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Tag: social media
Steemit’s New Economic Paradigm
An introduction to Steemit
I (Kurt) have been posting on the new social media platform, Steemit, for more than a month, and it seems to be promising for several reasons.
One of the most obvious is that, people can get money on there, which means that many starving artists and writers finally have a platform where they can quickly monetise their content, without having to know too much about website design, sales or marketing.
A deeper point – one which will most likely drive the more constant growth of the platform – is that the system is structured to incentivise helpful, constructive interactions. The system is designed to encourage people to be cool. That’s no small feat. I’ve thought in the past, that if someone really wants to change the world, they have to change the incentives, and that exactly what is what the creators of this site have done.
Since joining, I’ve had to stop myself a few times on other social networks, thinking “Is this the way I would phrase this if I were writing on Steemit? Can I find a way to be softer, more compassionate, more inclusive?” Of course, some people persist in unconstructive feedback, even despite themselves, but the signal-to-noise ratio on the site is still extremely impressive.
In this video, I give an introduction to why this new platform is interesting and may be the way of the future, and I read out an article which I published on the platform, which many people enjoyed, talking about what makes the site and its associated currency, Steem, valuable, and the reasons it may well succeed in the long run.
If you enjoy our posts, please have a look at The Paradise Paradox’s page on Steemit where you can join, earn money, and upvote our posts to help support the show! You can also find a lot of additional content which is not posted on this site, with Kurt’s posts on Steemit and Aaron’s posts on Steemit.
Here’s my original article, and here is the article I mentioned by Leah “Stellabella” Stephens.
To download the audio, right click here, and press “Save as”.
Episode 45 – Right In Your Facebook
The Episode:
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The Story:
The year is 2005. Brad Greenspan, Tom Anderson and their team of dedicated programmers have built an empire using a relatively new method of communication and social interaction – a social media website, a medium allowing people to connect and interact with people all over the world sharing common interests, to make new friends, and to advertise their companies and bands. In July, he sells the company to News Corporation for $580 million. For three years, MySpace was the largest social networking site in the world. After that, in a few short years, the userbase would decline and it would be worth only a fraction. News Corporation would watch their investment dwindle, watching their customer base slowly trickle to the new guy on the block – Facebook.
This is the process of creative destruction that happens so frequently in a free (or relatively free) market. One company creates an idea, another company improves on it, and if the original company can’t innovate quick enough, it gets washed away on the shores of history. The second company goes on to enjoy all the spoils of pandering to an ever-fickle and frequently disloyal consuming public. Then, the cycle begins again.
The question is, how long is Facebook’s cycle going to last? Many contenders have risen and fallen, and many more have risen and stagnated: TSU, Diaspora, Google+. Customers are aware to some extent that Facebook likes to use its users for social experiments, but that does not deter them, with the appeal of convenience and a network effect maintaining their presence. Princeton University predicts that Facebook doesn’t have long left, and by 2017 we may see an exodus.
What will the next wave of social media bring – social media 3.0? How will new platforms such as Synereo and Minds.com entice their potential user base – monetarily, or otherwise? What will it take for you to give up on the Book of Faces? We ask these questions and more in the next exciting chapter of … The Paradise Paradox!
The Links:
Synereo
Minds.com
TSU
MySpace
The Paradise Paradox on Facebook
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Facebook will lose 80% of users by 2017, say Princeton researchers
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