[codewithcheese]

What short sighted click bait. Steem has already solved or partially solved most of these problems and we haven't even scratched the service. Read the Steem white paper [1] if you want your mind blown.

[1] https://steem.io

[mannigfaltig]

What are the key reasons someone should go to Steem rather than to some existing social platform? Steem will likely be slower and the barriers to contribute will likely be higher.

Secondly, do you think it is a good basis for building communities if everything is associated with monetary rewards? Sites like Reddit are exactly enjoyable because, most of the time, reward is only imaginary, just like in real-world gatherings of people: It is about having a good time rather than about an exchange of money.

Thirdly, how do you ensure that the things people post on Steem are their own work, especially if the data is hosted elsewhere, e.g. on YouTube. There will probably be massive, irreversible thefts of intellectual property (a.k.a. reposters, but with actual money involved). Conversely, a lot of valuable content comes actually from reposting and "karma theft" (which is what linking e.g. a blog article from someone else actually is).

Fourthly, how do you avoid fraud as for example often found on Kickstarter? Kickstarter actually has a review process and even they are not fully equipped for it. I am not seeing reliable moderation ever scale enough such that it can withstand the likely immense fraudulent interests due to the monetary incentives.

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

> There will probably be massive, irreversible thefts of intellectual property (a.k.a. reposters, but with actual money involved).

Whatever this might be, it's not theft. And it might just be something we have to accept if we don't want to live in a de-facto police state.

> Conversely, a lot of valuable content comes actually from reposting and "karma theft" (which is what linking e.g. a blog article from someone else actually is).

That's a fallacy, though pretty common. People who connect other people with stuff those other people want do provide a useful service, and being rewarded for a useful service is not obviously a bad idea, let alone some sort of "theft".

> Fourthly, how do you avoid fraud as for example often found on Kickstarter? Kickstarter actually has a review process and even they are not fully equipped for it. I am not seeing reliable moderation ever scale enough such that it can withstand the likely immense fraudulent interests due to the monetary incentives.

Just like everywhere else in life? You don't need a big brother managing every step you take in order to avoid fraud.

[Kiro]

I need to be honest, for me it was definitely the fact that you can earn money for just writing blog posts and curating. Also that it's so transparent what people make, it really motivates you to post when you see someone earn thousands of dollars from one post.

I did however find out that the community is great, made many new friends and read a lot of interesting posts. Lately it looks like it has been kind of overrun with people from China or third-world countries, which is interesting, but sometimes the posts are not translated and the steemit.com site does a poor job of managing different languages.

I haven't been active on Steemit for more than a year but thinking of going back since I miss it. It's very consuming though, a lot more than Facebook. Since there's a monetary reward on everything you do it feels like "working" even when you're mindlessly upvoting stuff. I used to spend many hours a day just reading, jotting on a new blog post or connect with fellow steemians on the official chat server.

[cetra3]

It's decentralized but needs:

- My Email Address

- My Phone Number

Not really the sort of decentralized I was hoping for..

[qznc]

Identity is still a huge open problem. There are blockchain projects who promise to solve it (Civic is probably the most popular).

I do not believe a blockchain will solve it. The core problem is that you need a network of trust. Currently, we have governments as trust masternodes via identity cards. Then there are secondary master nodes companies like Facebook, Google, Telekom, Vodafone, etc, where verification is easier and faster, but less reliable. How does a blockchain improve anything about it?

Here is the challenge: There is a kid born in rural Africa. How could you proof to someone with a smartphone in the US that this human being exists?

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

> Here is the challenge: There is a kid born in rural Africa. How could you proof to someone with a smartphone in the US that this human being exists?

Better question: What would you even need that proof for?

[TeMPOraL]

So that the other side knows they're talking with (and maybe talking about, or sending resources to) a real human being who actually is a rural African kid, and not with a server farm of some sleazy US advertiser who autogenerated a fake profile.

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

Now, that is mixing up a whole lot of different problems, isn't it?

First of all, "proving that this human being exists" in no way implies "proving that this human being is a kid in rural africa". Let alone "proving that this human being is a kid in rural africa who lacks resources". Now, those absolutely might be legitimate concerns in some scenarios--but how would that be a baseline requirement for a system for social interactions? Last I checked I don't need to bring a credit report to get into a local pub and chat with people either.

Secondly, if you assume a situation where those questions actually were relevant: How is trusting one centralized, not democratically controlled institution to take care of the problem even a solution? If you rely on them, you implicitly also give them the power to effectively declare real people non-existent. If facebook says "this is not a real human being", is that actually reliable information, or could it just be a case of them optimizing their business with the (possibly unintended) side effect of cutting this rural african kid off from resources by incorrectly labeling them "not a human"?

[TeMPOraL]

> Last I checked I don't need to bring a credit report to get into a local pub and chat with people either.

But you see those people, with your own eyes, and thus know they exist. Maybe in 50 years we'll have robots indistinguishable from humans, and the question of proof will become relevant for in-pub interactions. For now, the question is relevant only for long-distance communications.

> How is trusting one centralized, not democratically controlled institution to take care of the problem even a solution? If you rely on them, you implicitly also give them the power to effectively declare real people non-existent.

True. But so is the case with a democratic government, and so is the case with any other organization or system. And the power to declare people non-existent is exercised frequently, often by mere bureaucratic accident. Ultimately, trust is a spectrum. No organization is worth 100% trust, but also no one is worth 0% trust. I don't e.g. particularly trust Facebook, but I trust the social web - if I have a friend who has a friend who has a friend who is a friend of the rural kid in Africa, I can with high confidence assume the rural kid in Africa exists[0].

So yeah, in my previous comment I mixed up a few different use cases. But I think in pretty much all of them you want to at least know the other person is a human being, and frequently you also want to know they are who they say they are.

--

[0] - This effect is actually sabotaged by the pro-privacy efforts to hide as much information about people as possible, rendering users unable to follow the social web chains beyond their own direct connections. Privacy is important, but it's always a trade-off, sometimes trading off genuinely useful things.

[tyywebb]

The problem of figuring out whether someone is the real person or an imposter (problem of identity) is a completely different problem from verifying a person's circumstances.

[sneak]

https://anon.steem.network

Account creation costs real money, which we subsidize. Anti-spam is required. No phone number or email address is required to use the blockchain, only for Steemit Inc to buy you an account and give it to you for free.

Anyone with an existing account can create more, if they pay. AnonSteem simply sells creation for btc and ltc with a markup.

[Kiro]

You can spin up a node or use a wallet to create an account directly on the Steem blockchain instead of doing it through the Steemit webpage.

[cetra3]

If that's an option I haven't found it from a quick glance on the website. I just followed what was there without looking too deeply into it. Maybe if that's something you can do, there should be a clear process written up somewhere

[Kiro]

Steemit is not aimed at advanced users. Most probably don't even know that it's powered by a blockchain other than on a buzzword level.

There are plenty of guides how to work with the Steem blockchain directly posted as blog posts on the blockchain itself. :)

[codewithcheese]

Anon Steem makes it easier for you to create an account anonymously. https://anon.steem.network/

You can create an account through steem connect if you have a friend with steem https://steemit.com/news/@timcliff/new-tool-from-busy-org-cr...

For advanced users you can do the steem account creation transation yourself using the steem cli

[dspillett]

I've only scanned the "how to build" documentation but from what I saw there is only information on producing a test network not joining the public blockchain? Is there a set of instructions for hosting your own "real" node?

(I've not read the white paper or other documentation so the info may be buried in there, I'm unlikely to find time for that in the near future though so asking out of "laziness" in case you have a quick answer to give)

[crucialfelix]

I find it and the white paper I interesting. It is very well thought out. I joined. But the stink of money is everywhere and this is distracting. Reddit and HN have worthless internet karma points but we can laugh it off. Making it explicit that we are whoring ourselves in a market pushes it too far I think. It makes us self conscious and that is an impediment to creative discussion. But something will come out of these attempts. Something with tokens and systems and weird rules. It's a game. We just need to find the right game to play in.

[yborg]

Now if we could only solve the shilling problem on social networks.

Your whitepaper blew my mind in trying to bootstrap YACC via the hook of a decentralized social network. I'd say odds of long-term success are zero here, but points for originality.

[Kiro]

Please do some research before posting nonsense comments. Steemit is a pretty big community already, with a thriving ecosystem. Go to https://steemit.com/ to see for yourself. Steem is just the blockchain/cryptocurrency, while Steemit is the actual community front-end on top of it.

There's no shilling going on here. Just a user recommending it.

[amelius]

I wonder if the concepts in Steem could be applied to the real economy, to arrive at a more fair distribution of wealth.

[tyywebb]

That would be interesting. Basically instead of companies existing, make every project in the world an open source project on a blockchain and people get compensated for contributing directly as a consequence of how the blockchain works.