3D Printing, Crypto and Steemit with Celia

Celia reached out to us after feeling disaffected by Steemit and hoping that Yours might avoid some of their problems. Since Steemit is one of our closest competitors, we knew that Celia’s input would be extremely valuable to help identify places where we need to improve.

Celia is a former 3d printing PhD student who fell in love with the world of crypto and picked up casual blogging. She discovered Steemit as a way to monetize her blogging, and tried to put her PhD thesis on the platform. She was able to earn $10,000 of Steem dollars and Steem which she is now cashing out.

Why is Celia disaffected by Steemit? Primarily because their voting algorithm, which gives huge weight to whales who control most of the currency, doesn’t work well for most Steemit users, including herself. If your content doesn’t please the whales, you don’t get a payout.

Fortunately, because Yours is not developing its own currency, it is not possible for Yours to suffer the same problem as Steemit. The only way to have disproportionate influence on Yours is to actually give a lot of money to a content creator. That’s good for the creator, and expensive for influencer.

Besides voting, Steemit has a few other important issues, such as a lack of a private messaging system, and the fact that the payouts are ultimately coming from investors in the currency, which gives a scam-like feeling.

Our top question for Celia was how the payment scheme should work for Yours. We are considering several options.

The first option is something we call the endorsement model. In this model, every piece of content has an “endorse” button. When you click that button, you make a payment, say 10 cents, that goes 50% to the content creator and 50% divided evenly amongst earlier endorsers.

For instance, if you are the first endorser, all 10 cents goes to the original creator. If you are the second endorser, 5 cents goes to the creator, and 5 cents goes to the first endorser. If you are the third endorser, 5 cents goes to the creator, and 2.5 cents goes to the first endorser, and 2.5 cents goes to the second endorser. In this model, the endorsers aren’t just tipping. Endorsers can profit if they endorse popular content early. This gives people a profit motive to tip.

Another payment scheme we are considering is what we call the purchase model. In this model, creators can allow access to a preview of their content, but people have to pay to get full access. For instance, for an article, the creator might provide access to the first half of the article for free, but you have to pay 10 cents to access the second half of the article. In this model, there is no profit motive for paying, but you pay because you want access.

Celia likes both models and point out that they would have different use-cases.

Celia can see using either model for different reasons. The endorsement model would be useful for casual blogging, while the purchase model would be useful for market research. Her crypto blogging might work well with the endorsement model, and her PhD thesis might work well with the purchase model.

We think that is a great point. The same person might have different reasons to use different schemes. Ultimately, we want to make sure Yours supports many different payment scheme that cover use-cases for many different people, in the same way reddit has many different subreddits for different communities.

We look forward to following up with Celia in a couple of months after we’ve had time to iterate our product on the basis of her feedback. Thank you for demoing Yours, Celia!

Photo by HowToStartABlogOnline.net / CC BY

Ryan X. Charles is a distinguished programmer with 20+ years experience. He’s previously lead development teams for BitPay, Copay, and Reddit. Charles is currently CEO of Yours.