The Unintentional Narcissism of Steem - and how the Whales can save us all
I just want to start by saying that I LOVE steemit. I love the idea of steemit. I love the success stories that steemit has already managed to create and I think that the aims of the steemit community are admirable. But I fear that in these important times of early adoption, we are making some big mistakes.
The panacea I hope steemit eventually reaches is one where there is great quality content across a wide range of subject matters. Where well curated and well written articles are the norm as people discover the voices of others around the world. A place that emphasises substance over simple marketing tricks and hidden agendas. What scares me is that this doesn’t seem to be the trend right now. Which brings me to the title of my post.
Why is steemit narcissistic?
You only need to look at the distribution of payouts basted on tags and you can immediately see why. At the time of writing, 56% of replies are on posts tagged with steemit, steem, and introduceyourself. This has translated to 62% of the total 3.4 million SBDs paid out so far going towards only these 3 subject matters aswell!
Now why is that? Is it because the quality of the content on these 3 subject tags is substantially higher than on say the science tag? Absolutely not. Is it because the vision of Ned Scott and Dan Larimer when starting all of this was to start a community to mainly talk about how awesome their creation was? Very unlikely, but if you guys are reading this let me know if I am wrong!
We in the steemit community love it and want to see it succeed. We are your captive audience, and whether most posts are about steem or philosophy or science or art, I doubt many of us will care. We will actively try to contribute to areas we like to write about and read about other areas from people that have different passions. That’s probably why we love posting about steemit and our experiences using it! But is this really what the rest of the world wants?
Let’s wheel out the granny example
Let me give a silly but (I think) useful example. My gran couldn’t care less about the steemit. She would have no interest in reading articles explaining the ins and outs of how it works. But she is interested in cooking. She loves to cook. Loves talking about it, sharing recipes and I know for a fact that many of you reading this would enjoy them too. She has quality content that she would never even think of sharing on steemit. Now the only thing that would attract her to steemit would be other original and quality content on cooking.
To engage with people that have no interest in steem or cryptocurrencies MUST be the next step along the steemit journey. And the only way is to engage these people is to have fantastic and wide ranging content across a plethora of subject areas. In order to attract this quality content, the easiest way is through economic incentives and this is where I turn to the Whales.
Whales save us!
Many posts have talked about your importance in shaping the future of steemit. Some have been critical of the level of influence you have over the general community. I am not here to condone or criticise the current distribution of steem power. I am just here to provide some food for thought.
With the steem power distribution situation as it is, we are in a situation where a relatively small group of people are able to really drive the community away from the unintended narcissism it is currently experiencing and back towards what I hope it was intended for. I know very few people that would be interested in joining a community that only talks about itself!
Whales must drive payouts towards other areas of interest to attract people interested in art or travel or food without a prerequisite interest in steem, which currently seems to be a requirement in this community. We must move away from a situation where economic incentives are heavily skewed towards focusing on 3 tags that the wider world do not care about.
I call on you all to please nurture areas outside of your current interests and read what the smaller parts of the steemit community are writing about. Only then can we hope to reshape the future of steemit for the better. We need to make sure that we incentivise quality content contributors across all subject areas so that we can engage the most amount of people around the world. And it is through this type of engagement that interest in steem will organically grow.
p.s. I realise the irony of posting this under the steem and steemit tag but it’s the only way to maximise the chances of this being read! QED
Great post, and I agree completely that we need to build out each individual category. I also recognize (more recently, in fact) that Steemit is quite literally the most interesting thing that I've personally seen happen in the technology / cryptocurrency space in over three years. In many ways, it's the only thing I really want to talk about right now, and I don't think I'm alone. All that means, I think, is we have a chicken and egg problem. Steemit is exciting so we want to talk about it. Talking about it too much won't grow the user base of people who want to try out a useful social media platform which could reward their efforts directly.
I think, at least, posts like this are a good step in the right direction. :)
Thanks madam for this wonderful post, I will not defend whales but they have invest money on steemit, they do what they should do to make steemit on the top ten websites in the world, some posts deserve to be paid most than other that's true but unlucky, any blogger on steemit will say I deserve but whales didn't up-vote my post including me but I understand finally that the success of steemit is more important than individual success , money will come if steemit really succeed and take a place on the top 10, yeah some time we see posts up-voted by whales and don't deserve in our opinion it happen because whales have girlfriends, friends and wife so I think we can understand why, thanks again for this wonderful post I really enjoy it
Very valid arguments here. I hope this trends so the whales can see it and steer this ship on a more balanced distribution course.
It's steemit's version of circlejerk. Everybody here posts about how great steem is because everybody upvotes posts about how great steem is because, well, we're here instead of reddit. And tbh, it's worse with money involved.
never did this so u can check my wallet)
Is one able to buy steem power? I get the vision of steem is to create a platform by which content is essentially peer rated, and I think that's great. However, if one is able to buy the ability to become a whale (which I'm not sure one can) then doesn't this lead to a capitalist market place, where those with more wealth control content?
Steemit will need to diversify the content and for that to happen a greater diversity of topics will need to be rewarded. If not then someone else will come along with a platform that does and take away it's business. It's what happened to MySpace when Facebook came along.
I should also add to that:
One other gripe I have (which hopefully can be proven wrong to me) is that there is an implicit assumption of correlation between ability to write popular content and ability to rate content produced by others. This may in fact be the cause of whale creation, logic as follows:
A content provider (presumably) is going to have a narrow set of interests. Any steem power directed to said content provider is unlikely to move outside of this set of interests. Once new users see where most steem power is accumulated with respect to tags, their content will be adjusted accordingly, as they each aim to accrue as much steem power as possible. The current system provides positive feedback to a small subset of interests (as your article describes). Given the feedback loop due to the implicit assumption made above, it will be increasingly difficult for new areas of interest to crop up and become popular
It would be very interesting to see a concentration of steem power wealth (measured by how much of the total steem power outstanding is owned by the top 1% of steem power owners). Despite the best intentions of steemit, I presume this looks similar to the distribution of wealth within the US, which would be a real shame
It would also be very interesting to see how the evolution with steem per tag has developed. I'm going to start tracking this as of today, to see if content is becoming more or less diverse with time
I got to learn from you, my earlier post on this got me next to nothing.
Hi! This post has a Flesch-Kincaid grade level of 7.0 and reading ease of 75%. This puts the writing level on par with Tom Clancy and F. Scott Fitzgerald.