answers, but I reckon that next year or in a few more years it may. Just not in the near future.