Hunting and fronting and looking ahead to community

It is almost 8pm and this is the first time I have sat down at Steem... weird. It has been a very busy day however and I am slowly (quickly) getting more and more responsibility coming my way which is great but also, time consuming. I travel for two days to Helsinki this week and then off to Sweden next for three days which cuts into the time I have to do all the other things I need to do. This is why I earn the "big bucks".

This is my long day download post to get my head out of work and into real life. Steem life.

I don't know about other people here because it might be because of my posting frequency but, I feel like something is missing when I haven't written for Steem. I haven't gone 24 hours for a very long time and while some might find that strange, it is actually quite easy. This is what I am hoping will help drive Steem along in the future.

As the ecosystem expands into applications with an increasing amount of diversity, users young and old are going to find more and more ways to integrate some part of Steem into their lives. While I might be suited to blogging, it need not be that at all for most people and it could be as simple as updating their @actifit card daily or playing a few rounds of @steemmonsters. The thing with Steem is that it is able to cater for a great many people as Steem has the capabilities of having so many various activities performed on the blockchain.

The transactions are something that are quite important on the blockchains it seems and while Steem used to be number one on https://blocktivity.info/ it is now sitting in 5th. Interestingly though, EOS which is sitting in the number 1 position with 20 million transaction in 24 hours is at 16% capacity but Steem is at 0.08% with 1 million transactions. Does that mean that if Steem had the same number of transactions it would only be at 1.6% capacity, 1/10th that of EOS?

I don't know much about scaling of blockchains and the technology requirements for transaction speeds and the like but, I think that means that EOS would be running at 100% capacity if there were ~140 million transactions in 24 hours whereas Steem would need ~1.4 billion to hit the capacity. Not my area though but something I wouldn't mind knowing more about.

Remember that every interaction is a transaction and the dice games that EOS runs are likely to add a very high volume of transactions to the blockchain but, are they value creators? Sure, they do make money in various ways but what I mean is, are they the types of transactions that are community orientated, do they get shared, do they attract new users? Yes, casinos make a lot of money but, do they spread a lot of money? As they say, the house always wins.

Still not my area but what I like about Steem is that the development isn't focusing on transactions alone or transactions that can be solely automated like the gambling games. To me it seems that Steem has more of a content focus where real people and communities can develop and relationships can be built. For me, that is the thing that is going to be sticky with Steem, the content that connects people.

I had a few moments today where I was reading the comments of a few posts of people I don't know or normally interact but came across through resteems and I was happy to see something popup a couple of times. Inside jokes. What I mean is that there are people commenting on each other's posts adding personal information that only they are privy to and without inside knowledge, others will not understand. That tells of relationships, it tells of track record, it tells of community.

There are going to be so many blockchains in the future that are going to serve a lot of different purposes and people but I think that the ones that people connect with at a personal and emotional level will be the ones with longevity and that attachment comes through interaction and relationships that withstand the test of time, not only economics.

While most projects attract users because of earning and investment potential, those that have relationship value also are going to not only attract but hold people's attentions. Those that are purely economy based or narrowly focused are going to lose that attention whenever the potential to earn or the usecase is no longer adequately filled or required.

With the potential diversity of Steem, usecase is not an issue and while Steem projects will come and go, the chain can evolve organically to the needs of the community itself. This means that there will always be the potential for economic return as there will always be ways to leverage the infrastructure to build business or attract attention.

What will keep people here long-term is going to be the communities and people they interact with daily and in the not too distant future, that is going to increasingly include family, friends, colleagues and familiars of all kinds who will enter onto the platform and find their places to interact. While some interactions might be in niche corners, nothing on Steem means that is the only place one can be. A user can still play games, still use various applications and still hangout where there are many users of varying interest groups milling about in the 'public spaces.*

At some point, there are going to be millions of users across thousands of applications all connected to the one blockchain, all with a wallet, a user name and a group of followers that follows them wherever they go. There is power in a community that can stick together but, there may be a lot more power in a community that can move together.

While an interesting social experiment, where it is leading is back to a fundamental point where again - people will matter.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]