The word 'clout' has increased in popularity lately, google's definition of it is: influence or power, especially in politics or business. E.g. "I knew she carried a lot of clout". When I first started hearing of the usage of this word was in the streaming communities, especially "IRL streaming" where the streamers would just stream themselves and their daily activity. Some were more entertaining than others and some got in the game early and evolved it over time to become really entertaining.
As a streamer that would either use the Twitch or Youtube platform the word clout was often used in context of the amount of viewers or popularity the streamer had. Often times if you were a really big streamer and say you had friends that were interested in entering the same space, your popularity would give them a kickstart by asking your viewers to follow x account on Twitch or other social media platforms and the influence of that would help new streamers get started and maybe find fans/viewers that would stick around in the long term.
Here is an example of a recent clout effect where streamer Ice Poseidon let's two users from Instagram show their profiles on his live stream to 10k viewers and see their reactions as their instagram profiles would blow up with new follower notifications. The part I'm talking about occurs at the 9th minute in the video. (condenser doesn't read timed links yet AFAIK)
Now while this is all cool, getting a lot of followers may be the end game on these platforms. They all rely on ad revenue so the only way these streamers are going to make any bank will be by grinding it out like everyone else did, unless you were already famous and popular that is. All that will be on a whole new level with Steem.
Imagine we already had millions of users, distribution of stake was great. 100k accounts all with 1k SP giving out $1 votes, how would that change the game you ask? In many ways that you and I can even think of right now. One thing about this tech that many don't realize is that right now we are still in the very early phases. Andreas Antonopoulos once mentioned that in the early phases of this revolutionizing tech we will constantly attempt to re-invent the wheel the same way people did way back when the internet was still early. "Hey we will be able to use the internet instead of phone lines, let's make something for that", yet the tech couldn't completely cover that yet and internet speeds were not as great as we wanted them to be, but that didn't take long and it changed. Same thing goes for video to video connections, live streams, conference calls or this facecam thing people so lazily named. The continuous evolving tech made it possible. Did it take 10+ years? Sure but who cares, we got it now and phone companies have had to give up and go into the internet provider business. Right now we are still in that phase here on Steem too, we attempt to re-create already existing popular apps in different ways on our blockchain and even though those have great shot at becoming popular not just because of the reward pool but censorship resistance, mathematical safety of you owning your account and all kinds of reasons. Will this be what will bring Steem to the masses though? Competing vs already existing giants? Who knows, it's hard to tell, often it feels like the already existing giants keep constantly shooting themselves in the foot as if they've already invested in Steem.
The clout game on Steem will be completely different because those 100k followers with 1k Steem you have won't just be able to support you with follows, donations and attention, they will be able to also reward you directly with immutable rewards. Even if you become a streamer that everyone hates and only a handful of people enjoy, even if all dapps ban the user from their platform, IPFS and blockchain will make it possible for that user to always exist and continue existing on our platform. Sure it could have an influence on the streamers income, but they will never be able to remove your already earned value. Your earnings won't just go from x to 0 in one day cause the advertisers did not like you talking negatively about their product thus forcing the streaming platform to ban you and instantly deplete your earnings cause you'll still have SP if you've believed in the currency and can earn ROI in many different ways.
Steem is a completely different beast, and although at this point in time we keep attempting to create better versions of centralized apps or games, it won't be long until people start coming up with games that would have never been a viable option or could have worked on advertiser focused revenue platforms. The reason I'm really excited about games is because social media platforms are hard to let go of for a hard working content creator, they've already been through the grind to get to where they are today. Instead they will keep living in fear and being very careful of what they say in their videos and live streams as to not get the wrong people angry or by accident do something against the ToS. Content creators will have their freedom to do whatever they want to here and the outcome will hopefully be much better than what currently exists. We'll just need the right amount of users to get the ball rolling and that shouldn't be too difficult in the next few years considering the advantages we already have.
