I welcome this conversation and have some points to add.
First of all I am not a developer, so that makes me simple minded. In addation I have no $$$ to invest. I have also NOT powered up everything all of the time, in fact I have sold some steem and sbd.
A recent analysis that I carried out shows that success on steemit is NOT dependent on SP owned and there is a greater correlation between Reputation and account growth than SP and account growth. ( even though I am simple minded I understand that correlation is not = causation)
I have put serious effort and time into Steemit and feel I have been rewarded and my expectations have been more than filled. I believe that steemit does offer the FREEDOM you have mentioned above and part of the problem is not Steemit, but the people using it.
Distribution is a problem, and the initial distribution is what caused it, but two tiers are being created and here is why I think it is happening.
A new person joins steemit, thinking they can make money posting content rather quickly. their expectations are not met and they leave steemit. Retention is only about 12%. If only 12% of people stick with it, and allow themselves the time to grow their reputation and their account, then there will always be an uneven spread because 88% of accounts will never grow. What would be interesting as an analysis is to exclude the 88% of users that dont bother putting in the effort from data and then look at the distribution.
Simple an all as I am, I don't think its hard to understand that if only 12 % of registered users are actively using steemit and trying hard, the the wealth will remain within this 12%
Therefore I would say that Steemit need to address retention, not distribution.
The bigger issue for me is corporate governance and controlling power being in the hands of a centralized organisation (Steemit Inc). I am actually looking at misterdelegation today, but when the CEO of Steemit Inc, abuses his own power and use Misterdelegation to upvote his own comments then there is a serious corporate governance issue.
Steemit Inc is a private centralized company. Here lies our problem. Lack of corporate governance, leadership , accountability and a show of continuous 'self supply' and insider trading. Where else would this be accepted????????????
Thanks for reading the opinion of a simple minded but successful steemain......Power to the People - Steem on
Hey @paulag! Thanks for jumping in! :-)
You know I'm a fan of your work, so it's great that you add some of your knowledge here.
That's great. Still in order to grow repuation what you need is visibility. What do you think is the best way of providing new accounts with more attention? Do we have to improve curation towards smaller accounts?
12% is really heavy! How could we close the gap between expectations and reality? Is it an educational problem we might address already during the onboarding process, e.g. providing more tutorials?
Wouldn't a better distribution help to improve retention after all? Or is it just an expectation management issue?
With regards to Steemit Inc I actually don't have a really deep insight into how much influence they effectively have e.g. when it comes to decide over new hardforks. We would have to ask the witnesses. @lukestokes mentioned this being a possible issue during his interview with David Pakman. So I guess there are some valid points. They may not have any intentions to abuse their status, but the fact that they could might scare some people here.
By the way Ned removed his self-vote, so I think it was a mistake using the company's account in that situation, but he corrected it then.
Power to the people, haha! Yeah :-)
why are people replying on Steemit to grow their visibility? On steemit we have the opportunity to share our posts on other social media platforms and generate our own traffic and our own following, but steemit is not being used that way. If you make a post on Wordpress, do you expect wordpress to market it for you? yes you can get followers via wordpress and you will get a ping or notification when someone you follow makes a post.
Why should steemit provide new accounts with more visibility? Having worked online now for over 10 years I have had to grow my own following using social media marketing. If you open a shop, you will advertise it right? its not steemits responsibility to provide marketing or traffic to YOUR content. Authors need to take responsibility for their visibility. The organic steemit markets is what? 65K active accounts? that's not very many people to market to....
"wouldn't a better distribution help to improve retention after all?"
Interesting question. If more peoples were making $$ retention would be better as this seems to be the expectation gap. A wider distribution would accommodate that, however bad content will still not succeed
@ned only removed his vote because he was shamed into it. Good corporate governance within Steemit Inc would prevent this happening in the first place. How many steemit inc staff accounts are part of a voting circle and what I would call - self supply. No one can answer that question because steemit inc is not transparent - we do not have a list of staff accounts. Compare this to a public company where vesting interest must be declared.
I share all my posts in my other social media networks and bring traffic to steemit like that since 1.5 years and I know that a lot of others are doing the same. Why do you believe that doesn't happen here?
Who are you talking about when you say steemit? @steemit or Steemit Inc or the community?
In general we're all responsible for our own doings, no doubt about that. Still if a company advertises with claims such as Money talks or Your voice is worth something then this roots certain expectations. I've been working in marketing and sales for 12 years now, and the number one rule I've learned in all the companies I've been working for is:
Are we true to ourselves if we advertise steemit using the word money? There's a huge gap between message and reality, and that's why we have only 12% user retention. That's my personal theory.
I have absolutely no idea. Why don't you ask them? :-)
you share you post and I share mine, but ask all the new people and I can assure you that most of them don't.
You make a very very solid point, don't ever lie to your customers
Did you recently shared a blog post where the 12% vs. 88% are backed by numbers/stats? Sneak doesn't believe these numbers are true (see comment above). Would be nice to show some evidence :-)
thanks for pinging me @surfermarly - I have replied to @sneak above
perfect analysis - address the retention is a key challenge. Would be interesting to see how many great creators of value we loose amongst the 88% quitters - retention of the best would be great - assume 60% of the 88% are spammers or scammers anyway.