[Shitpost] Curating Content in the Philippines Tag

I’ve been here for more than a year and I’ve seen how the contents in the #philippines declined in quality. The activity of it’s community members decreased over the course of the crypto winter. There’s a lack of quality content being produced compared to what it was back when people were active. There’s hardly any real engagement going on within the community. Image on the right serves as my default thumbnail image.

To blame it on the crypto winter is only one aspect of the problem. I think it also had something to do with how influencers tried to gather more users for the blockchain. The sell was the Steem Blockchain being something similar to gold mine and it could help fuel a lot of community projects and personal agendas. It wasn’t far from the truth when actually. This was during the time when Steem and SBD were above 5$ USD still.

The common practice community mentors taught new users were to produce quality content. Write interesting articles, share talents, or just sharing about their personal lives. It’s a solid advice but not really suited for the intricate dynamics of the blockchain. Engagement is a crucial factor that determines user retention as far as I know.

It’s not enough that you’re content is good. You also need to make some effort to connect with other users that would be willing to know what you are passionate about. This is what mentors really lacked in the ph community. It’s difficult to teach how to engagement because it’s something that is practiced all the time and not just some one time compliment dropped on a post to fish for upvotes.

When the prices went down and people saw that the payouts were no longer worth the trouble they’ve put into their posts, things gradually declined from there. In my own bias, I didn’t feel this decrease in moral until I noticed that the active users whom I used to read their content suddenly dropped their activities on the blockchain.

I think setting up the right perspective and expectations would have helped a lot. For instance, trying to sell the blockchain as a money printing platform was a bad idea because it just encourages people to expect the blockchain’s value to be equivalent to the price tag of whatever it is currently in. Users expected that the people with high SP or the quantity of people that supported them wouldn’t fade once the crypto winter starts.

There was a time when I would read some facebook posts boasting post payouts from a blockchain they never really believed in more than just a place to print money. So where are these persona’s that were once prominent have gone to now? Most likely on another blockchain on rinse and repeat mode. While I can’t blame some users for having false expectations about this blockchain, I can’t help but think what it could have been if influencers were prudent enough to focus on strengthening community values that are beneficial to the blockchain.

Promoting ideas that connect users on a global scale. Through this blockchain, I got to meet a lot of community projects outside what my local community was interested in. It’s the people that made me stay and not the tag price of Steem or SBD. Most of my engagement happens on Discord communities I’ve connected to.

A lot of content creators that were hooked into the blockchain months ago didn’t have a strong foundation of communities to connect to. Only focusing on a few tags to expand their connections and this led to missing out some opportunities to find something meaningful to do in the blockchain. There are gaming communities, art, communities, music, and curation groups to choose from. But the local mentors failed in emphasizing this aspect.

For the record, I have accumulated SP over the past few months were everything was going down. I spent my time socializing before I got busy with hospital work and now I’m slowly picking up where I left off. There’s a hidden art to engagement and the value of a relationship isn’t measured by how much upvote you can get from the person you’re talking to. Sometimes a mere conversation could spark the next project you can do in real life or post.

Now I just see the Philippines tag littered with posts that are posted for the sake of posting. Maybe some activity, autoupvote advantage, and a scarcity of showcasing what the user is being passionate about. I appreciate the people that remained to use the Philippine tag sharing what they are really interested in talking about. I appreciate the people that put some effort into their posts or doing something good with their SP out there.

I appreciate the conversations I get with strangers that deliver some new perspectives from the world they live in. It is disappointing to see the lack of depth and character with the recent posts often published in the tag. It’s like reading insincere content. No passion, no brand, and no depth. For content creators that still bother to put more effort into their posts, my salute to you, you are rebels in this modern practice of posting.