One big Steem family

New Social Media platforms on a blockchain.

Search and replace?

Currently there are three new active Steem forks, besides Golos. There is WeKu, Whaleshares and Smoke. Golos (EN: Voice) is aimed at the Russian speaking part of the world and really became a brand on its own. Smoke is a Cannabis themed Steem fork. That has a very pleasant user interface. Whaleshares is a bit fuzzy to me, is it a Bitshares or a Steem fork, or maybe both? Currently still awaiting approval for signing up there. And then there is WeKu.

One strange thing about WeKu, besides from still showing a lot of Steem(It) references, is that it is a partly closed up project. Only one witness, software not available at GitHub and the internal market is not working. It looks very centrally controlled, so far, yet it should change within 3 to 6 months. It is working very fast though and Steemians will feel right at home.

Rigged to the bone

It seems to be very difficult for these kind of Social Media platforms to keep system abusers out. Maybe because most users really want to play fair, but forget that there are those who do not care about it. WeKu has a signup bonus that is used to start the internal economy. But it got abused heavily by a few members, using it to create a sharke status for themselves. Draining the reward pool massively now, making things even worse.

Of course when these members get exposed it is the fault of the others. The system should not have made abuse possible. It is a very sick state of mind where the abuser blaims the victim for making it easy to be abused. But, it happens everywhere, right? Still makes it wrong behaviour though. Yet hard to tackle. However I wonder why these signup protocols leave out a proof-you-are-a-human puzzle. Mobile phone numbers can be bought very easy and cheap bulkwise in some countries.

Competition?

For Steem none of the forks do seem to be real competition. Because of the massive fake account signups, for example, WeKu does not have many real active posting members yet. Also its look and feel is a bit like a budget Steem. The Smoke network has a more pro look and feel to it, that could work as a substantive system because its specific cannabis theme. Whaleshares is still a bit of a mystery to me, why does it excist, what is its purpose? Hope I can dig into that one soon.

WeKu does feel a bit like a second league Steem clone, but I still like posting there. For one because I actually do get rewarded for my work. Where at Steem I would have to advertise myself using voting bot services. One reason I started to pull out my Steem Power, because this made the platform less fun to use for me. And even though WeKu has an second league feel to it and already got rigged badly, it still feels like a fresh start.

More to come?

Probably there will be more forking Steem clones. Some will take off, many will fail, at least, that is what I do expect. For the part of themed forks I can actually see some reason that these might take off. Substantive Steem clones that serve a unique purpose, without being competition for Steem itself. Maybe even adding some usefull code for Steem itself.

Steem now has Resource Credits {RC}, that will balance itself out in about 7 days. Where it might be experienced as a painfull switch, being unable to interact with the Steem blockchain, it could be well worth it on the long run. Especially because it can prove itself to be a real effective measurement against bots, spammers and system riggers. That would mean Steem is still ahead of all those who forked off.

Smart Media Tokens

Another major difference between Steem, the original, and the forking clones, is the upcoming release of the Smart Media Tokens {SMT}. This is an opportunity for many members to start earning SMTs in different kind of sub-communities. Combined with the RC system working and keeping abuse to a minimum the SMTs will add another unique major feature. This will leave most of the forks far behind. Does not mean though they have no reason to excist.

Seems this is just the beginning of web3.0, the decentralized internet. And you and I are a part of it. Thanks to Bitshares, Steem and many others to come.

May the Cryptos be with us!

Clones, they are everywhere you see.

Image license CC0.