My neck of the woods

Today, I was talking with @galenkp who was asking about @steemmonsters and whether it was something he needed to be looking into. Well, I don't know because, I am not very interested in games like that but, that doesn't mean it isn't important to me. my brother was saying that there is so much going on that he just can't keep track of it and I reassured him, that is okay. Not only is it okay, it is the way it has to be for Steem to begin to deliver on its promise.

Steem is like network infrastructure that provides the wiring for information to flow upon but, that information is going to continue to diversify. Many people who came in when it was just Steemit and one or two other interfaces often still interact mainly in those ways. But, like my brother who has also used @dtube, @dlive, @busy.org and a few others, they recognise the expansion also.

The problem is that because everything is lumped in together currently, we see all of these various aspects mentioned by people excited by the opportunity that they provide and perhaps, feel a little bit of FOMO, that we are missing something vital. These various apps and projects are vital but, they aren't necessarily vital for every user.

Amazon is the world's highest earning website making $3392.94 per second or, 107 billion per year. Pretty incredible. I took that from this website which also noted that in 2009, the highest earning site in 2009 earned 'only' $691 per second. Lame.

Even though number 2 is Google with 75B, 3rd is JD.com with 29 Billion. Ever visited the site? Probably not but, there it is, the third highest earning website. Others in the top 20 I had never previously visited were, Tencent, Reuters, Priceline, Expedia, Rakuten, Salesforce, Baidu, NetEase, Sohu. I know of some of these, just never visited their web services.

Me not visiting probably hasn't made much of a scratch on their bottom line but, it also hasn't affected me either. They can do what they do and we need never engage with one another. This is how I see Steem growing where services, apps, sites and users who may all be traversing the same blockchain, never need run into each other since they have no need to interact. The blockchain, like the internet that carries those sites, still runs underneath them all.

What I told my brother is that it will be this diversity that brings the real value to Steem and even though not all content areas, games or whatever may be of interest to many people, they are the niche markets that groups can get excited about, just like @steemmonsters. My brother doesn't need to know about it or play the game to benefit from the success of it in the long run, as he already has stake in its success due to the Steem Power he holds.

As more and more of these alternative ways to use Steem get developed, they will hopefully attract an increasing mass of users who may not be interested in long form blogging but, will be interested in playing some kind of game or, perhaps buying clothing using an SMT at a shop that sits upon the Steem infrastructure.

For Steem to go mainstream, it isn't about convincing people that blogging is a great way to earn Steem although it is at the moment, it is about convincing people to either develop or join a community that allows them to use Steem the way they want to use it, much like they do on the internet now. Some use the internet to browse the news, some gaming, some buying, some run businesses, some watch movies and some do some very messed up things like, use Facebook.

The websites and services themselves are subject to supply and demand and therefore be quite volatile and open to a great deal of competition but, the internet is robust and doesn't suffer the same volatility but instead, continually grows. With 5G and IoT the next phase, the growth is going to take another giant step. Any one or, thousands of individual sites can fail and still the network survives.

This is my perspective of what Steem could be in the blockchain world. One that uses the infrastructure of the internet to become an infrastructure that better handles the information that flows across it. It might not take over every position but, it could make inroads and power a significant amount of websites and whatever services they provide.

As they say, there is no pleasing everyone but, this isn't actually true. There is no one thing that pleases everyone. But Steem is not one thing, it is a growing multitude of things that will continue to expand and diversify so that anyone will be able to find something that they enjoy or find useful to interact with and with SMTs, they may never realise they are even using Steem.

So, we see a lot of things going on we may not understand , like or be interested in at all but, it doesn't mean it is irrelevant to us if we view the long term goal of becoming a mainstream tool. We do not have to know about every detail, we do not have to use every interface, remember the name of every project or, play every game to still be Steeming.

Taraz
[ a Steemit original ]