Steemit and Our Business

I've been thinking a lot about how I use Steemit recently and the impact it's had on Loreshaper Games, and I want to talk about the things that make Steemit very valuable for us and the things that could be improved to make it more useful.

The Good: Payout

Obviously, Steemit has a natural appeal due to the chance to earn money by writing, but most of what a business is using it for doesn't necessarily correspond to earning (significant) money simply by posting.

Because Loreshaper Games is a little weird in that we give away all of our games, we rely more on voluntary contributions and Steemit offers a way for people to do that through upvotes. However, our product releases on Steemit are generally less valuable than Steemit-focused content.

This isn't surprising, however if your company isn't designed to put out a bunch of writing that is intended for blog-style consumption Steemit doesn't necessarily have a significant financial incentive.

Still, the potential to earn some small rewards is important; for us, we actually make the majority of our "profit" through Steemit, rather than traditional distribution channels like DriveThruRPG or direct donations as part of our donationware scheme.

This remains true even if we exclude posts not related to our products that go up on DriveThruRPG or elsewhere.

The Good: Engagement

The real value of Steemit from our perspective has been engagement. We get to have a much greater focus on the industry as a whole, and provide content in ways that attract people to our brand.

Comparing this to something like Facebook or Twitter, there are a few key comparisons that I've noticed.

For starters, because of the curation system, creating quality content on Steemit tends to incentivize people to pay more attention to your future posts. This is true of any social media, but Steemit allows different types of content to be showcased.

For instance, Facebook and Twitter are designed around relatively short, non-cerebral, posts. They're great for businesses that are essentially publishing ads and making announcements (which are not really dissimilar).

Sites like YouTube and blogs tend to do better for this sort of content, but suffer from two distinct problems: making a video with audio is a fairly large time investment, as not only do you have to do the writing but also the video and audio production.

There are people who get by with really cheap and quick productions on YouTube, but it's not necessarily something that helps you build a big brand or following.

Blogs, likewise, tend to suffer from a lack of interconnection. You can do a lot of shouting into the void before anyone hears you when you're blogging, and going to a large network site like Tumblr doesn't necessarily make this better.
There is some room for a business in hybridization; using a combination of, say, Facebook and a blog, or Twitter and a blog, but this requires users to skip between platforms, and can create an inconsistent experience.

We use Steemit in this manner occasionally, especially with regards to announcing product releases, and that's actually one of its nice features: it's a good universal hub that hosts content well.

The Good: Positive Experiences

One of the things that I really value about Steemit is that I usually leave Steemit with a better outlook than I had when I went to the platform. I'm sure this isn't a universal, but I've been able to tailor my timeline so that I see a bunch of things I'm interested in and also get a chance to learn some interesting things from time to time.

Facebook, on the other hand, is almost predominantly relegated to shallow, milquetoast experiences. Twitter is an assertively negative place most of the time. I only use it for the Loreshaper Games business account, and I find that the only accounts I can follow reliably without being subjected to political firefights are other business accounts.

A lot of this comes down to the philosophies of the platforms. Facebook exists in such a way that its personal side is really about sharing your personal life and whatever memetic sludge goes through (and you can filter out the stuff you don't like, which means that you don't have to be exposed to it), while Twitter is basically hyperactive, with the benefits that brings and the negativity that follows the ability to openly call people out in such a way that everyone who follows you can see it.

I'm also 90% sure that Facebook has a tremendous bot problem; the Loreshaper Games business page is followed by what I suspect are 100 bots, and purchasing a Facebook ad leads to a lot of weird behaviors (like 38 people liking a product link, but only 2 clicking on the link). Twitter is better about bots, but so incredibly shallow and entirely lacking metrics.

Steemit has bots all over the place, but a lot of them are actually useful (like @steemitboard) and the others are pretty easily weeded out. They're a whole different sort than the fake faces of Facebook and Twitter.

On Steemit, however, there's a good balance of thought-provoking and useful content. Because you can see what people are doing (like Facebook), but don't necessarily get pulled into every fight they get into (a welcome break from Twitter), it's really valuable.

Combine this, again, with a higher level of meaningful engagement and the format of Steemit and you've just got a recipe for better engagement.

The Bad: Monopoly Bucks (Or: It's Not There Yet)

Let me just preface this quickly by saying that I am Steem optimistic. The sheer number of transactions on the Steem
blockchain, the lack of transaction fees, and the growing number of users all lead me to believe that at one point STEEM will be worth a lot to the people who are using it now.

However, right now it reminds me of something else.

When I was in college my university offered dining plans that could come with extra allowances so that students could buy stuff at campus convenience stores, or visit the cafeterias on campus in excess of what their plans would normally allow.

These extra allowances quickly earned the name "Monopoly Bucks" in my friend group (and, likely, beyond) because of the fact that they were only really useful in a number of places.

Right now STEEM is very much similar to that. I've only ever used it to purchase a video game as a test to see if it actually worked (it did) and to purchase @steembasicincome shares for people that I want to see more from in the future.

There is a way to convert it into Bitcoin which you can then convert into fiat currency, but until you can convert STEEM into fiat currencies directly or use STEEM in place of fiat for regular transactions, this will be a lingering issue.

However, one thing that does mitigate this for us to some extent is the potential of hiring freelancers using STEEM. That will become easier as we increase our STEEM holdings and as more talent arrives on Steemit, something encouraged by Steemit's tangible rewards for artists, writers, and other creatives.

The Ugly: Out of Time

One downside of Steemit right now is sort of two-fold. A post really is most attractive for a week because of how the curation system works (it may be more fair to say that it's really attractive in the first couple hours, since that's when curators are most likely to be rewarded for upvoting it if it's good).

However, Steemit also makes it relatively difficult to find content. We get around this by occasionally posting a catalog, but I haven't been keeping up with that because it's a fair amount of manual effort.

There's no way to highlight or pin posts so that they can be permanently displayed, which would be nice for a company trying to show off products, and there's a fair amount of

Our Wishlist

There are currently a few things that would make Steemit or the Steem blockchain a dream for us, and they're all things that are not impossible if the Steem network continues to expand:

• It would be nice to have a way to utilize the permanence of the Steem blockchain to provide content indefinitely, rather than just have the most recent posts be the thing that stand out to users. Services like @dbooks.org look to be a good first step in this direction, and I've been meaning to look into using DBooks in particular as a way to distribute our games and other content.
• Another good feature would be to have a Steem-native website that allows people to interact with us on the Steem blockchain using our own main website, something like @steempress-io in inverse; we write on Steemit and then the post goes to our own site using Steem and matching our brand style, but still supporting engagement via the Steem blockchain. Tumblr is used in this way by a lot of businesses, and while I don't know if there's an existing platform that offers this, it's something that's sure to have a good niche in the ecosystem. This would have the added upside of encouraging newbies to discover the platform.
• Content discovery on Steemit is generally limited to curation, and there's definitely times where I see someone has been active and I love their stuff but I just haven't heard of them. While the incentives to curation really encourage a cooperative environment where people share good things because they're good, having some sort of "You might be interested in!" feature could be cool. I think things like this do exist (for instance, you can search for posts using a certain tag), but it would be nice to have the ability to follow people but also filter their posts by tag, or even get notifications in your feed when people you follow upvote (but don't necessarily reblog) posts with certain tags. I know that this is just a frontend thing, but I don't know of any frontends that currently do this.