STEEMIT2.0 : Is VOICE Going to be the STEEMIT Killer?

Finally, it seems STEEM has got some real competition now.

For about a year, speculations were rife that former Steemit CTO @dan, who is currently the CTO of Block One, may launch a new EOS blockchain based social media that could be much better than Steemit and hence was being touted as Steemit 2.0. The day has come today!

When I woke up today morning, the first thing I did was to sign up for the beta access of Voice.

The day before, I had discussed about some possibilities of today's announcment in my post here. Yes, the thing being touted as Steemit 2.0 has been finally introduced with this name Voice.

It is creating its own token on EOS blockchain named Voice Token which can be earned through interaction on its social network. But it won't be pre-mined. Every user will have equal influence to start with. There won't be any advertisements, bots and trolls on the platform. They are going to open user accounts of only real people after scrutiny. So no one can have more than one account on Voice.

Every new user will get a free EOS account with required CPU and RAM staked by Block One. Some VOICE tokens too will be airdropped for free. VOICE tokens will be needed to pay for "upvoting" a comment ...termed as "raising your voice". The tokens will be paid back (with some profit) if someone else choose to raise their voice more than yours. However there ain't much detail about this concept and token use case as of now.

Voice announcement video:

Could VOICE be STEEM killer?

IMHO, it's unlikely. Steem is already a matured and proven platform and moving ahead. But it's good to have some competition. This should make the Steem platform more agile and quick in development. It's the slow rate of development that has given opportunities to several other communities like Voice and Whaleshares.. I mean, if SMT were launched in time, communities like Whaleshares or Smoke probably won't had forked Steem.

Perhaps, Voice may become a different social networking model with no direct competition with Steemit. With no bots and a need for KYC to open an account, I think that platform already has some limitations. Although some bots are being abused on Steem platform, they do serve a purpose. Imagine no @cheetah or no !popcorn! And there won't be any option for creating a corporate page or account, an anonymous account for reporting something controversial or even using dapps.

Technologically, at present, Steem may have some edge over Voice but one thing shouldn't be ignored - Block.One is an ultra-rich company and we can expect a massive advertising campaign from it for promoting their platform. Dan Larimer had already said that they will be advertising as never seen before in the whole cryptocurrency industry. And it's a fact that a well advertised and publicised product sells better even though it's inferior than its competitor.

They have already pulled in Coinbase who is serving educating videos about EOS while rewarding users $10 worth of EOS for answering quiz based on those videos. It's possible that these videos may include Voice videos too in future.

So if Steemit wants to retain its numero uno position of blockchain based social network, they should fasten their seat-belts and speed up. Arrange some funds for increasing their marketing budget and improve the platform as quickly as possible.

After all, in this capitalized economy, competition is good for everyone!