Token flows, cryptofying communities and gaming Steem

With so much going on at Steem currently, what I have noticed in myself is that there is a little bit of confusion on what exactly I should be doing. Don't get me wrong, I am just going to keep on posting like normal anyway, but there are other games afoot that I am unsure about. Do I buy some PAL and stake it? Should I start vlogging and podcasts? Perhaps I should create a TarazCoin?

What is the best way to go?

This is the confusion I have been talking about for quite awhile that I see as a driver of Steem in the future as while the platform decentralizes, many more games open up meaning that there are a lot more and increasingly diverse opportunities to participate. The complexity involved will make it hard for any one person to game the system efficiently as every approach will have pros and cons attached to it.

This is fantastic, isn't it?

While there are going to people who take the easy approach and keep doing what they are currently doing, there are gong to be others who will take the foot in the door approach and push their way into the ecosystem to carve out a place for themselves. The opportunity on Steem is enormous for the future regardless of what people may believe or experience now.

One of the benefits of Steem is that there is a low barrier of entry to build on the blockchain and because it is feeless, the cost to users can be more accurately managed. A large community that is non tokenized already has to pay for their userbase in some way but for most of them, going to a crypto experience is going to cost them more than it might be worth.

However in time, non-crypto communities can join up to Steem and potentially even have support along the way to advise them on how best to tokenize and empower their current community without it costing the earth or having to start from scratch. There are already platforms developing that are able to do this to some degree and in the end it might be possible that either Steem will integrate with the community in question or, the information they have can be ported over with the relevant info blockchained.

There are obviously lots of benefits for a community to tokenize even if those tokens aren't worth much at all to begin with, or ever as it builds a gamified experience that users will start to attach to and use to gauge and relate with the experience. This gamification is what is happening on Steem now as there are more and more platforms with numbers getting attached to them and various rating systems that people love to get as feedback, even if not an earner. The internet is full of them already and the games have been full of them for quite a few decades already, even if it was nothing more than bragging rights to have a top score on the Space Invaders arcade game.

What all these numbers do is give indicators to direction and a user can build meaning into the ones they think are important for them, while someone else might not care about that metric at all. What is your most important Steem metric do you think? SP? Post count? Upvote value? Average post earnings?

With growing complexity of the ecosystem but decreasing barriers to entry and simplification of front ends, users are going to find themselves building an experience profile that is unique to them as each will choose to utilize the Steem blockchain in different ways and using a varying set of tools. Continually developing gamification experience makes gaming the system increasingly difficult and the broader the usecases and spread of users, the less impact those who do game the system have as it is being gamed all over the platform.

Steem is made to be gamed.

The problem is that it was too easy for some people to game it over others with behaviors that are not overly healthy, which led to a gross imbalance in resource allocation early on an continues today, but this is changing in multiple ways and not just through the spread of Steem. This is just the early phases of course and I do believe Steem is the coin to hold onto as it powers the platform like electricity, but people should be exploring the ecosystem breadth and seeing what tools are available to them that they may be better suited to wield.

So many things going on, so little time to play. What happens when there are ten million users spread across a thousand applications? It is going to be a lot of fun, that's what.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]