I'm recently home from #SteemFest and it cemented in my mind just how much promise SteemIt has. The community is incredible, so dedicated and, as @andrarchy talked about, full of future-oriented people. We have people of all kinds, a huge amount of development going on both technical and social. Everyone present wanted Steem to succeed and were willing to work to make it happen. But I can't shake this feeling...
If Steem is so Amazing, Why Do We Keep Hovering Alongside Dogecoin?
For the last few weeks, the Steem market cap has been above, below and never far from the market cap of Dogecoin. And that's with ~90% of Steem locked up in long term smart contracts, Dogecoin is fully liquid and has no artificial way to increase the apparent cap, you can see that in how Dogecoin has considerably higher trading volume. Similarly, as you can see below, Google searches for Steem have been comparable to Dogecoin for months, even the spike in interest during July didn't bring us much above it.
Of course, long term Steem has had trivial social awareness or "mindshare" compared to Doge, which exploded in 2014 but is now by all accounts completely dead.
I invite you to visit the Dogecoin subreddit. The most popular topics are about how dead the place is, and reminiscing about the good old days when they used to sponsor racing drivers and bobsled teams. How is it that SteemIt seems so alive (despite the price) while actually we have less search traffic and less trading than a seemingly dead currency with little if any technical advantages over those competitors from which it was cloned.
Wow Such Community
The one thing that Dogecoin had going for it was a really vibrant community with a distinct culture and a lot of optimism. The tipping culture permeated the entirety of Reddit for a little while, and they actually had a conference which was larger than SteemFest. It was held in San Francisco in 2014, and entry was free. Around 300 people turned up.
The motivation for this post is that I don't want to be under any illusions about the likelihood or inevitability for Steem to succeed. Dogecoin seems to be a lesson that a vibrant community isn't necessarily enough. We have other examples such as BitShares which show that technology may also not be enough.
Why Will Steem Succeed Where Dogecoin Failed?
* Note: Truthfully, I don't think I need convincing after writing this up. This post is just to explore the possibility that we've gotten caught up in our own little fad, as it's something which happens all the time, and I'm sure that those looking in from the outside may see us that way.