RE: How Managing Expectations Can Grow the STEEM Ecosystem
It is so easy to get captivated by interactions on Steemit and drift into thinking it is the driver of Steem. The original whitepaper, though, made clear that it's the blockchain and Steem that are the focus of the developers. Your comment that "Steemit.com is just a reference implementation of a Smart Media Token" ties it all together for me.
All the social engagement on Steemit.com simply allowed confirmation of the high transaction capabilities. And it had enough people, bad actors included, to adapt to unanticipated problem behavior. And finally, it had enough people to generate unanticipated ideas, too, like the Utopian.io project.
I knew all this (except the SMTs) before joining Steemit, because I read the whitepaper. But it is so easy - too easy to want Steemit.com to succeed and focus on that -- especially as an average person writing content, curating, and connecting with other people. We get attached to the friends we make on Steemit.com. Seeing friends drop off, to be replaced by bot and vote-buying messages is just depressing. So I do hope they both grow together. But I'm not always optimistic about the Steemit.com piece.
Very true. The only solution I can think of at the moment is just to continually reset expectations and communicate in a way to educate people about what's going on with the larger STEEM ecosystem. People are obviously free to expect whatever they want, but at least with enough repetition out there, they will hopefully eventually come to conclusions which fit what's going on now.
And you do a good job in educating people about the Steem ecosystem, with your posts like this one!