Trying to Get Beyond Monetary Rewards
"Steemit: Come for the rewards, Stay for the community."
We see this phrase on the Steemit welcome page and just about all marketing that has been put out revolves around the has the monetary rewards as the exciting draw. Now, I'm not trying to put this down because it really is a big part of what makes this platform unique and grabs attention. On this note, I don't have a great idea on changing this marketing strategy because just pitching the community aspect has to compete with TONS of existing sites. On top of this, most people don't want to change to something new when it's viewed as equivalent, it has to be better.
Before going to far, I want to mention that making money is a big draw and what makes this place exciting. For many of us this each post is like a pull on the slot machine to see what comes. Even though I felt this way when first starting, now I instead view it more like Texas Hold'em poker such that there is some aspect of luck, but you can make the odds go in your favor.
Now onto my point. I've seen in myself and some others who completely immersed themselves in the platform (numerous posts, lots of editing time, tons of reading, tons of commenting, etc) during their first month or so, to then scale back a bit through month three. I have to believe that at some point things get viewed in the sense of dollars per hour of work time which is affected but many things like the reduced price of steem as well as votes getting spread around better than they did in Steemit's early months.
Debates over Flags!
Over-Rewarded Posts
I want to start by stating this is purely my view of things. I'm sure there are aspects and/or discussions I've not seen, so as usual take things with a grain of salt, research and decide for yourselves.
For a while now we've seen posts with higher payouts (relative to the total reward pool) being flagged due to being 'over-rewarded.' I'm not going to put out specific names but rather highlight the different situations. Most of the below scenarios have had flags from a small number of whales using their "stature" to protect and/or benefit the platform as a whole.
Early Days
In the really early days this didn't seem to happen at all. From what I saw, flags were only used to deal with abuse such as plagiarism, personal unconstructive attacks, and the like. At this time it seemed that using flags to 'de-value' a post was frowned upon.
Over-valued for non-interaction
I remember a specific user who made huge rewards while steem price was high and as the share price (and hence post payout dollars) reduced, they began to use a bot (or secretary or whatever) to post their articles from their other sites to Steemit (which is totally allowed.) However, many users both large and small took issue that this user was regularly receiving such large rewards while ceasing to respond to any comments left on the post. Overall, this was a statement that large rewards requires community interaction. They still post here, often getting some rewards, always some flags, and seemingly still never interacts with the community. I'd bet that if steem price were back at previous highs they would respond to comments more, but I'd also expect many users had a 'bad taste' put in their mouth at that point.
Flagged for Repetitive or Now Free Content
I have seen a few cases where a user had been posting things for the community that over time were seen to be 'taking too much' and typically had a free app developed by somebody else to provide the same service/info. There really is a fine line to providing periodic updates to the same things and being viewed as 'being greedy' or draining the reward pool. Even if a good deal of work is put into compiling, analyzing and reporting information, these things become automated by that user or another. At that point, some saw these 'paid' posts to be overvalued between some combination of 'being lazy if automated,' 'greedy' if posted too often and/or no longer as valuable with a new 'free' app being available.
Flagged for Concentrated Whale Voting.
Most recently many of us have seen flags being given due to concentrated whale voting. While I understand the 'painful ping' anyone feels when they see their payout drop due to this. But at the same time, even more people would be up in arms should only a few dozen posts have rewards of a hundred or two dollars with everyone else being less than a dollar. While the first sight for most of us is this dollar amount, it is also a percentage of the total reward pool. This situation typically has both sides feeling that they are acting to better the platform as a whole, one by creating quality content and/or an integrated helpful personality and the other a whale to counteract the large number of whale votes on a specific post.
It is worth noting here that on the user (non-whale) end of things, there are those who regularly earn high rewards and those whose post rarely reach those levels. While not perfect, often when the person who was flagged due to this that rarely earned that level of rewards, ended up getting direct donations of steem/SBD that equaled or exceeded what was lost due to the flag.
Final Thoughts on This
It's really rare for a whale to flag a post to reduce it's rewards due to personal malice. Most the time it is due to their view of benefiting the platform as a whole and never pads their own pockets. Remember that every flag a whale puts out is a lost opportunity cost for curation rewards (which is really the only way they earn on their SP now.)
If you are one who rarely makes these higher rewards and gets flagged, try to understand where the whale is coming from rather than taking it personal. You can easily let it be known what happened and see if the community responds to fill the gap you lost through direct donations. There have been many instances when non-whale users have banded together to help somebody out.
If you regularly earn high rewards and get flagged, I get the demotivational aspect this has, but you still have received a decent chunk over time. Again, try to understand where the whale is coming from. While most instances will end with a agree to disagree at best...this is very different from a direct, malicious attack.
Censorship Claims
While I understand the technical definition of censorship, I do view things in a different way depending on if it's the topic itself that is being 'shot down' versus a person being an ass or abusive. Most of those who have had their reputation flagged WAY down are either serial plagiarists (which really doesn't fall under censorship at all) or have continuously been a complete ass who then turns around and complains how their being censored.
Short of rather specific hate speech, I've really not seen entire topics being put down. Usually it's a case of an individual being flagged. Now I'll concede that there easily can be instances I've not seen myself, but every time I've followed down the rabbit hole of somebody whining and claiming to be censored by such and such...just about all of them had a rather blatant pattern of being an ass. To me, flagging someone for this behavior doesn't fall under my umbrella of censorship, rather penalizing horrible behavior.
There are many people on here who are gruff, blunt and argumentative yet haven't been flagged into oblivion. There are ways to disagree...in reality it's encouraged. But when you start a pattern of unconstructive personal attacks, people aren't going to want you as part of the community. If you're that pissed off about this place, then why stay? To me this is similar to the angry drunk...doesn't that defeat the whole purpose?
Build a Slightly Thicker Skin
It's worth mentioning that because of the drive towards minimal 'censorship' there is some extra burden on the general user here. Being setup the way it is, there is no ban button (luckily mute works now) and we're going to run across those who just seem to enjoy seeing others suffer. While I'm not advocating their behavior, we the general user, need to have or build up slightly thicker skins. Don't be so quick to emotionally go off the deep end.
If the person is being an ass-hat or a troll, mute them and probably pity them. (Can you imagine waking up that way everyday?) I've held the belief for a long time that I look to be disagreed with and find holes in my ideas. Even though it's never pleasant to be shown a flaw, this is how we improve. There is minimal value to always being affirmed or getting a 'smile and nod.' In the end...
It's not about being RIGHT! It's about being BETTER!
Part of this place is learning how to grow as a society. Right now we're all in the giant pool with everybody included which has it's pro's and con's. In the (near I hope) future we will have topical communities which while not solving all the issues, will make it easier to build smaller groups around people with certain interests with those that take issue often avoiding these areas. Hopefully this also helps to draw in new users by letting them join selected areas of interest rather than having to sift through so much.
Self Fulfilling Prophecy, Voting and Payouts
In my view, people tend to be driven (consciously or unconsciously) by what is being monetarily rewarded. To a large degree this only makes sense. They see what others are earning on and try to follow suit with their own material in that area. In short, what the whales vote on, we get more of.
Now I do want to thank the manual curators out there. I know it's not always the easiest nor always the most profitable. Nowadays a vast amount of steemit users use some vote bot/follow system. There's good and bad things about this that I don't feel are worth getting into with respect to the vast majority of users. However, with whale voting having such impact, it has to be looked at differently.
Regarding the 'Oprah Winfrey' bot that applies dozens of 1% votes to just about every post, while I think there were good intentions, I'm not personally a fan. I think the new users you were looking to motivate just get confused of why they're not earning a payout (assuming they don't see the vote percentage.) For those that do see the percentage, many take it as insulting. In the end, I think this while good intentioned, is doing more harm/confusion than good. When steem price is higher or the UI showed more payout decimals, it may have a better effect. For now, leaving one engaging comment achieves way more than dozens of small votes (in my opinion.)
It's got to be tough being a whale with the constant double edged sword where everything you do receiving complaints from somebody. At the same time, you're the ones with the most to loose financially. Personally I believe that most of those whale users that didn't want to be here have had the opportunity to leave by now after the economic changes some months back. The ONLY real way to be 'earning' on your vast steem power is to curate with the bulk of 'interest' no longer being there. If you don't vote, you lose opportunity cost of having your money else where. If you do vote, people complain about what's voted on, who made what or about the majority of vote power being 'centralized' into too few users.
Even with the upcoming delegated voting, issues will persist. Sure, vote power may be passed around some more, however the whale giving this power away earns no curation rewards. The only account where this would be effective is the actual steemit (steemit inc corporate) acct, not one held by an actual person. Short of this managing to increase the steem share price, I don't see the benefit for whales to do this outside of being nice (which I'm not complaining about, but only lasts so long for anybody.)
In the end everything is based around a long term, be patient strategy. Those that believe where this is going will stick around, ideally reaping the benefits. While I'm not saying I'm leaving this platform, I don't feel like I understand the holistic vision anymore.
Final Thoughts
We have to look at both the user and the investor side of things when it comes to longevity.
Users need to stay excited. When the payouts aren't there needs to be something else to keep them engaged such discussions in comments. I'm happy to see the trend of these being upvoted again. When comments decrease, the focus on post and their payouts go up. Often the 'gold' is in the discussion around the post instead of the post itself. While I'm sure many people have been upvoting comments, I have to give props to @abit who's actively seemed to be focusing on this. When other users see a comment that has a payout like that, they want to comment...yes in the hopes to earn too on some level, but isn't the whole point of this place to use potential monetary rewards to spur content sharing and engagement?
The public infighting has gotten flat out annoying for me. Just about every person here does things to make Steemit a better place either through posting, commenting, helping, supporting or even flagging. While we'll often disagree on the methodology, take a moment before flying off the handle, taking something personally and feeling the need to 'attack.' Instead ask a question, try to gain a better understanding and remember the option to just agree to disagree.
Lastly, I would love to see a way for investors to get a return on their investment beyond curating. I don't see how we can 'spread' the voting power around so that smaller users have an impact on the reward pool distribution while investors get their ROI. The proposed delegated voting doesn't solve the later problem in my eyes. While I'm a user and not an investor myself...invested money is what sustains the price of steem. Right now I don't know of a reason to hold liquid steem, interest rate on Steem Dollars is rather low, and holding (rather large amounts of) Steem Power requires curating. So in the end, the only reason to buy steem is to curate (in my eyes.) Is this enough to attract new investors? Maybe when the share price gets lower? (I don't claim to be an expert in this area, so feel free to enlighten me.)
Anyway...these are just my thoughts a little more than 7 months into Steemit. I want to see this place take off. I'm curious to see how the upcoming changes work out. There are many things in the works between hard fork 17 and the 2017 roadmap to be dealing with many of these issues, others are something the user base itself has to do.
End Rant
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Those who view steemit as a money-making opportunity should try delivering pizza. You get paid at least $10/hour, people give you generous tips always and you get to be stoned all the time. It's really hard to compete with blogging behind a computer all day!
While I get what you're saying, to a large degree this is more on the motivation versus the amount. There is a lot built into the system to drive people in certain directions, sometimes wanted and sometimes not.
For the most part I already do what I want to do on here. When I don't feel I'm getting what I want out of something (and this is largely beyond the money, being more in the intellectual aspects) I just don't do it anymore.
Most of this though deals my overdue thoughts on the what I've seen and am seeing on the platform right now.
A lot of thought went into this post. Well done. I can't say I agree with it 100% but then again I am human and that is expected. I will say I agree with almost all of it, and the things that I may disagree with it is not a complete disagreement, but more of a quantitative difference than anything else.
Again, well done.
This went over a couple of days and it kind of degenerated into what felt like a rant. I've really not posted on the topic of steemit for a long while.
Much of this is my personal view point and experience on here, so it's by no means expected to be a definitive for everybody sort of thing. Admittedly the investment/economic aspects are my weaker areas of this, knowledge wise.
I'm curious what points you disagree on. I don't take offense to that.
Like I said it was more quantitative. I have seen some powerful people down voting because they don't like a person. Some posts have been down voted when they were low payouts and the reason given more or less was because @dan up voted them. So it wasn't so much an attack against the person being down voted, but more because it was Dan who voted on them.
This is from a very small number of people though so mostly what you say I think is pretty accurate. There are a few small outliers for various things that have power, but are by no means a representation of the majority of those that have power.
Ah, I get ya.
I had forgotten about that 'instance type' but it is worth noting. Just another reason to not take a flag personally, outside the people who are just acting like ass-hats anyway. Lol
The problem is we are a very reasonable group of people and intelligent for the most part. We do not get to dictate what people do/do not take personal. They will decide for themselves. I'd say we are actually more reasonable than the masses and that is why for the most part the discussions and this community are so awesome.
However, we do want a lot of people to come here. More and more of those people will be from the masses IF they stay. So I believe we are actually seeing a rather tame reaction to these things from our current community. If the masses do come then you cannot simply ASSUME they know they shouldn't take it personal. That is a learned and discussed thing. Will they take the time to learn, and be reasonable before a "shit storm" breaks out? Experience, and observation make me believe it is very unrealistic to expect this will be the case.
If you expect them to LEARN how they should act before they react then you've been hanging out in a lot different places than I have. Actually, I don't hang out in the places, I see them, shake my head and walk the other way.
I'll agree most peoples first reaction is to take it personally, be offended and fly off the handle in some respect. There isn't an easy pill to give people at the start to help this, some are just that way, with a few naturally not.
However, being able to find and digest another persons point of view and/or humanizing them over a period of time through interactions does wonders. To some degree the polarization we see now in the US population and congress is largely possible because of groups becoming so split. We used to be able to discuss opposing sides of things and even while disagreeing on priorities, you could understand where the other party/person was coming from. Now we don't come in contact with the 'other side' often surrounding ourselves with like minded people, news programs, etc only affirming what we want to hear. At this point it's way easier to view others as 'pure evil' or malicious instead of somebody else with hobbies, kids, and other things outside of the topic itself.
Couple this with the average attention span of people being less than a goldfish, hence never willing to think or research longer than 8 seconds. This leads to a split of both sides yelling right past each other, seemingly the only thing in common being the belief that
Maybe if I say it louder it will be more true!
Lol. Even after all this I still try to maintain my hope for humanity. "Better" is never easy.
Great post, well articulated and lots of insightful points here. I'll pick a couple that resonated with me to respond to:
Funny you should mention this. I've noticed a distinct trend in my own posts. My cryptocurrency posts get totally ignored by the whales, typically making only a dollar or less, but these posts take me the most effort to create. On the other hand, my Japan Diary series chronicling my experiences in Japan is quite popular with the whales. These posts, which require only a small amount of effort compared to my cryptocurrency posts, are my real moneymakers. Whenever I get tired of not getting any payouts, I just do another Japan Diary and then I feel better the next day. We need someone to become the patron whale of cryptocurrencies! Maybe @thecryptofiend could oblige if he gets big enough to achieve whale status. ;-)
Amen to this! Comments are worth their weight in gold. Recently I did a post about my cryptocurrency investment strategies. It got a dismal payout, but generated a large amount of commenting and good back & forth discussion. I had a lot of fun engaging with people on that post, so I view it as a great success despite the small payout. I think a post without comments is a terrible thing, akin to a sad little school kid with no friends.
First thanks for reading! For a long time now I've mainly done shorter 3-5 minute reads.
I definitely understand where you're coming from on the crypto vs Japan Diary posts. There is that split on writing topics where some are in the 'what I want to write' category with others being more oriented towards 'what they want'. They both have their pros and cons, just a matter of where the focus is that day. Often it does seem that the less time intensive and quicker to digest posts do better payout wise. However it did seem that many of those posts with lower payouts tended to get me more followers, even if they had lower SP. I am actually a bit surprised there's not much curation on the cryptos though, many months ago that seemed to be a big thing. But this may be from either being a more competitive market on here or due to the user base changing to more non-crypto, social media oriented people...hard for me to say. In the end though, there's usually a good balance to be struck putting out the longer posts that I just want to do with the shorter ones that seem to be better received. And all hail @thecryptofiend. Lol! We seem to bring up one of his posts each week on our @steemittalk podcast.
Comments in the end are the life blood of social media (especially while not having an onsite direct messaging system.) I've heard so often regarding Reddit that 'the gold is in the comments' which very often is true (once you week through the trolls anyway, lol.)
I'm pretty happy with some of the changes that are bringing comments back to the forefront on here. This includes changes to the calculation of what makes the trending page, putting/keeping curation rewards on comments, and the like. While it's definitely not all about the money, things like this are what prompt users to the 'desired uses.' This encourages the engagement that is sooo important.
One last thought. There are posts that lend themselves more to conversation/comments than others. For example many of the 'news' oriented ones I've done while ideally being interesting, often don't leave a reader with too much to say outside 'heh, that is cool,' or some equivalent. I'm not trying to paint this as bad, just how it is. However the choices of what to choose for topics, how they are written, and perhaps the willingness to give a deeper (even if controversial) point of view are likely to be effected as users catch on to these 'rule changes.'
Yes indeed, there has to be some hook that gives me an easy angle to base a comment around. Otherwise, even if I like a post, I may not comment if I can't think of something useful to say. And I hate just saying something short like "cool post!". As with my blogs, I want my comments to have some substance and not look like some stamp from a bot.
I find that the best hooks are the ones that actively invite audience participation. Such as "Which of these options do you like the best? I'd love to hear from you in the comments below!" and the like.
And speaking of Reddit, I've noticed that Reddit has a huge cryptocurrency community with vast daily discussion threads for example on the EthTrader sub-reddit. I think some of them have migrated onto Steemit, but I'm kind of surprised more of them haven't made the leap. You'd think Steemit would be a natural stomping ground for such people. I'd love to see a Steemit marketing campaign targeting Reddit users.
I hear you, I tend to be the same way. Generally I don't like leaving the 'cool post' type comment. Often I either leave a 'wall of text' or nothing, though I've been trying to work on that a bit, just so I comment more.
You're very right on the 'hooks' and having some sort of 'call to action' like that to give their take. There are also more 'controversial' topics that tend to get people to chime in on their own, with it being something they're more passionate about. Often on the internet that could degenerate quickly, but not so much a problem with the community here (at least in my eyes.)
I think there are a couple of issues impeding the crossing over to here for reddit users. First, most places steemit links are removed (automatically or by moderators) or shadow-banned (where even with upvotes they stay at the bottom of lists.) There's a similar thing on Facebook. The other is the calls of 'scam' and other naysayers who tend to be the loudest people in the room. While it's definitely not insurmountable, it does make things more difficult.
These people annoy me. I can understand some healthy skepticism, but I wish people would do some research and think for themselves instead of just giving a gut reaction and calling it a day.
The fact that Steem has lost 98% of its value since the highs of last summer probably doesn't help either. People think "hey, Steem, okay, let me check out the price chart". Once they look at that, it's game over for most of them. I bet we probably won't see another big wave of adoption until the price begins to recover. But of course the price will have a hard time recovering without some increased adoption and excitement to get people buying again... it's sort of a chicken-and-egg type problem.
Oh I understand. When someone is being asked to invest money, they should be skeptical. But I find it rather hilarious when people who've not put in a cent scream ponzi.
Regardless, if you are able to earn something from nothing (outside of time of course, but it's not like we were necessarily paid anything before) then it's really a moot point.
Ideally we can get come organic growth just through word of mouth. It's nice that most of the 'loud fighting' has died away (at least for now, lol.) I brought this up with a facebook friend just yesterday, she may check it out. I tend to not push it hard, instead just pique their interest and let them ask questions as they come.
But yea, there definitely is a somewhat catch-22 right now with some potential signups lacking excitement with the low price while potential investors are likely looking to see the user base grow.
I did hear that steemit inc recently hired a 3 or 4 person marketing team. I'm rather excited to see what they put out there.
You make a bunch of excellent points!
Although I got briefly involved in some of the discussions (trying to add the voice of newcomer content creator to all the "tech talk") I'm sort of over all the squabbling and infighting. After all, what I want to see happen is for this to become a large and thriving community for content creators... that investors can benefit from, as a side attraction. If we think about how businesses work in the world, "investing" is the result of a great and worthy idea... and ideas growing make their investments grow while ideas developed expressly FOR investors tend to atrophy and die. And here, we DO have the idea.
Communities-- and building communities-- is about people. It's about humans interacting with humans to the mutual benefit of all. Sure, bots have their place (as I have said before) but pretending they can be stand-ins for humans in the building of community is a dangerous and potentially deadly road. By all means, have a bot retrieve the content of your favorite contributors. By all means, have cheetah and the twitterbot point things out. By all means have Guilds that execute scripts of upvotes IF the content has first been examined and approved as "worthy" by a human curator. By all means have bots track down "undervalued" content and make lists for people's consideration.
At this point, I'm really more interested in creating content and interacting with others... I mean, that's the whole POINT of a social network, right? I have some ideas for ways to expand the applications of the Steemit platform (hereunder, benefiting Steemit, Inc. by having a more attractive business model that actually generates cash flow). Much as we may think otherwise (and SnapChat notwithstanding), money doesn't appear out of thin air... at least, that approach has never worked for me when I get to the checkout counter at the market...
This is great! The building communities/people aspect is a really big deal. Things just have seemed to take on a whole new level of complexity when monetary compensation for the users is added in the mix. I'm not opposed to this by any means...it's just something that changes how things get viewed. I highly doubt anyone would react to the same degree if flagged/downvoted on Facebook or Reddit.
I'm also not against the use of bots...I do agree they have their place. This was more meant just for the Oprah Winfrey bot and other very specific instances. But like you said, they can't replace the human interaction aspect. In my eyes one or two comments out weighs a couple dozen 1% votes anyday (at least with there steem price is, lol.) Bots were something I had to evolve my thinking on in my early days on here.
I'm very curious to hear your ideas. I think many people have started to get disillusioned with social media (even though by no means is it dead) for various reasons. There needs to be a perceived benefit for them to participate. I know many social media sites had to learn to generate money, typically through advertisements and/or selling user information. With steemit not doing either of those (maybe advertise in the future) I'm curious what other models outside depending on investors there are.
Thanks! I'm still brainstorming, formulating and clarifying.
I think PATIENCE is key. Gradual organic growth. It's tempting to go after "the numbers" and start to indiscriminately recruit from Facebook and Twitter and Instagram... but the mass market is (a) not a good model (b) very fickle and (c) not really money makers in a "per user" sense. Let's face it, twitter is 11 years old and they are STILL trying to figure out how to make money.
I won't get into details YET, but I think there's great potential in "fee services" being attached to the Steemit umbrella, be it a crypto-based crowdfunding platform, or a crypto-based peer-to-peer marketplace in eBay/Etsy style, back when those were cool. We have a huge advantage in the decentralization... we can charge way less for the same thing, because there's not a staff of 2000 and a fancy office campus to pay for.
Let's say (just ONE example) I put my art on the peer-to-peer market (Let's call it "SteemBay" because I'm tired and have no imagination left) and offer it for STEEM to buyers. Let's say I sell it for 1000 Steem... buyer pays 1000, I get 980, Steemit, Inc gets 20 which goes into the "bucket" that replenishes payments to contributors through the social site. It's all just another transaction on the blockchain; just another form of "mining," if you will. I'm thrilled as a seller, because I'd have to pay eBay 10% or more, PLUS 3% to PayPal or a credit card processor. Buyer is thrilled because they can buy and pay from ANY location on the planet without currency restrictions or fees, and they can even "trade" their content creation efforts for art, all under one umbrella. eBay enables over $250BN in commerce (10x the total market cap of ALL alt coins combined!) per YEAR... we can nab a little slice of that, under the slogan "Towards the NEW 21st Century Economy!"
Basically, cherry pick the best of other social sites, adapt them for this platform... and make Steemit what people LIKE about other social sites, but without the interference, censorship, high cost and whatever.
That is a great idea!
It's seemed rather tough to make more use of the actual currency for things. Honestly, I was rather surprised at first to not have seen an embedded item listing come up for people selling items on peerhub for SDB to put into their posts here. (I understand the why a bit better now, I think. Lol)
It's a very compelling pitch for that use case with everything you included in here. I think the only things that we'd need for this would be a 'seller reputation system' (that's independent from our blog reputation) and them just some process for when to disperse payments (unless the escrow functionality came around and I forgot.)
I guess an additional bonus on this would be on the tax side of things too...at least up front. (I'm sure the tax collectors would take notice if large transactions were taking place.)
Thanks! I have a wad of notes sitting on my desk now with ideas, as they come up-- I will be developing the "bones" of this one for a while, in hopes of creating a meaningful post that-- hopefully-- "the powers that be" might read and think "we could DO this. It has value."
In my short tenure here I have come to see the potential of Steemit... but it needs to deliver real world applications to truly grow into something of widespread interest to the general population. That means developing and implementing "features" that real people can use.
To echo your sentiments elsewhere, I am also encouraged by early adopters and influencers like @abit reading and interacting with these kinds of discussions around the site... makes me feel that there is broad community interest in building a long-term future for Steemit.
This is a great reminder for all of us. Very well said! :)
Thank you!
Thanks for the mentions. :)
No problem. It was more meant to highlight what I've seen as being beneficial (I know there are others too,) but you've seemed to have been at the forefront of that lately.
Pretty much every post you've upvoted comments exploded with others giving their points of view, truly increasing engagement imo.
Great post, great dialog. You have new follower
You should try to join the Steemittalk podcast on Saturdays, @sykochica is one of the hosts.
Thank you! This was definitely longer than what I've been writing for a while, but it was overdue for me. Lol.
Like arthur said, feel free to check out the @steemittalk podcast recordings or join us live on Saturdays (3pm CST / 9pm GMT) where we try to have similar discussion flow.
It is certainly an interesting time for Steemit. It has the chance to be big, but we need to be wary of putting people off. There have to be incentives to stick around. It is hard to see why people should want to hold a lot of SP unless they just enjoy wielding power. I don't earn much from curating with my few thousand. I'm not totally clear on what difference HF17 will make, but I'm sticking around to see what happens.
Agreed.
There are already enough impediments to getting people onboard, let alone retaining them, without some of the 'unnecessary' social issues. It's hard to make the pitch around the community during enflamed fights.
Like you said about holding SP, some may just enjoy having the influence, at least for a while. I'd have to suspect at some point it would need a return on their money whether through curation, increased steem price or some other method. But I'm not an investor myself so it's hard for me to say I fully understand their viewpoint.
I had tried the curation game in the past, usually getting 4-6 steem a week. It was fun for a while just to try it out, but eventually I preferred to just vote on what I wanted, typically voting on stuff that already had a payout enjoying seeing it tick up more on their earnings.
Some of the HF17 changes I'm curious to see the effect of include:
I know there are other things, but those are the bigger ones I'm eager to see the effects of.
Thank you for the bullet points, I personally cannot wait to see how the 7 day payout period will play out, which makes me assume that comments will also receive the same time frame.
The other development that will be interesting to watch is no nesting limit, which seems like a quick stitch instead of a thoughtful attempt at fixing comment nesting.
Another problem that you haven't touched on is bots like iflagtrash, blacklist, and probably others that are in the works which will without argument fall in the category of assholes and trash, trolls and anonymous censoring/muting/hiding agendas that will continue to hurt the community, and these undoubtedly require a whale effort to counter and are probably supported by whale pockets, not just outright support for those bots by a certain unnamed whale. Many have been affected by these and I think we cannot forget that they are awful all around, as much as "everything has value" can be argued it's obviously abuse regardless of the "testing the system" argument.
Thank you for this post, I understand you started off from advertising and went into multiple aspects but I don't think it's a rant, especially if you re title it.
Yep, comments will be paid exactly 7 days from the post's posting time. I'm not positive if posts themselves can have time extended like they currently do on the first payout.
I do expect to see the UI not handle the unlimited nesting well when they get deep. But even if not ideal, I'd prefer it this way than trying to track down what comment replied to what. I'd expect there to be a push to clean the UI a bit after seeing what it does on this one.
Good point on the downvoting bots. There are some others that had been doing that as well (maybe still going, I quite following after a while) that ended up prompting changes to the notification showing flag systems. Overall, while I understand the annoyance and detriment these can have to new users, most are little more than a nuisance, having little SP. Iflagtrash however is a bit larger account in comparison, where it can actually have more influence on payouts.
I will say on these downvote bots is that a big piece of frustration is most users (often) not being given an idea of why they are being flagged, at least explicitly. Even though I'm sure there is some reason (since most people would by default take a chunk of steem just to devote to flagging,) it doesn't always fix the issue by doing it this way. However, I have seen 'upvote' bots created in the past to directly offset certain downvote bots.
While ideally we could use our words instead of flags in scenarios like these, often it's either an emotional response from the bot owner or they are fed up after long strings of arguments. However, overall I can't claim to know the criteria being used to be put on these downvote bot lists. Really though in my eyes, iflagtrash would be the only one with a 'meaningful' effect to be concerned with.
I tried a bit to retitle it, but after a while, I really just wanted to finally hit submit. Lol. But I'm still trying to think of replacement for what I've got, sure I'll edit it once one comes to mind.
This, and @nanzo-scoop's Early bird syndrome article have been my two best "Steemit" topic reads today. Thanks!
😄😇😄
You're definitely welcome and thanks for reading!
I'd not seen the early bird post but I'll definitely check it out.