Okay, for all you non-cool kids, “Dapp” is the short form of “Decentralized Application”. I’m told that it is pronounced “Dap” and not “Dee-app”. I wrote about dapps a bit in my last blog post.
After posting, I decided I wanted to find a dapp to try out. I searched around a bit and found a number of them. FileCoin is the one that interests me the most, but they are still building it, and it won’t be available until late next year at the earliest.
I then stumbled upon Steem. The main outlet for Steem is SteemIt which is basically a user-run Blogging and commenting platform. You can earn Steem Tokens by adding value to the blogging network through posts and comments, and curating those posts and comments. By adding value, you earn Steem, and Steem is worth real money.
Steem is block-chain based, and a decentralized, autonomous application. That means there is no central server and that it is immutable — once you post to it, that post cannot be removed, or altered, without your permission. The community of Steem users has strong incentives — cash, generally — to upvote good content and comments, and strongly downvote bad content like spam, plagiarized content, or anything that the community deems unsuitable.
My first concern that SteemIt would become “one-sided”, much like Digg.com did back in the 2000’s, where one political slant would get all the up-votes. However, while I don’t completely understand how it works, it appears that users who tend to down-vote in a slanted way are punished.
The user model is interesting. People with lots of juice/karma/whatever they call it can really influence things. One up vote from them could be worth as much as — literally — $100. These are people that have proved to the network that they are obviously very trustworthy. My upvote, on the other hand, is currently worth almost nothing, as I have yet to add much value through posting, commenting, and curating.
Another thing I learned is that your voting power goes down each time you vote, and is “powered up” over time. You are incented to be judicious with your voting, because the more you vote, the less each vote is worth in terms of adding value to the network. In other words, you can only vote so much, and each vote is worth a bit less if you vote frequently. You can and should use your votes, you just have to be careful with them in order to be able to add value to the network.
I created an account and started poking around. There are some good introductory posts, one of which made the wise recommendation to find a niche in SteemIt and fill it. I noticed that there were not too many (any?) articles on software development, so I decided that would be my niche. So far I’ve posted three articles on the softwaredevelopment tag, and plan to do many more.
One thing that all the introductory posts pointed out is that it takes time, effort, and input to have Steem become worth it. You need to be consistent and work to carve out your area. So far it is an interesting place, and poking around reveals some quirky and interesting stuff. I plan on sticking with it and seeing where it goes and if it makes me any real money.
SteemIt is worth looking into. I encourage you to join. There is no affiliate link for me to post, so I’m just suggesting it out of the pure goodness of my heart. 😉 It’s a cool way to get involved with Dapps and the block-chain, it doesn’t cost you anything to start, and besides, it might even put a little money in your pocket.
I warn you, though, if you want to create an account, you MUST remember your password, which is a large hash and provided by the Steem system. There is no way to recover your password. They’ll give you the hash and you need to copy it and store it safely. I confess I didn’t get this part at first, and lost forever my account for “nickhodges” and had to come up with a different name (“TrenchantGuy”) to have an account. Silly me. (At least I’m not the only one…..)
So give SteemIt a try.