What's More Important For Steemit Right Now: SMTs or Hivemind
Which Came First? The Chicken Or The Egg?
For quite a while now, we've been hearing about SMTs and Hivemind. "They're coming!" has been the trumpeted cry, with any actual arrival date retracted so as to perfect the code and allow for any changes in priorities or emerging contingencies.
SMTs and Hiveminds are both supposed to be great boons to the nascent but burgeoning STEEM economy. They're both meant to put STEEM on the map, so to speak, among the mainstream, and not just those who watch the blockchain or cryptospace. Once these very two different layering applications appear, its STEEM to the moon.
Which Is More Important For Steemit Right Now?
The answer to that is neither, unless we're using the term Steemit interchangeably with STEEM. If that's the case, then either is bound to be the most important, with the slight nod going to Hivemind. In either case, Steemit as a site or platform, is the loser.
You've Got Some 'Splainin' To Do!
Neither Hivemind or SMTs are meant to help Steemit's usability per se. Hivemind is supposed to facilitate the creation of something called Communities, but whether or not that will be an extension of Steemit or something new entirely is left to be seen. If Communities is like an add on, then Steemit will benefit greatly. If it's essentially something else, then Steemit will be abandoned for Communities just like Myspace was deserted for Facebook.
Either way, Communities is meant to be the next generation of social on the STEEM blockchain.
Hivemind would bring Communities about, along with the potential of many other sites with an easier and more uniform connections. That means there would be even more competition on the social end of the STEEM blockchain. That in turn could spell better times for Steemit, if it does survive as a platform, because there might be more emphasis placed on developing it faster than what exists now without much competition. Or better said, without bleeding edge competition.
So No SMTs?
Smart Media Tokens are meant to be another layer of creation. New and existing sites around the Internet will be able to create their own tokens backed by the STEEM blockchain. When that happens, it will open up STEEM like never before. It will have the potential of moving STEEM into the top 10 of cryptos because of its scalability, usability and its already proven record of rapid transactions.
However, there's a lot of moving parts involved from what I've read, so how quick SMTs will be able to be employed is a question. If it's going to take working hand-in-hand with a STEEM representative to get the SMT up and running on a site, as suggested by an earlier dev post, how quickly can that happen? And if the process of doing so takes time because it's not drop dead easy, how many non-tech website owners are going to participate?
I think there's just as much potential for things to wrong as right when SMTs deploy. I have a little more faith in Hivemind and Communities because those are being developed for use on the blockchain without any other technologies or skill levels involved.
And The Winner Is...
...Hivemind.
This post is part of @dragosroua's May 30 Days Writing Challenge. Today's topic for day 11 is:
What's More Important For Steemit Right Now: Smart Media Tokens or Hivemind?
Interesting analysis @glenalbrethsen.
My thoughts are that neither is more important for Steemit right now. Before either of those are adopted, sorting out the crap that is already going on would be a much better use of energy in my opinion.
I agree, and I think that's what Communities is supposed to do. However, given human nature and the particular genius of those here, even if Communities wipes out everything currently existing, (mainly the bots, spam and plagiarism), it can't and won't change how the reward pool works, or the disparity between SP across the entire ecosystem, or what people ultimately want to get out of STEEM. The writing prompt didn't mention Communities, though, so I added that in there on my own. In the prompt, Steemit and STEEM appear to be synonymous, which makes it a harder question to answer because in my mind, one is the platform or interface we use and the other is the blockchain where we transact.
I agree. I see Steemit and Steem as being two separate things. As I've mentioned before, Steem has a much better chance of surviving in my opinion. 😊
The way Steemit is acting right now, it's not going to survive the rest of the week! I can't be the only one these timeouts and network errors are happening to. The last time this happened, I ended up giving the Steemit crew the benefit of the doubt, thinking they were tinkering under the hood. Turned out, it was a massive spam attack that took out a lot of the nodes. So, STEEM might survive, but if we have no way to access the blockchain (Busy hasn't been working for me, either), then it's going to take something much more robust and secure to do it.
I've been having issues all afternoon on both Steemit and Busy @glenalbrethsen. The level of communication about what's going on is crap. No-one seems to know what the problem is. 😢
Okay. It's working a bit better now than it was. Maybe they've got whatever happened fixed. It's kind of hard to post, comment and curate when the tools you have aren't working.
I keep saying we need some kind of alert system that just shows up across the top of our feed whenever there's an attack or something that will slow down use. Getting all of these errors is not at all conducive to creating loyalty and trust among users.
an alert system would be great but communication is not one of Steemit's strong points!
I'm still not able to transfer any SBD or log into Busy. 😢
Yeah. Steemit wallet is still acting up (I've been having a hard time accepting rewards all morning) and I was only able to do one thing briefly with busy before I gave up. Been back on Steemit, which at least has been working for upvoting and commenting, something it wasn't allowing me to do earlier, either.
No, communications are not strong suits. It's a simple ask, though. And probably even more easily implemented. Oh, well. We wonder and we wait.
Thanks for the comparison Glen. Truthfully, neither is too big on my radar at the moment. There are many communities right now, so I'm sure why we need another, separate community-based application. And I've been waiting to hear about SMT's, but besides general information, there doesn't seem to be anything concrete coming out. It would be nice to focus on what we already have that is good, or on things that now need improving upon, as opposed to creating more new stuff. Just my two-cents' worth :)
I'm in agreement, in that if more of us would concentrate on what was already here, there wouldn't be any reason to mess with it.
Unfortunately, there are too many here who either fail to get the concept of what Steemit is about, who have different interests than using Steemit as a de facto social site, or who don't really care. Either way, if they can't be swayed to follow the 'social contract' as I've heard it referred to, there can be problems. If not now, down the road.
Frankly, I don't know if this new Communities deal is actually going to do anything or not. If it makes it harder or nigh impossible to create spam or plagiarize, than it might be worth it right there. If it puts bot use back into a more manageable, sustainable position, great. All of that remains to be seen.
And until one or the other is here, there's not much we can really do other than keep on keeping on. We can't really adjust habits or strategies or anything when we really have no idea what we're actually dealing with.
Well, I'm glad you addressed this, contest or no. Thanks for the information. Should I be uneasy or excited?
How about cautiously optimistic? I mean, any of us who have only been here since the last Hard Fork took place will only know how things are, even if the older members either complain about or glorify the way things used to be. So, we see what it looks like now and wonder how could things get so lopsided, while depending on which camp you listen to, it was either worse or far better before the last Hard Fork. Which probably means the change was more of a draw.
It's really hard to say that things are going to be peachy keen after either one of these things hit, so I tend to try to be as much of a realist as possible. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst, and maybe you'll get something in between. :)
Indeed, wisdom there. Will be keeping my eyes and mind open. Blessings.
I agree with you Glen! indeed Hivemind needs to do this.
Although SMT is useful it is a smaller market for business men, investors and those that will create service tokens or the like.
So, you think SMTs will bring in a small market? That's certainly not how they're being sold. I realize marketing and reality are too different things, but this is supposed to spread like wild fire across the entirety of the internet and revolutionize the web as we know it. It's supposed to usher in a true attention economy, with STEEM at the center. Am I overstating what we've been told?
I feel like I'm not. I also feel like it's going to be overly complicated unless they figure out a way to make SMTs easier to integrate into a site or platform. And that might not come until a couple of versions down the road.
I believe it will be a smaller but richer market that have the funds to create tokens and build off the steem blockchain.
Think of it as the ERC 20 that Ethereum has where a lot of tokens will be created and a major part of ICOs yet with EOS coming out June and of course other blockchains out there it has many competition.
I still believe in Steem but having read the things on EOS it is a superior blockchain that vastly outperforms all current technology although just a bit faster and. More efficient than Steem.
That was one of the main reasons why the SMT were supposed to be released Q2 of 2018 to Pre empt EOS.
That is why I am more keen on Hivemind and Communities.
It's still Q2!
What I've read about EOS, and it's not nearly as much as you, it's taking the blockchain to another level because it can be the OS for blockchains who can't really be developed on, or done so easily. It's the operating system to the bios, or something like that.
I expect that EOS will do some great things, though. Maybe Larimer will finally have his outright winner. All the work he's put in helping to create and then designing his own cryptos, you would hope he would get something that could retain all of the positive traits while diminishing the risks of the negative.
Then, you bring human nature into play and you see where it all goes.