Thoughts on Crossposts, Reposts, and Evergreen Content
I have posted this image before on Steem. Am I a spammer now?
Imagine an art gallery that hung art in their windows, with the hope that it will draw people in, that they will have a positive experience, and hopefully purchase a piece of artwork, and better yet, return one day to repeat the process all over again.
Now imagine that same gallery, full of work that artists have put countless hours into, taking that artwork and putting it into a warehouse room in the back, where it was all no longer eligible for sale after seven days.
How many artists do you think would want their work hung in this gallery?
Now this isn't a 1 to 1 analogy because Steem isn't a gallery, and we aren't selling anything, but let's just look at some well known anecdotal realities. Tons of amazing content creators have tried Steem, but we retain almost none of them. I don't have concrete data to backup my suspicion, but I'd wager it has something to do with the situation we've all seen countless times.
New awesome content creator comes to Steem, is overwhelmingly warmly welcomed and showered with votes on their first post. Next post get's pennies. More pennies, more pennies, then suddenly a post that does REALLY well, more pennies.
This comes from the fact that Steem hasn't hit a critical mass of users yet for the curation system to function in a natural and organic way. The stake is still in too few hands. Curation groups and trails are a band-aid to this problem. People dedicate themselves to finding great content and rewarding it with stake that has been entrusted to them by stakeholders.
The problem with all this(IMO) is that it creates a bad user experience for the best content creators. Let's just be real about something...all content is not created equal. It's my opinion that it makes more sense to continuously incentivise the creators with the highest value content than it does to "spread it around to everyone". If we use our collective stake to keep the best creators here, we'll get "the rest" because they will come here to CONSUME content.
This one too
Coming to Steem to consume content in the past has been relatively pointless because there's not much in the way of actual curation.(Great stuff up, not as great stuff down in a decentralized consensus). There's a lot of other variables at play when it comes to what gets votes and what doesn't. That's fine, that's Steem, but now to the matter at hand...
I've been advocating for cross posting and reposting since before it was a thing because I don't believe we all as individuals should be the ones ultimately deciding what something is worth in the macro sense.
To put it more plainly, if you like it, vote for it, if you don't like it, don't vote for it, if you really don't like it, downvote it. That's curation working, but in order for people to be able to make that decision, they have to actually SEE and be exposed to the content as well as being given the opportunity to ascribe some value to that content whether positive or negative.
This is why crossposting and reposting, IMO is an absolute must for Steem to become a viable platform for people to want to share their content.
Steem is as far as I know, the ONLY content sharing platform that has this notion of content "expiring" from being able to receive rewards. Can anyone actually make a logical and reasonable argument why this makes any sense because I haven't ever heard one. The only justification I've ever heard is from a technical standpoint, which definitely makes sense, but crossposts and reposts negate the technical issue.
So now where is the logical stance against this? People will use it to spam? Umm...people have been spamming since the inception of Steem. If we let the spammers dictate what features we will have and what features we won't we're doomed. Attack the spammers, but an artist reposting work from months or maybe even years ago is not a "spammer". Please look at the trending page for OnChainArt. Does it look like a cesspool of spam and abuse? There is a mix of new, crossposted and reposted content there. Can you tell? Do you care?
If some artist made $5 a year ago and made another $5 today from different or the same users, is this harmful to Steem?
I seriously don't understand how this bad idea has been allowed to proliferate this long.
Quoting myself from a Discord chat
No matter what, crossposting and reposting or not, there will always be people trying to abuse this system. There is money involved so it is and will always be part of the system here. I can guarantee you that the people tasked with fighting abuse have always had plenty of work to do.
I don't particularly value uniqueness in and of itself. I also don't think blockchain as in the technology, has any sort of preference on whether content is unique or not. In regards to the usefulness of content on Steem to the overall macro system, in my mind it comes from it's potential to bring new users to Steem, to bring traffic to Steem, to promote Steem, etc.
The content being unique or not has no correlation to any of that. It's only the quality that matters in regard to the contents value to Steem.
This is my stance and belief on this and would greatly appreciate counter opinions or people voicing their agreement if you agree. I think we need cultural shifts here on Steem. Our failure to gain traction is not all about the lack of features.
Let me know your thoughts in the comments and let's start the conversation(or fight depending on your temperament 😁 )
See you all in the next post.
I've been using old artwork a lot. At first, I never did such a thing because I assumed folks would think I was being lazy... yet those same folks who at the time would complain about something like that, were sometimes using the same damn images from pixabay over and over and over. Dig for long enough here and you'll see hundreds of posts that have the same images from pixabay, published by many different people.
I'm thinking I've produced about 1000 images or more since being here. I made my own pixabay and sometimes I'll use these images more than once. Why not? If I pull up an old image, there's a strong chance my followers today are seeing it for the first time. It's not spam. Of course, if all I did was post the same three images constantly, people would lose interest in my blog. That would be a dumb move, so why would I do that?
Were you expecting to see Wicked Warren today? No. Chances are that's the first time you've seen him. Wicked Warren might want to be a character in a future story someday. Do the creators of the Simpsons start from scratch with every episode and create a new cast? No. They use what they have.
I've kept a folder with all my Steem post images for organizational purposes that has numbered folders within for each post. I'm just under 400.
If my content was tracking Bitcoin charts or talking about politics or the weather, I could totally understand this. But there's definitely A LOT of content where this makes absolutely no sense. It's time for us to stop acting like a tiny little village talent show and get serious about being a place for the worlds best creators.
Must be nice to be organized. I have a folder for each season. Everything is just thrown in there. My WIP folder has thousands of files that all say wip03012020 or whatever date it was when last saved. Works for me though. If I'm working on textures for game mods or something, I'm far more organized, but that world is separate from this one. This world is fast paced so I cut corners to save time, but I digress.
This:
I also agree with that. It's supposed to be a lot of work to gain traction in this online arts and entertainment world as an independent creator. There's no such thing as a participation award. The early days are always hard. Even in the music world, an artist or group will release a song. It might be a hit locally at the bar or club, or maybe got 2000 listens online. Then they manage to sign a deal with someone. They release that same song but this time around it has millions of youtube views and the downloads show no sign of slowing down.
A noob showing up here today should know their content is valuable and it's not the end of the world if things don't go right the first time. Look how well things go for some folks when they take something they knew was fire and rework it into something like a Showcase Sunday post. Galen is sitting up there nice and high on the trending page today and totally deserves it. Same thing happened to you I think the first week we all tried it. I'm kind of rambling and all over the place but I'd cringe each time over years when I'd read a disgruntled Steemian saying the content here sucks. No. The content is great. The curation sucks. Things are really starting to get better now though. Today's trending page 'all posts' on Steemit was solid. Sorry for the ramble, dude. Too much coffee.
To be entirely honest, as an experienced online creator: the early days/weeks/months rewards on Steem are an utopia.
One must have built years of following online to come anywhere close to that when starting a new profile on a platform or a new site. On Steem, one not too shabby
introduceyourselfpost... BOOM!Next few OCD upvotes (pre-communities) and few curie upvotes. TRIPLEBOOM!
Most people who create elsewhere will never earn in first 12-18 months combined what an average steemian can make in first 2-3 months. Then, when elsewhere a profile and traffic start to grow... on steem one risks finding the vacuum of merely minimal support trails. Everywhere else it's usually at least 12-18 months of hard work to grow a profile to a degree of support and many give up again in that time. Here, it feels the curve is inversed and thus wrong.
We've seen way too many solid creators disappear because of that.
!ENGAGE 30
Many become confused or something. I've said this before but for me personally, I want to sell out a stadium. I'd love it if this place had hundreds of thousands of consumers with tiny 1 cent upvotes. Produce my content, get 30000 'likes' much like a Youtube video, then feel like it was a job well done. The confused members here seem to only want that one big whale vote. Instead of selling out a stadium, they're performing for that one guy in the front row. For some, they only came for 'rewards' and their content is just filler. If some of these folks printed off their post and tried to sell it on the street in paper form, they'd be better off just sitting down with a cup, asking for spare change. Nobody would buy that shit. The real artists and real writers, the ones who work for eyes and hope for votes, they're the ones we need to focus on.
@nonameslefttouse you have received
30 ENGAGEfrom @fknmayhem!View and trade the tokens on Steem Engine.
If we find a way to create indefinite payouts for evergreen content, that will be absolutely massive. How do you think cross-posting can help with this?
A cross post under the hood creates a new post on the cross posters account. There is a default beneficiary split with 90% going to the original poster, 5% going to the cross poster and 5% going to the community account.
So if you cross post a post that is past the 7 day payout it re-opens that post for rewards for another 7 days.
Yep, OK, I understand that. I guess it can help and it's a good way for some experimenting to happen to see how well it can work.
At the same time, I am thinking that it dilutes the original post - meaning that the rewards are now spread across multiple posts. If all rewards are shown in the original post, then other people can see that this post got quite a lot of votes on it so they will be more likely to open and read it.
Also, it requires that someone cross-posts so that a new 7-day payout window is started.
Some time ago someone created a website that introduced a way to vote on Steem posts indefinitely. The way they made it work is by creating a new comment from the post author, and placing the upvote on the comment. I guess this is a workaround that solves a lot of problems.
I think that the word spam refers to copying text and to multiple publishing. If you write different articles, but using your own pictures, the same ones, this cannot be called spam.
Today, you have one vision of the plot, tomorrow, perhaps you would like to present this work in a different fantasy. This is called creativity.
I being using crossposting but actually came to a conclusion that it doesn't to much sense.
Because there will always be abusers and for personal posts if we resteem to blog all people can view it. To promote friends or good posts, we have always the possibility to make a post promoting the user and not just a post with a phrase that could say nothing..
Thank my view, I guess crossposting will not have a long life
well to play devil's advocate, for most users on Steem a "crosspost" doesn't appear as a post at all, it is just a text link to another post. Only on steempeak does it actually appear as a post, and steempeak is still only a fraction of the daily users that steemit has. It really isn't particularly surprising that people are flagging cross posts. Put yourself in the shoes of a steemit user (I know, those are painful shoes to fit into). An author you follow has published six posts into your feed, five of which are just links to the first one. How is that not spam? Do you really think a text link to another post is deserving of upvotes?
Well, that is all about the current implementation. If Steemit and other frontends adopted Cross posting this argument disappears. On the other hand, I agree with SteemPeak moving forward with their own features and not waiting on Steemit. They'd be waiting forever.
In any regard I'm talking more about this in terms of the attitude towards it vs the current state of adoption on frontends, so on that point you're right.
Off topic in a way, but not, but is, but isn't - but hey, you asked for input...
Make something long the lines of capthca a requirement to upvote or downvote.
It solves all the bot/circle jerking autovoting, and means people have to make the effort to support (or criticize)
Using you SP, to 'support' or criticize, require no effort - or cost.
Making people 'work' to support makes it all very much more organic.
Use technology to enhance the human the experience, instead of letting technology mold us...
It sorts the wheat from the chaff, the lazy from the intentional.
How about this, seeing that this is the third time I spotted you suggesting something that you have absolutely no idea about, how about you avoid the lazy, how about you ignore the No Effort Support and Critique? I'm not saying I'd do that, but it might work for you, and you get to be in control of the chaff vs wheat, win win, no? I'm curious though, isn't it kinda, IDK, odd, that no one has thought of this genius "solve all the bot/circle jerking" stuff? I mean people have been trying to solve that problem for years, and guess what, you polished the theory in what? A brief stroke of genius while you were forced to Captcha before you could praise in the comment section some obscure blog that detailed how FIAT is not real money?
There is definitely a lack of focus on quality contributor retention. The organic distribution is not sufficient for regular, high quality creators to grow a lasting interest in the platform.
And that's also damaged by the focus on spreading to as many accounts as possibly. Currently with lower activity and token value, the spread of especially curation teams is rather wide but as soon as there's more activity again, most will focus once more on making sure that new members are found and recognized. Which is great, but what happens after some months of contributing or reaching a certain reputation level? They're left out and unless they've found regular support of a whale or some orcas by then...
Interestingly enough, I recently read a prolific curator and supporter of steempeak's crossposting feature state they do look at how much the original post already earned. I had ambiguous feelings about that because it felt as if earnings define whether they appreciate a post or not. That's not going to help retention of quality contributors either. Besides... does it really matter? EIP introduced a matrix to avoid absurd earnings and keep lowly appreciated content (or farmed/spam content) lower in rewards.
I will have to reread why there's a payout window because I honestly can't remember why or even if a reason was given. That's another thing I'd really like to see the back of.
I'm not sure if I will actually get around to doing it though as I have a lot of 3d and not enough time XD
Few months ago I took a break from steemit because I was barely earning anything. Recently I returned determined to try this again. I think that crossposting and different communities should help a lot of people. So far for me it is not working- my best pieces that took months to create are earning pennies and my followers are dead. But it is not necessary a bad thing. I don't want to quit steemit for good so I will have to adapt. Perhaps in the future I will buy some steem and focus on curating content instead. after all consumers are needed as well.