I’m excited to be living through what is – more or less – the format wars for decentralized media. There are a lot of great ideas and blockchains out there, but like VHS and Beta, or HD DVD and Blue Ray…

THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!

I keep track of them on my Distant Signal website, so if you ever want a quick comparison, I’ve got a fun little chart with all the current Media Chains I know of that are available. I’m going to be adding @dtube tokens as soon as they are available to track!

Sadly, I had to delete Hyperspace today from that list after I received an email from their team with the news that they are ceasing operations.

It had a really nice interface and had a Universal Basic Income model where everyone would get an automatic amount of AMPs every so many hours. I forget what the frequency was, but it seems as though just giving crypto away is not enough to get bring it into circulation and increase use. There’s probably a lesson in there somewhere about the real world UBI experiments but I don’t know what that lesson is as of yet.

In any case, as these format wars run their course, we can see that even good ideas with decent designs can fail. The success of Steem is not set in stone and there are still quite a few competitors out there in the space of monetizing social media and art on the blockchain.

While it’s sad that we have lost a competitor in this space, this also represents a victory in the development of it. As the players are winnowed down and their mistakes and successes analyzed, the others will grow in strength.

Here’s hoping that Steem and its network of apps can fill the void left by Hyperspace and continue to improve.

Steem on!