So another Steem monsters season is ending in approx. 8 hours. I think i can honestly say that im slowly starting to lag behind the other players, overall.
Ive probably mentioned it a million and one time already how i go about playing Steem monsters and what my “sale” tactics are.
Unfortunately i knew that i couldnt maintain my gains at the same levels indefinitely with minimal investment in my decks. Last few seasons i would regularly finish at Diamond 1, but i dont think i will manage to reach that rank this time around.
I would even do the dailies at higher ranks then this season which meant fewer cards every day. With all that i had a streak of bad luck this season so i barely managed to sell 10 STEEM worth of cards across both accounts. (Probably the worst ive done so far) And that includes rewards from the previous season end.
Ill try and push up a bit on the ladder to at least increase my rewards a bit for this season although i dont have high hopes pulling anything big. Been having diminishing luck ever since the legendary summoners drop that treated me very well, if i may say. 😛 hehe
Oh and one more thing to add for SM players. If you do pull something tomorrow dont sell it right away. You never sell cards when a large number of them reach player collections. The price drops really low, really fast and bounces back after a day or so. If youre selling, its best to sell after the initial card dump. And yes this IS card advice. 😛
Ill see you folks around and good luck to everyone with the draw.
I busted my butt yesteday with the Dtube review for Oracle-d that turned out to be a bust since the review wasnt “professional” enough. Prolly was a bit too negative now that i think about it. haha No matter!
Today is a new day.
For those of you that have missed it STEEM has been listed on Huobi exchange with a USDT pair. Which is always nice. Thats probably why we are seeing a pump the last day or so.
If id have to guess id say that the exchange might be pumping the price a bit to get some traders hooked on the token early on. Just a guess ofc.
Id love to see STEEM and 0.4$ but its anyones guess if we can sustain the price growth. Usually STEEM drops off pretty fast after a small pump.
But im not a market analyst so im not pretending to know the movement of the market. Im just going off of what ive been seeing lately. Call it anecdotal. 🙂
The best thing about this listing is that we got a Tether/Steem pair. Thats amazing news especially in a volatile bear market when you can easily move your STEEM into a stable coin and alleviate risk easily.
Will i use Huobi?
Probably not, since i find centralized exchanges for most part being in the game of extortion and borderline criminal activity. Having a net negative effect on the crypto ecosystem. I dont deny that we “need them” right now, but that doesnt mean i need to like them.
So… @oracle-d decided to create another task for us Homo Steemiens to write about. You can read more about it here so i dont go on needlessly. LINK: https://steemit.com/social/@dapplovers/review-a-social-dapp-and-earn-rewards-ft-state-of-the-dapps
Theres going to be enough needless text below.
I was deliberating with myself for a while as to which Dapp i should choose for review. Yesterday i reviewed Trybe (EOS) and i found the current state of it, in reviewer terms (or 6th grader terms), to be “blagh”. Few days before that i reviewed the new Whaleshares look. This time i was going to be smart about my pick. Maximize what i could earn from the review by picking a dapp with a ton of Nedelegation that will reward me for being a jolly good sweet talker.. That is why i picked:
Dlive!
oh wait. whoops
No, no. Its Dtube, im picking Dtube.
The youtube of STEEM with a capital “D”. “D”, because you know they’re packing, good ideas.
Anyways… The review, um.
There are a few reasons why i picked Dtube. For one, its one of the most resource intensive projects on the STEEM blockchain that has an extremely ambitious goal of becoming competitive in the global market of video sharing platforms. This is something that i actually think Dtube could achieve.
We have seen time and time again that any video sharing platform that would even try to challenge Youtube would fail tremendously. They would fail for the simple reason of not being to take off because of the magic circle of: Creator-consumer-advertiser.
All 3 need to exist on the platform, for a platform to take off, be sustainable, but unfortunately no other platform could achieve the trifecta no matter how much they would reduce their cut of their revenue.
Dtube is different, not to go into a lot of detail, because it uses the power of the STEEM blockchain. There is no complete dependence on advertiser money and the wealth distribution is such, that while in “legacy markets” the earning potential existed only for the platform+Creator, with STEEM consumer is added to the mix. Monetizing their attention and engagement. But you already know this so lets get into something else. The user experience.
Oh boy.
Content placement.
Ok. If im being completely honest, i have never in my one year using STEEM clicked on Dtubes “Hot/Trending” page. Not one time. And im someone that (from another account) uploaded dozens of videos to Dtube and was using dtube almost daily for 6 months. Still, never once did i look at the trending page. Ill try to explain why that is as simply as i can.
When the content placement depends on vote cast by “1 person + DTube”, then what users of your site are seeing isnt “the wisdom of the crowd” on the trending page but rather the_autovoter_ preferences of a whale and the continuity rewarding tendency of the DTUBE curation team. In a way, there is more centralization in what im being told to watch on Dtube then there is on Youtube.
And this is not something that is hard to change. Dtube has control over how it wants to show its content.
Design.
There is really not much to say here. The design is basic. As i said in the intro, i made a Trybe review yesterday and i pointed out a few things that bothered me. The site itself had some terrible design ideas, was extremely convoluted and it ran poorly. Dtube does not run poorly and is not convoluted, on the contrary, but it does look extremely basic and does a poor job explaining what anything is about.. Take this for example. Dtalk-Push my Dtalk key on Steem.
A person clicking on the Dtalk tab will see this and think:
What is Steem? What is Dtalk? What conversation?
Its very unintuitive and even though you could say that Dtube is early in development, the fact remains that you can always add a few sentences of explanation. That excuse does not hold.
That is something i dont only see with Dtube but rather where ever i look in the crypto space.
Not considering what a new user sees/understands when they are introduced to new information.
I could point out a few other things but its just the same criticism that stems from us forgetting what a new user experiences once they arrive to STEEM.
Mowing lawn!
Folks would probably assume i would talk about the videos that are “gone with the wind” in a few weeks, but theres really nothing to say. @johalfiles (a whale that upvotes Dtube content) a few weeks ago pointed out in the Dtube discord that exact thing and the reply was basically: “It is as it is.”
The problem is that folks dont understand that video hosting is about the most expensive thing there is online. While there are ways for you to keep your videos online indefinitely by running your own IPFS node (my knowledge is limited there) most creators wont know how to do such a thing so providing that service on platform would be a great way for Dtube to gather some funds if they explained whats going on with your videos (when uploading) and provided an easy way for you to keep your videos indefinitely (for a fee) without having to educate yourself on IPFS hosting and every other single thing that has to do with Dtube. The name of the game is not Football, ole ole, we are the champs. The name of the game is: “How to explain complex topics in the simplest of ways”.
There is really not much else to say here. Uploading works pretty well and is about as fast as uploading to Youtube. The video quality is inferior to youtube but you dont really notice it most of the times. When was the last time you used 4k on youtube? Im assuming theres a dtube node somewhere close to Croatia since i have no problems viewing any videos.
At this point the success of Dtube is pretty much dependent on the success of STEEM. The time of the Dapps has not arrived yet and the majority of investment is still going into “infrastructure”.
Example: Projects like LISK are 38th in market cap (10 above STEEM) and i dont think there is a single person using any of their dapps. _I looked into it._ Once the market matures im certain that many projects that arent driven by hype but rather user numbers will start getting a lot of attention from investors, Dtube among them. The focus will eventually shift towards “what has real world application and what do users want” instead of
“i got this cool idea!”
Substratum had a cool idea.
And thats about it for this review. Thought i should mix it up a bit.
I think we need to be realistic at all times. We hype up everything and partake in tribal behavior without ever taking an objective look at the limitations and the potential of a project. Realizing the limitations and potential is extremely important in cases like this. @ned dropped a million STEEM delegation on Dtube.
Was that foolish?
No. Because i dont think Ned saw Dtube “changing the world”. He saw that small advantage i talked about in the beginning existing that could make Dtube a “contender”.
Dtube cant re-invent the wheel but it sure can rock the boat.
Conclusion
I give Dtube a rating of π/fleml. Read what i actually think. lol.
And there you have it folks. Let me know what you think. Was i too harsh, was i not harsh enough. Ill take it on the chin.
Few days ago @anotherjoe pointed me towards Trybe as another site where i could post my stuff and do all the fine things you do on sites similar to this. I say “sites similar to this” because today i read a comment made by @officialfuzzy on Whaleshares that said this:
p.s. you will not find blogs from me on this site (Whaleshares) as it is not a blogging platform in the end vision. once we are out of beta people will understand.
After that comment i went on to read the Whaleshares whitepaper and i still didnt see Whaleshares being something more then a social media blogging platform. But! Since Fuzzy wrote that, i will henceforth use the adjective “similar” to describe what im talking about as to stop myself from being wrong and lacking in understanding. lol.
Anyways…
I tried out Trybe and right off the bat i ran into a number of things that annoyed me. There were art assets overlapping, the screen load was choppy and parts of the window would move up and down for no reason. The page never loads all at once but rather in parts.
Two screenshots of the same page 2 seconds in-between. Art asset placement seems very different.
Looking at the initial screen and menus, everything seemed extremely convoluted and instead of me being able to find my blog right away, they placed “job board” on the front page and your blog link is placed somewhere inside the side menu. The right side menu, not the left one.
Even when you get to your blog page theres more clickable links and windows that you can watch slowly load by clicking them. Everything is just too large and hard to navigate and theres at least 40% clickable links that shouldnt even be there that are simply cluttering the UI.
Did i say how annoyingly slowly the pages load? They even change color when they load lol.
Want to see some more dumb design decision?
Here you go
Which designer (and mind you the site hardly looks like its in a alpha state) thought it would be a good idea to have so much spacing between comments that only two 10 word comments fit on my whole screen? You can literally park a bus in the space between those two comments…
Actual bus caught parked in the Trybe comment section.
Even making a post feels strange. Theres a review process so you always feel like someone is watching. The always present support window doesnt help with that feeling. I dunno, i just dont feel comfortable writing there.
When you do post, your post can be found in 3 states. Published, in review, draft. Click and wait through more page loads to find where you post is at. I counted.. Takes me about 3 seconds to load and i have super fast internet.
There are some rules to follow and im assuming they check the content before allowing you to post something. Hello censorship!(im tempted to try and see the limit of what youre allowed to write about.) You have to meet the 300 word minimum requirement and you have to put a featured image or they reject the post. Why they couldnt simply automate that the text cant be posted if those two requirements werent met so i dont have to wait for the review, is beyond me. I guess they dont want unwanted content on their site.
Browsing content itself is unintuitive as and of course its tied into the slow page loading time so i didnt even bother trying.
And there you have it. Pretty disappointing experience i probably wont repeat.
PS: Im not someone that will speak negatively about a platform because i might hold STEEM or WLS instead of EOS. I would have very much wanted Trybe to be another place to post on and learn new stuff but unfortunately the user experience is simply bad.
Lately i have been having trouble keeping my voting power from draining fast. At one point i dropped to under 60%. You work hard to build up your few cents never to see your full vote drop.
I was supporting a few folks via SteemVoter that post multiple times a day and my VP was falling rapidly.
I tweaked a few things and i seem to be recovering my VP slowly. The problem is that i cant know for sure how many times someone will post a day so i would love to see @steemvoter / @buildteam add an option of being able to choose how many times a day my vote goes out.
That would allow much more customization and a better experience overall.
Maybe you want to vote someone always 100% no matter what. Great. Maybe you want to vote someone 2 times a day for 100%. 4 times a day at 50%.
An option like that would allow us to have more control over our voting power and that is something that i would most definitely like to see.
You could even monetize added functions like this. Provide the basic service to everyone for free, but charge a few Steem a month for a more customized experience.
Im a relatively small account and my curation is just a small part of my income here, but im sure there are large curator accounts that would love having a higher level of customization and would probably pay for it. The feature i mentioned is just one among few that could be added to the payed package.
Last few weeks i have been grinding hard as some may call it. A week ago i ran into @scripsio which is a blog site that utilizes Steempress to send your posts to the Steem blockchain. Not only is it so much easier to write a post there due to the superior text editor, since it uses Steempress i almost doubled my weekly Steem income simply from Steempress votes.
I mean, its still not crazy numbers, but when youre stuck at 20 cents per post and then you jump to $1, suddenly you feel super important. (not really lol)
Even though i basically blog for fun (and dream whale dreams haha) i still try and find as many ways to increase my payouts.
Because…. Is that not a smart thing to do?
I delegate to @wherein (great project worth a look) that upvotes my posts. I delegate to @partiko (we all know partiko) that are a bit stingy with votes but they drop occasionally. I delegate to @steem-ua for some more votes and now @steempress.
At this point im pretty sure i covered all projects that exist on the Steem blockchain that will upvote my daily drivel. haha
On Whaleshares its a bit of a different story since the earning potential right now is much higher from blogging there and folks are a lot more generous. Upvotes flying left and right.
Steem is starting to be about things other then blogging, which is great, but its still nice that there are projects like these that i listed that will give you a small boost from time to time.
And there we go… My obligatory post for the day. I guess it was about something after all..
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Haha. STEEM got poor gains these last few days compared to other tokens (I think we didnt even outperform BTC) and when the dump hits us we lose 11%. Good thing im starting to diversify my portfolio, moving some of my STEEM to other projects to reduce some of the risk. STEEM just seems to be slowly slipping. Outside the pump we had a few weeks ago when Bithumb opened transfers again, STEEM has mostly followed the rest of the market, but with poor gains and sharper drops.
March is a few days away and im hoping, finally, we will hear some SMT news. They promised the testnet on March 1. and as much as im skeptical that Steemit.inc will deliver, im hopeful just the same.
State of things.
I promised myself 3 things when i bought STEEM.
I will not hold Bitcoin!
I will not sell for fiat!
I will not cry if i lose all my money!
Haha.
So far im standing strong although every market shift feels like someone is poking me with a hot poker since i know im missing out by not doing smart and obvious trades.
Oh well, cant wait for another slow build up and sharp drop. Kudos for @enforcer48 for calling it. haha.
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