I noticed this platform from the links that people kept posting on reddit so I decided to check it out. So far I've been favorably impressed.

First of all I like that Publish0x doesn't have its own token but rather proposes itself as a platform that can be used by altcoins to airdrop their tokens by gathering them in a pool and distributing them through donations. Users do not willingly donate and the incentive of allowing them to tip themselves if they also tip others it's well thought and it's a superior mechanism than the alternative platforms in crypto.

For example, on Steem and Hive what matters is how much you stake in the community and your vote will have a different weight depending on the size of your wallet. This, opens the door for all type of distortions. Users with large accounts voting just themselves, their friends or selling their votes and new users getting discouraged because so many decent posts were ignored and not rewarded while real garbage posts where earning hundreds of dollars and were even being featured on the trending page. I still remember when Ned Scott, one of the founders of Steemit, was interviewed live on bloomberg and the embarrassment on his face when they showed what was trending on the homepage of Steemit that day was priceless. A simple look at that homepage was enough to keep away all serious investors. 

This was also the byproduct of the distribution of tokens that took place with Steem. A number of users received what became hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Steem with the promise that they would help re-distribute them. However, they just used their position to make profits for themselves and further increase their influence on Steem. That was supposedly a decentralized community but truth is, a few accounts had disproportionately too much power and totally destroyed what was a promising platform. They had all they needed to turn Steem into a successful platform. In 2017, there was a lot of hype about ICOs and believe it or not but Steem was almost in the top 50 coins by marketcap. Tens of millions of dollars poured in with the promise of the release of Smart Media Tokens. So there were a lot of money going around but instead of developing new tools and improve the blockchain they did...I don't know what they did, they simply mismanaged all these resources and got nothing done. The imminent release of Smart Media Token was just smoke. For many people Steem died when Ned Scott sold his shares to Justin Sun, to me that was just a consequence of a decline that started in 2017 when Steem failed to deliver the Smart Media Tokens. 

Yet, I value that experience. I think Steem was a very interesting social experiment. There were some interesting gems in that sea of garbage posts. Users got together and formed communities and started providing all sort of services. There was a community called Utopian that helped many Open Source projects by providing financial support for activities such as copywriting, translations, artists and support for developers that were contributing to Open Source communities. For a few years some people were even able to make a living on Steem, many projects started there and it changed the life of many people. So, despite the decay in that community, there was definitely some good that came out of it. 

To me it was also impressive how a group of users decided to fork from Steem into Hive when they felt that their freedom of expression was being compromised when Justin Sun took over Steemit and de facto also the control over the Steem blockchain. Hive today is still very active, that community is more independent now and it's kind of self-funding through a proposal mechanism. There are many interesting things going on there but they still have some of the same issues that Steem had. The main one is that they use their own token and if you look at the chart you can see that after the initial pump, hive is struggling to retain its value. 

That is because despite the incentives that users receive when staking Hive, the inflation is still too high, new coins are minted everyday and many users just sell the coins as soon as they earn them because they don't believe hive will hold its value. To be honest, if I have to invest considerable amount of my time writing, I would not want to worry that the tokens I earn will be worth nothing in a month. Getting paid in more stable token it's very valuable.

I know I did not talk much about Publish0X but I hope I made clear why I like it. Basically it doesn't have the same elements that are causing so many problems in other communities. Steem and Hive are currently still going but at a much slower pace than what they used to. I welcome any new type of social media platform and if it allows us to earn some crypto even better!