You forgot to mention delegating your token SP to a me.excel account to be able to manage Steem VP and EXCEL VP effectively.

I agree the difficulty level is tough, and even before stepping into steem-engine.  

The choice though is either to stand still or continue pushing the boundaries and for that reason i'm for SMT and steem-engine.

Steem is way too complicated.

Everyone here is either already invested in cryptocurrencies and knows what they are doing.....or they really want to earn magic Internet money.

It's way beyond the casual social blogger who just wants to post cute selfies or whatever.
SMTs are for the most part really making it more confusing.
Take twitter just a short paragraph and a sentence when it came out. Its easier than email.
Or reddit, just type and hit enter.
Can't earn money, but who cares? Most people are earning waaay less than minimum wage.

We need a Steem Lite or a Steem Simple.

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> Online attention span has dropped from 12 seconds a few years back to only 7 seconds now. 

Nothing else to say

> I think it makes everything more confusing to the mainstream person and will mean less adoption, not more!

You are 100% correct. Even explaining all the economics of Steem itself is complicated

It would be nice if Steem went back to it's foundations and was honoring content based on it's value. Simple blogging is what brought me here but now I agree it is getting too complex. Content doesn't really matter and the use of bots has ruined the experience. It is like a library where the most successful books are the ones about the library. But I do see light at the end of the tunnel with the different niche communities starting. Value put on specific content in each and hopefully policing to stop abuse.
These different communities can be a gateway drug to Steem.

Congratulations @paulag!
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* Comments - Ranked 6 with 71 comments

im totally with you... all i can see atm was a lot of people started to power down their STEEM to buy this new  Frontendtoken , and they forgot they will loose RC too when they do it this way... so the complete system get wonky by going this way... I see also a small problem.. For my Post a i need to use  Frontend A ( or its # )  for the next a completely other one .. So this sets Borders in middle of STEEMIT, i dont know if i like this  but in my first thoughts i need to say .. NOPE i dont like it... I love the Community of STEEMIT ,  but all this selfmade Borders  will show up one thing... People will start to refund their  operation Delegations to get the SP back to power up their own Vote again because they will get less by  their own posts...  And try to invest it in all NEW WAYS... so what will happen ?? Yeah i think a lot of Actual Communities will die in this progress.  Yeah there will come a Community Reward POOL, but hey you need to pay a lot to get on this List  to have a CHANCE to pay out of it, so next stuff which is made to  DISS the small Communities because they cant efford the Payment to get on this lists... 

Yeah  so The Community showed hey STEEMIT wqe dont need YOU and the SMT we re going to make ourselfs Token and going forward so , ahm why we did this ???  

And yeah im using this frontends because  with only steem its nearly not worthy anymore to create a post because all are swopping 


STEEMIT i LOVE you but imm not okay with the momentum

While I really do want to see SMTs soon, I agree that the existence alone will not increase demand.
Steemians are mostly waiting for external hype while neglecting the usability of the platform.
Steem is too noisy to act as a backend and too complicated as a frontend.
To illustrate, I like to point to the fact that most social interactions are happening off Steem - on Discord.

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it is up to communities, go to steemmonsters website, pay 10$ with paypal and you have it all, that should be the message to your friend

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yes, I love how no one on the platform ever agrees on anything, isn't it wonderful  (-:

I hear what you say, that SMTs won't magically make things great if things are fairly lame here as it is.

Like you say, STEEM missed a huge opportunity, and continues to do so, by being difficult to access/start-up.    But not even that, even if it was only attractive to geeks, there would be more here... only 2400 dolphins after 3 years of existence??  If Steem was the place to be there would be millions of geeks worldwide here.  It just goes to show why STEEM flounders and is getting squeezed down to a pipe dream things will ever succeed.

Buy STEEM with a credit card ..... is this so hard to be achived?

Great points. Way Complex to get started. Way too high a learning curve..

Although this is where people might say _taking actual charge of your life takes effort_.

Some of the people who hate the effort also contain that Faceblog is not paying them to rent their eyeballs.

That said, I still think we need an easier way to onboard. I can't convince even one millenial to join up and those kidlets are tech savvy!!!

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Like many commenters here, I too believe that the frontends need to hide the crypto complexity from users until the user wants to see it. Signing up should be as easy as any other popular non-crypto website. 
In fact, it might even be easier since maybe the user already has a sign-in from another website they can use similarly to how "sign in with Facebook" works.
As for earning crypto bring a major drawcard, I don't see it happening without some big changes to Steem economics. Within communities, with better focused community UIs, the social might be enough of a drawcard.
Right now, earning from posts is done by inflation. There aren't many other internal member to member value transfers denominated in STEEM that encourage STEEM to stick around or be burned. There isn't the obvious "support my fave content creators" mechanism there are on twitch, YouTube or Patreon for example. I think they might arise in more social oriented frontends.

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A couple ideas.

When ready, give your friend a @blocktrades btc to sp address to power them up and send them to the nearest btm.
This is how I've made my buys.

Steem-engine, when it is ready, can fork off of steem, run their own witnesses, and viola!, the ninjamine and hard forks 17 through some of 21 are as if they never happened.
Stinc's abominable business reputation is no longer a dead albatross around our necks.

Smteee's come with the security of steem's 21 witness consensus.
Steem-engine currently lacks that.
SE tokens are partially contingent on the good faith of those building it, atm.
They go to zero without more development, but so does steem.

Crashing steem for a SE style take over may have been the plan all along.
That would help explain stinc's penchant for warmly embracing questionably known influencers that turned out to be bad actors, ie jerry, charlie, tdv(cleaned up his act, here anyways), among other lesser knowns, in order to increase the pump and fomo of the suckers.

I dont know how to ease onboarding beyond acquiring account tokens and setting up accounts yourself.

What smteee's and se tokens come with is the chance of getting in on a viral game.
Imagine if dungeons and dragons had in game gold, and every item, bags, staves, swords, spells, potions, etc, were uniquely identifiable and traded on an open market.
Totally already happening on next colony and splinterlands.

I just don't see actual investors, as opposed to fomo'd suckers, buying in until stinc's reputation is mitigated against.
The kneecappening was very effective.

I do think any price below .25usd is a buy, for me, but hope dies last.
I think we can get past the malignancy that currently has us down.

Blockchain will not go mainstream until the complexity abstraction. EOS has a new tool where user can sign up just like Instagram account.

It's called dapp service providers or just DSPs 

https://liquidapps.io/ is one example.

Wow, someone speaking her mind on steem. 

Most people will disagree with you, because they think 'download this app it will do everything and you earn money' is enough of an explanation for people. They will do fishy analogies like 'the driver doesnt need to know how the engine works'.  

It's obvious that adding another layer on top of it won't make it simpler, but hey, look at the way it's integrated in steempeak already, if most UIs adapt to this and make it a standard, you can't deny that it serves a purpose.

Steem-Engine is really cool, I love it and I see *some* potential, but I definitely agree with you. However, it's like I've been saying for a long time:

- We need to figure out **who** our audience are.

How are we promoting Steem and what type of people do we **really** want here? Are we going for mass adoption, (which would be literally everyone on FB, Twitter, Instagram) in other words, the "average" users or are people **still** trying to bring people on board with all the mumbo jumbo about Steem being a "decentralized platform" etc?

I mean, nobody cares about that except for the "underground anarchist-anti-government" type of people, but most people **on** Steem, seems to believe it's the best way to go...

Decentralised or not, the "average" people doesn't care. They want **simplicity**, and to promote Steem like a personal cash-cow that so many has done during these years have only **hurt** Steem.

That being said, I read the comment from @yabapmatt. A great comment, and it feels like we could potentially be heading towards that direction, but I guess it will take another 3 years or so before we're even close to something like that.

At the time I'm writing this, Steem is worth $0,23. 100% of all the Steemians **hate** the price because they have either lost some of their investments or they aren't being rewarded as much as when the price is high...

The funny part is, that these "average people" I've been talking about... They have **never** earned $0,23 for a post on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, so **anyone** interested in earning a little extra on the side, for doing the **same** thing as they've been doing for years on other social medias... Well, they wouldn't care much about the price being $0,23, because they would ultimately see it as a **huge** chance to earn something **extra**.


My two cents:
People fucked up a long time ago and Steem had to pay the price for peoples ignorance, their selfishness and greed. So, that behaviour was and has been slowly killing Steem ever since people started to behave like nothing except themselves mattered.

But hey, instead of doing something **real** to turn this ship around, we can just continue to flag our newcomers and people we don't like on a personal level for *"raping the reward pool"* and whatever, meanwhile we continue to shove those 100% upvotes up our own asses. Eventually, we might actually be able to buy ourselves lunch at McDonald's for about 100K steem.

- That would be fun.

That is why facebook is entering this space. The concept and the tech is great but the implementation of them sucks in all platforms. It's not the public that is lazy, but the entire user experience that's bad. 

Even if Facebook is encounter problems to implement libra. They have a clear idea that for mass adoption the wallet must be as easy as possible and payments and transactions as well. 

They will capitalize their token and network with every single person on their system for being simple with great user experience. They are looking at this like another feature and not a complicated concept. The complicated math should be on the backofice and the front-end should be clear and minimal to anyone understand it right away. 

If facebook is available to put their structure in place I hope by then steem and steemit take a time to review what they truly do wrong and don't be mad and try to figure out what was the problem in the first place. 

You know me, I think you're dead on with this analysis. But there is a deep and essential reason that it's right that a lot of your respondents aren't looking at or aware of, and I often can't determine which it is.

It's this:

Nobody wants your filthy money if they can't buy anything they want with it.

It's that simple. It's the point that we've been hammering on for years and yet which seems to be lost on developers and crypto cultists. Just because a "coin" exists doesn't mean that people will want it. Nor does it mean that they should want it. And what does it mean to have a "currency" that you can't do anything useful with, anyway?

---

Let's try a different script:

*User:* I really love this guy's art.

*Us:* What if you could tip them to show how much you like it?

*User:* Cool! But how?

*Us:* Find stuff you like on this site, hit the tip button, and voosh. Creator gets a little dosh.

*User:* How do I get it to give away?

*Us:* Well, you could just buy it. Or you can earn it yourself from folks by making good stuff they like or finding good stuff other folks want to see.

*User:* Neat! I can see the value! How do I get in?

---

And – that's the whole thing falls apart, because the developers of the Steem blockchain never wanted the above to actually happen.

After all, people can get clear utility out of that flow. Everybody involved knows what they're there for. There's no judgment if you're a creator and you want to pull the money out you've earned for being a creator because everyone involved want you to use that money. There is an implicit reason to invest real money if you want to, in order to be able to reward people who are making content you like (see Flattr). There's an implicit reason to create, to curate, to be involved.

And there has to be a near trivial, frictionless way to get on board with something as simple as a straightforward sign-up in a reasonable amount of time. The user has to get value out of the system from day one, hour one, minute two – real value, not necessarily monetary value. The user has to have a beneficial experience.

But that's not what people on the Steem blockchain seem to want in terms of user experience or intent.

SMTs don't actually bring useful things to the table. There's no real script that requires an SMTs you exists for user value to be created. The only thing that they seem to do is provide another venue for speculation, which does nothing for users.

And that's a shame. It could have been so different.

hear hear!

> Friend - “What the fuck Paula…. you must have nothing to do with your life…. that’s way too much hassle.”


so many chuckles. THIS is not simple and only committed people take it on... the average social media user is not committed and will not invest... great call-out paula! we need some simple on boarding and yes, an allotment for new users so they can participate here. we shouldn't expect them to invest at the start. 

in my case also, I don't know what's with those tokens. Unlike pal by @aggroed because I use it like in steemit. Unlike also by @dramatoken because if you called drama, it will give an upvote. But the other token I don't their purpose, maybe I just have no idea about it. I mentioned I didn't know because if we sell some token, there's no guarantee that someone will be interested and buy it.
just saying, I'm ignorant about tokens..

I think you are both right and wrong here.

Yes, using cryptocurrency (steem, tokens, bitcoin, whatever) is far too technical and complicated. This is a problem that needs to be solved.

And yes, at their current stage, steem-engine tokens are mostly just rearranging things rather than changing things.

But both of these are problems of a technology still in its infancy. The steem-engine tokens that will be successful will do two things: they will transact seamlessly and the will provide value to the user.

By transact seamlessly I mean that the whole conversation with your hypothetical friend will not happen. XYZ app wants to build a token? Great, do this one log in and all the rest is done in the background automatically. Every action will be a simple task the user takes and all the complicated technical stuff is handled for them. Just as I don't really need to know how the federal reserve moves checkbook money around and interbank overnight loans provide liquidity to front run check clearing to operate a bank account. Incidentally, this is also why I think steem will become a utility token powering the 2nd layer solutions. We don't use dimes to transact USD. We use a 2nd layer (maybe 3rd) solution of digital bank deposits to transact USD. 

And then there is the value creation issue. All value is subjective, and for a currency to have and keep value, it must provide a mechanism to transfer that value from party A to party B. The organizations that figure out how to provide value through their tokens are the ones that will succeed. #PALnet provides value to the steem community largely by weeding out the accounts that get in the way of value. #steemleo provides value to its members by focusing on investment topics. The ones that will become really successful will be the ones that offer subjective value to an external audience.

So yes, your conversation with your friend is the state of things today. But that's just temporary technological hurdles.

Steem and crypto, in general, are far from becoming mainstream. Shouldn't even be the focus right now. I'm more concerned about _distribution_. Keeping the people here help enough to continue doing what they do and being their friends and probably telling other people about this blockchain. Steem-engine is meeting that goal. On steem engine, new tribes are building their ecosystem. Most of it is myopic but it would be great to see a tribe do better, which cannot be ruled out, and seek to attract over users outside the steem ecosystem.

The crypto sphere is basically speculative. There are highly any genuine projects within this sphere, steem is not an exception. 

Steem is hard to get for a newbie and rightly so. This is not just a social platform, you have your wallet(money) in it and all these measures and protocol are not going to be simplified anytime soon, well except we start using some form of biometric security measure to access our accounts and funds.

I don't want millions of people and investment here with the mess we have. We need to decentralize further, have a healthier distribution, look at generating revenue (my preferred option would be ads) then maybe we will attract more eyes. But making things easier to understand is quite unlikely, not in the nearest future.

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With HF21 coming up and likely making the bidbot problem on STEEM even bigger than it is today, I think we have a golden opportunity for Scot tribes to make bid bot users as invisible on their sites as they do non-tribe posts. As such I feel Scot tribes may end up saving STEEM from going under in a spiral of bid bot use increase. 

At this moment I'm a bit torn as there is no fiction tribe yet, and palnet is nice as a demonstrator, but to general to gain solid adoption by those I follow. I really hope @blocktrades will find it to do [what is needed](https://www.palnet.io/blocktrades/@pibara/maybe-what-steem-really-needs-right-now-to-boost-its-ecconomy-is-a-blocktrades-shopping-basket) to create a more solid foundation for content oriented Scot Tribes. If something like that happens, I'll be powering down STEEM and powering up whatever fiction tribe token will be there to move towards. 

One of the big mistakes that the STEEM people keep making is putting investors first and forgetting the platform is useless and ultimately valueless without users. I think the comunication surrouding HF21 has shown us just how narrow the scope is with those concerned with the main STEEM currency. I feel that if DTEEM is to survive it will be because Scot Tribes (SMT are simply too litle too late right now if you ask me) help create a fibrant collection of user communities that can exist without a spoiled experience because of bid bots. But then, that does imply we all agree that bidbot usage on scot tribe tags is socially unacceptable.

I think that when HF21 hits I'll [try to use](https://www.palnet.io/flags/@pibara/proposal-palnet-bidbot-selfvote-flagging-week-juli-15-till-juli-21-please-resteem-this-post) my free downvotes for bid bot use on Scot tribe tagged posts.

Indeed. Everything gets more confusing each day for this 60 year old who is not tech savvy and who is also not the sharpest knife in the drawer. I am patiently waiting for everything to be simplified. I hope the day comes soon because I might not have much time left. 😊