Making Steemit Communities Work

With the recent developments of steem-engine tokens, SMT's and Hivemind Communities things are finally setting up to have some real Communities on the blogging platform. I wrote an article with my skeptical view on tokenization a while back and want to follow this up with some ideas that could make communities work.

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BLOGGING PONZI & ABUSE PROBLEMS

Blogging Ponzi
The Steemit blogging platform is facing quite some fundamental problems. In essence, it still very much has a Ponzi aspect as the main reason to buy and hold Steem is to earn more of it from the reward pool while the price goes down if no new money comes in. The trend of making extra tokens (PAL | LEO | SPORTS |...) pretty much adds to this as they use the same mechanism and most of them don't have anything to back up their value.

The thing that gives Steem real value in my view are the resource credits System, the dapps people actually use and want to spend money on like Steemmonsters along with potetial advertisement revenue (especially if it would be shares one day). Having a stablecoin that can be actually be used to pay/receive money without having to deal with fluctuating prices would be a great use case. SBD has shown to be broken in that regard and also has a supply issue.

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Abuse Problems
Take away the rewards and 99%+ of blogging would instantly disappear from this platform. The reality shows that people mainly want to earn/grow here while blogging is mostly just used as a tool to do that. If you want to do well financially, you pretty much need to understand the current metagame and bend your way of going about things around that.

The rules to do best rarely encourage proper behavior and involve:

• Having Multiple accounts
• Doing a lot of self-upvoting
• Making many low effort posts
• Taking advantage of all free upvotes (Esteem, busy, Actifit, ...)
• Circle Jerk Voting
• Writing about Steem/crypto
• Powering up (Good Thing)
• Making a lot of Friends (Good Thing)
• Using Bid-bots for Returns
• ...

Anyone who wants to have a real blog about a subject they genuinely love by default will have a quite hard time to get anything going. The system currently allows for users to empower themselves by powering up and being part of many of the curation projects like @upvoteshares which I started myself and had been running successfully for over a year now. HF21 will make blogging even more difficult and it will likely require even more metagame to do well financially meaning the ones who are gaming the system will be the first to find out how to do it best.

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CREATING REAL COMMUNITIES

We tried to get the SBC (Steem Betting Community) going last year but it showed to be quite the challenge since only a handful really cared while most were just in it for the upvotes. Getting members to support each other and interact growing as a group was one of the hardest parts. The Tokenization and communities features that are coming could potentially bring change to this when done properly.

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Pegging Token Value to Steem
I've been thinking about an SBC Token and how to make it work to create a real community on this platform. The main issue with current tokens like PAL / LEO / AFIT /SPORTS / ... is that they aren't really backed up by Steem or anythig else. PAL can be Converted into Steem Upvotes (45$ daily in total) which makes it hard to justify the current market cap of 2.3 Million. Most other tokens I have no clue what gives them value aside from the temporary hype with people buying speculating they can earn more later on. It's pretty much the same as the gambling dapp craze where people played to earn dividends to profit from players that came in later on which did not turn out that great.

POSSIBLE SOLUTION EXAMPLE

This is an example that might work to get a real Community like the SBC going.

Basically, an SBC token would be pegged to Steem that is powered up in the @sbcbot account and upvotes are directly linked to the amount of SBC someone has powered up. Only whitelisted members can use the SBC tag and posts show on the separate interface. There would probably have to be 2 tokens

• SBC that can directly be converted in and out of STEEM (always at 1 SBC = 1 STEEM) at any given time. These can NOT be sold on to someone else and can also be gotten while delegating SP to the bot account. It's always possible to get your STEEM back in return for them at any given time!

• SBCR (reward). This one would be the inflation token that also counts toward the upvotes equally to the SBC token. It can be sold and bought on the market based on supply and demand.

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So the more tokens you have powered up (SBC & SBCR combined), the bigger your steem upvotes from the @sbcbot will be and the more you will reward other SBC Members with SBCR tokens.

What this could do for a community

• Mods can make a community attractive. If a small group of people want to start a community, all it takes is for them to have SP giving people a good incentive to be part of it. The values likely won't be high enough to attract scammers and since only whitelisted members can get the upvotes, it's easy to ban anyone that tries to abuse the system. It's more about the community instead of just the upvotes.
• All the money/upvotes stay within the community. This gives a good incentive to make friends within the community and support each other where otherwise most would just use their SP for what's most profitable to them which most of the time does not involve selflessly supporting community members.
• Everyone can empower themselves. The ones that really want to be part of the SBC community can lease SP to the @sbcbot account getting SBC tokes that give them upvotes and influence in return. The bigger the community gets, the more SP that will be in the account and the bigger the upvotes become.
• Grow organically. Anyone who comes in with good content also being socially active but is not willing to invest in Steem should be able to get something going meeting likeminded people in the process. In a smaller community, the bigger stakeholders are much more likely to help the smaller ones grow.
• No Multiple Accounts needed Right now most blogs on Steemit are all over the place when it comes down to content. These alternate interfaces where only specific posts are shown can be a great way for people just to have 1 account. It would also be better for readers who just want specific content.

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I'm not sure if I explained it very well, but I believe a system like this could work for a smaller community (many tweaks would be possible to optimize). People would be able to be part of as many communities as they like but would be quickly exposed if they are just in it for the money.

Feel free to let me know your thoughts in the comments...