What i learned as a minnow!

in #steemit7 years ago (edited)

After a few weeks on steemit, i am going for my first statement about steemit ,the hopes and expectations i had. Yes i am a newbie, yes i still might even be a minnow, although i made an investment to power up. I am not a newbie on social media though and did a lot of work in youtube and other projects, especially videoediting.

minnow tale.jpg
When it comes to social media there are some golden rules, that seem to always apply,
Like the rule: Quality before Quantity. I can hear the masses screaming yes thats right quality is what it takes, not quantity. Well... it depends. And actually it depends on the lifetime of your content.

Imagine this:
You make a video on youtube about the top ten destinations to travel worldwide. If that video was made with a really good quality and you have a relatively small youtube channel. It might take 4-12weeks to develop and possibly go viral. But its almost impossible to reach high click-averages per day in the first 7 days, if you dont have lots of subscribers,

Steemit behaves different. On Steemit as on any other social media, content creators are after the money. Youtubers are called “influencers” nowadays, a nasty word i dont like. Often it means they are paid by a third party, to positive influence their audience for a certain product or brand. But lets not loose the red line. Steemit blogposts have an active lifespan of 7days in which they can make cash. After the 7days the content is no longer featured on the relevant tabs (new,trending, hot, promoted), so hardly anyone will find and read old content.
So while a video about the top ten travel destinions worldwide could basically be relevant on youtube for 10years, on steemit its dead after 7days.
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To what conclusion does it lead me? I cant spent too much time on a single blogpost, it wont be the same quality than it would have on other social media sites, unless i see steemit as an addon and not my primary tool of publishing. If i do, quality wouldnt be out the world but i would highly weight consistency as my first priority.

My golden rule for steemit would be consistency first. Example:
3 blogposts a day and best possible quality applied to it.

And here is a tip of the day. I plan to publish a new tip on every blogpost. You probably benefit from it :)
tipoftheday1.jpg

If youre up for a small gain of your steembalance Check out my most recent blog, you get 0.1 steem as a new Steemboy/Steemgirl or 0.2 as a previous follower. This is part of the 200 follower-Celebration►
https://steemit.com/giveaway/@steemboys/200-follower-giveaway-party

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You have to realize not long ago the payment window was 24 hours! People were angry having to wait 7 days to get paid. Remember there are also flags that need to be accounted for. If one expands the payments, does the flaging also get expanded?
BTW I followed.

This are indeed issues i havent thought about. But i believe it should be possible to seperate payment and the window. A 4week window could have 4weekly payments. Thanks for following, checking out your blog tomorrow.

Interesting perspective which I can relate to. When I read the white paper on the purpose and function of steemit. My interpretation was that users would identify what they considered 'good' content and by their upvoting and resteeming behaviour would ensure that useful and helpful content would get better ranking and by definition better earning potential. Secondly posts similar to facebook about daily life events would encourage a sense of community.
So there is a built in incentive to find and follow users that create posts of this nature.
The seven day life of a post is fine if the user is getting a significant number of upvotes and resteem equating to several hundreds of dollars. Most blogs do not earn that kind of money even if they have been online for many years.
Personally I have blogs on other websites that have made over a $2,000 but it has taken many years and YouTube is the same in terms of earnings...abysmal.
Good post and a real honest assessment of your experience so far. I do think that as we move forward and gain more followers and reputation we will see increased earnings and accept that seven days may be sufficient time to capitalise on that post.
Some posts on steemit have made $1,000 in just a week.
Upvoted and resteemed #oldtimers

Thank you for that great feedback and sharing your view as well. What i hope for as steemit moves forward and gains followers is, that there will be a better distribution of steem and steempower. I imagine that, the better the distribution of influence, the more quality will get rewarded .So the investment of time and work will directly relate to the amount of $ earned. I don't believe thats the case yet. Currently there are spam and flower posts upvoted by whales, which might be legit, but leads to frustration for newbies who spent a lot of time on their blogpost with 0.05$.

I'm also hopeful that you're insights will come to fruition eventually. Anyone can buy influence by purchasing more steem but as you say. It's skewing the distribution of earnings in their favour via curating post that give them added fees etc.
The simple solution is to buy some influence funds permitting.

See in no way am I a professional blogger, I have been prolific on G+, Twitter etc. but three [quality] subjects per day? I'd have to resort to posting any old rubbish just to meet that target. :-(

I am on your side, its not good for the quality if you do 3 posts instead of 1. However my point was, since steemit is only rewarding 7days, quality in my opinion comes second in line after consistency, only to a certain point of course. If you would usually spent 3hours for 1 blog on steemit it might be better to spent the 3hours in doing 3blogs (1hour each).

So I've not been on steemit that long but the recent influx of users really grieve me. I've seen people post a page just rammed with pretty poor quality animated gifs with little or no textual content. I even saw one lazy [Insert relevant insult] simply post a youtube video. No accreditation just a subject line, the video and the usual help-me-get-more-followers-and-more-votes tags. :-D

I believe steemit is a niche and what you describe is basically a problem all social media sites have to face. Spam, bots , people exploiting/abusing the system. The algorythm has to find answers for it. Reputation was one approach. Steemit will constantly be tested and has to deal with people trying to exploit it. This is annoying at least, but it will also help steemit in a way that solutions have to be found and probably make steemit stronger and more stable afterwards. Its easier to change the algorythm than trying to change people's hearts & motivations :)

Can't we just do a Chuck Colson on them? :-D
http://www.seektress.com/byballs.htm

Thanks for posting, its a good read. However my opinion of what steemit is and how it measures up against other social networks is different. I see steemit as a long term investment plan, I know most people on here are just looking to make a quick buck but I really don't think this will last long.

I personally get really bored of being bombarded with useless information constantly, the marketing around other social networks which pay the curators is just too much for me, if I want to buy something I'll search for it and I'll find it without the help of aggressive marketing tactics, steemit is completely free of this, and mostly it's a social network built around perspective, yes you can see perspective on youtube, facebook, twitter etc... but these are networks based purely on current trends, and there is no incentive to be kind to one another.

So back to topic, my "system" is, I'll look for interesting content, and when I find something interesting I'll look at the author, I'll then go through all his/her previous posts and look if the subjects that are covered are also something that might interest me, I'll take as long as I need to and I'll read previous blog posts, if I'm happy with the trend of posts I follow, that way cultivating my home feed into something I can trust to always provide me with new and interesting reading material.

So yes, you may not be making profits from old blogs, but there are people still reading (I doubt I'm the only one) as long as the content is good. You will pick up good followers and more likely to pick up votes in the future.

Remember this is still in Beta, we dont know what changes will come in future and I can assure you that all the other social networks (where I've been a consistent early adopter) did not start off as lucrative as they are now and it's taken many years to get there.

Thanks for the compliment. I believe you have a very good approach taken on steemit. Especially when you mentioned that you focus a lot on your homefeed and the authors you follow really do provide you with value. Actually i believe thats the best advice to give someone who is just here for entertainment purposes, by this i mean to enjoy steemit as a social media platform , not an alternative type of generating income. Can not add a lot to it. Steemit is in development, yes. Im very interested to see the route it will take.

What with posting three times a day, manually accepting rewards, what's all that about? As if I'm going to refuse. And holding down a full-time job I don't have time for more than a cursory glance at users who follow me to evaluate their value. Full marks to you for your rigorous vetting. :-)

What with posting three times a day, manually accepting rewards, what's all that about?

are you referring to the recommendation from OP?

I don't have time for more than a cursory glance at users who follow me to evaluate their value.

I'm not sure anybody does, it's not the users who follow you that cultivate your home feed, it's the users you decide to follow, and if I plan on making sure that this social network doesn't turn into another network where my personal feed is filled with trash content and screamer links then I'll definitely take the time to do some vetting before following anyone, I'd even bookmark profiles to review later sometimes, ultimately I'll one day be following 100's of interesting people and it's going to be more of an issue to do a proper cleanup, so long term investment :)

OP?

I'm referring to /Wallet/Accept Rewards

So I mostly follow up on people who follow me. I do scan through the "New" "Hot" "Trending" and "Promoted" and follow the odd one or two from there.

TBH if I like their post and maybe A-another of theirs I'll follow them. I can always unfollow if I get bored. :-)

OP?

internet term meaning Original Poster (in this case author of this article)

I'm referring to /Wallet/Accept Rewards

I get that now, yeah, I'm not really sure why that mechanic is there in the first place? why would you need to claim your rewards each day? and whats the benefit of not claiming your reward? its just a strange concept but there might be reason behind it.

So I mostly follow up on people who follow me. I do scan through the "New" "Hot" "Trending" and "Promoted" and follow the odd one or two from there.

I guess everyone has their own system, what would be great is if there was another feed dedicated just to the content your followers are posting, you could treat your home feed as the mature feed and the follower feed as the talent search. :)

I agree with the issue that after 7 days, no money is earned.

I say, that the first fix would be to allow any post with less than 50 upvotes to be reposted after a certain number of days since the end of the initial 7 days. Which would allow for a second chance of payout.

Another fix would be to have a secondary pool for posts that are older than a certain date to earn money from those upvotes that happen way after the 7 day initial payout.

Sounds good. I would tend more in the direction of expanding the 7days too almost a year, if thats possible. This would need a very good ranking system on the content to work. That might lead to more valueable content in general.

I think that the problem now is, the reward pool is too small.
Which is why, a year ago, someone could make $5k on his first post and now most people find it hard to make $0.01 .

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