RE: The Hierarchy of Engagement on Steemit
Much to think about, here.
At this point, I remain mostly in the "observe and learn" state... I don't have a crypto/blockchain background, so I tend to take more of a 50,000-foot overview.
One thing about brand building and engagement is to be mindful of the (crucial?) value of the "human factor" in the equation. Communities of people build strong loyalty and retention and make for long term growth and stability.
Stepping WAY outside of this frame of reference, in the early days of cell service, Sprint outpaced competitors because of their "family and friends" plans... people referring people and getting benefits. eBay went from online fleamarket to industry giant as a peer-to-peer referral network. Even earlier (first days of the web), AOL outstripped competitors Compuserve and Prodigy because of their attention to community building and connection. Early hardcore nerds considered AOL "a joke," but secretly took joy in watching an $11.50/share IPO skate up to $90+.
My point being, from a long term perspective there's an inherent risk in creating systems that remove the human factor from the equation. Sure, we can create (as a metaphor) a bot that trades apple and hamburger "shares" but since that doesn't actually feed anyone, there's a risk for it to become an empty and unsustainable shell game... which may fall apart when some start saying... "Uhmm... I'm kinda hungry. Where are the actual apples and hamburgers?"
So, getting back to the "core action" and "build your brand" concept, as it might apply to Steemit... it seems there's a great opportunity here to create a social/commercial peer-to-peer network where there's an actual tangible "thing" attached to the blockchain... valuable because it uniquely offers an attractive "soft entry" into cryptocurrencies to a large market who otherwise view them as "black box stuff for extreme techies."
Very true, regarding the human element. Dash factors that directly by focusing on payment processing that (will be) easy for the average joe. As more people use it, there's more engagement and more demand for companies to accept it, and so on.
Branding can be this. But maybe it's not the most fundamental action.
most fundamental action: The holy upvote :D (bringing in value to to others because you fond their content helpful) also the resteem spirit (that brings everyone together) and of course Father Steem who has enough to go around :D of course that is the opposite to build a brand.
ad what he said :D @denmarkguy because he is right. Upvotes and follows :)
But do upvotes lead to the desire to upvote? Kinda like the Tinder example. Do successful dates lead to the desire to more successful dates? Because ultimately, a complete success on Tinder means the user exits the app and never returns.
Not that I'm suggesting we go this route, but if an upvote only took effect after you upvote someone else, in other words, it was only contingent on a network effect, I could see upvotes being the core action.
But upvotes are not contingent, and that's by design. It can be part of the network effect, but not by itself.
Follows might be a better fit because follow-backs make sense. You can depict follows graphically, showing it as half-way complete, leading people to want to make them complete by follow-back. But is that truely a core action? Is that marketable? "Come to Steemit and click the follow button a whole bunch!"
Currently votes lead t annoyance :D it's not fun to upvote if you are looking for that either you need to have 100.000$ to upvote by which point it's either not fun(if you invested) or you've already done it 1mil times to earn the steem :D
Tinders approach should be ok, yes not centered around growth and retention but still a good idea to get a date and move on maybe suggest to someone else. Anyways you would get tired after the 10th fail or if you are into the one night stands you wouldn't care for tinder for any other reason than "genitalis" gene-tails lol either way that is the main crowd for the tinder i guess.
Back to the topic. Much like dash we need to have a few things going, what you said is cool
after that lOOOLLLOLOLOOL follow low :D that's the worst follows are mostly pointless for me at least. I vote for people an rarely do i go over my feed, I just can't. I follow the top creators I've found good people that interest me and the lowest "fish" for support. If you don't use mechanical addons it's impossible and its not made to make sense why follow 1000 people and upvote 40 :D or all of them for 1% it should be CREATE AND CURATE simple as that or go the trinity route of steem to support easy transactions, business and such, upvote for the creators/curators and the resteem for the social 2000 followers accounts :D I think we need to reallly step up the game.
The platform is leaking and people are thinking of ways to increase the price.
Unless we start bringing in value like the start was, there were many awesome people sharing priceless stories and everything making thousands. that sells then the upvote matters, unless we get back there it's a bunch of BS , value comes from the people. use that Come to Steemit to bring value to yourself and others. :D benefit by making the world great
The problem is as I've said steemit isn't twitter to post 1000 times a day and have 5k followers (if we take the current ratio of 5:1 active users to authors)
neither is it facebook where you like away and have your entire town in there.
It's mostly reddit with crypto. But it lacks the communication because the incentives are driving the price down. Everyone is running around rushing for returns while not really doing anything :D
The sad part is Steemit can rule all markets if it's formed correctly, we can have our YT our soundcloud our data centers for medical research or whatnot, businesses and whatever else, but it's like a world within itself and the economy needs to be fixed for that the platform needs to have a direction and that is so smokey right now. Used to be can't be censured now it's silence there use to be people that believe now it's waaay below par everybody wants gains but just rotates value and the currency gets inflated to devaluation. a 1.5usd to .11 is like a 1300% drop in just 4 months :D it's wonderful we are all here still, most companies are already dead by this time :D