Steemit |3 Weeks on Steemit – These Are My Thoughts!

I’ve been a member on Steemit for 3 weeks now. It took me a couple of days after registering before I logged in for the first time. Once I’ve had a taste of the community I was stuck. It didn’t take many days before I also made some investments in STEEM – piling everything into SP!

In the continuation of the post I will share a few of my thoughts and observations; about my current and future posts, and some speculation on my followers and voters. I will use a title as descriptive as possible for each segment. By throwing a quick glance at the headers you can decide to read, or skip the once that may not interest you.

MY POSTS AND TOPICS
In my initial introduction, I tried to give an indication that I want to write about the more “important things in life”. I continued to give some examples, while trying to not be too specific. I feel the combination did not play out as intended, and probably came across more confusing than informative. Following that, I mentioned that I might post some lighter material as well. Well, so far that has been all I’ve been posting.

I do enjoy making those type of posts, and I will likely continue to do so. I already have plenty of material for many more, and not only on the “Slice of Norway Series”. I will try to keep the theme similar though; a limited selection of representative photos/videos, not just the once-in-a-lifetime-lucky-strike shots with perfect weather conditions. Just enough literature to convey what I think is the key elements to trigger your interest. Some necessary warnings to avoid certain death on arrival, and an occasional twist. Sometimes I will fully reveal the location, other times I will keep it more general and secret, for various reasons. You will not see me dish out on hotels and food reviews and the like. Those things are better covered by people with a genuine interest for it. For me these posts will have a more recreational purpose.

The “main” topics will come when I decide on were to begin. It feels as they are more sensitive and complex. My reason for writing on any topic is to encourage dialogues, introducing my views and information and to be confronted by new views in return. A monologue from my side would be rather fruitless and I would soon go silent on the topic.

For this reason, I may delay writing on some of these topics until I have become a bit more visible in the community. My impression so far is that new posts have a week of relevance, less popular once perhaps only a day or two, before they are left for dead and forgotten. Not only uninteresting by readers due to the removal of any economic incentive, but due to lack of filtering and sorting options it will be close to impossible to find unless you are searching for it specifically. In my mind, this is one of Steems weaknesses; it seems to be heavily focused on new flashy content that can surf the surface for a week before its barrier deep in the blockchain. This means that timing is also crucial. If you post your “masterpiece” while your small and unknown – it may slip through unnoticed. This is one area where I know I need to do more research to have a better understanding.

Some of the topics I have in mind includes science & technology, religion, politics and world views. Most central of all topics is something that permeates everything we do, think and how we interact with each other. How we are communicating; where we draw the line between what we know, what we think we know, and what we believe. What label do we put on our arguments and thoughts while pondering them in our own mind? What about when we present them out loud to others? Does a belief sometimes become a “fact” to give it more punch in the discussion? What are our goals when engaging in dialogues? Do we discuss to win? And to win by any means? Or do we invite for a Hegelian dialectic in an attempt of reaching a more truthful answer then we had entering the exchange of ideas and information? Are we also willing to do so if that may result in admitting to some of our own mistakes?

Many questions, I know. Although, I believe it underlines my point, that the “bigger” questions are challenging, and require some patience and effort to pursue. Even if you succeed in all of this, there remains yet another challenge. Perhaps you started out with one unanswered question, and after all your effort and research you are left with only more unanswered questions. In my experience, this is the norm. It doesn’t seem very appealing, right? No, I agree, but you might gain something else from the experience. Something much more valuable. You might come to the realization of how little you really know for certain. How little anyone really know for certain. It might fill you with some humility and increased respect for alternative believes. Perhaps also avoid ending up in some of those heated debates due to conflicting believes. If such situation sound familiar. I’m by no means a guru that know better or have the answer to all the questions people may have. Let’s just ley that one down dead right now. My goal is to encourage to fruitful dialogue. In the end, we might have the most polarizing beliefs, and that is fine. What I’m looking for in any dialogue, is the other participants best arguments for their believes. With new information, I will then refresh my own beliefs, this time on a slightly better foundation.

Further, I will share some of my other observations and thoughts from my time on Steemit.

FOLLOWERS
I keep gaining followers, but I very rarely have the possibility to see who just followed. I try to look up the profile of my followers, to see what’s going on their end. Perhaps understanding why, they chose to follow me as well. This keep getting harder and harder, especially when I cannot distinguish between new and old followers. I wish there will be implemented some new feature to help organizing this. I assume that I miss out on many good posters because of it.

VOTERS
As mentioned, I’m curious about why some people decide to follow me. Sometimes I try to make some guesses based on the responses. A popular slogan often used as the recipe for success here on Steemit is “Quality, not quantity!”. As much as I do agree with that, I get a very strong impression that one of the other crucial parameters is being silenced. Kind of being the elephant in the room. The elephant is popularity, and I mean popularity in the same fashion as celebrities. That, mixed with perhaps a pinch of greed, to put it bluntly. I think this is quite obvious in plenty of posts, identified by two factors: The first being immediate massive upvotes after posting. In this case it’s obvious that the voters have not had time to read even a sentence of the post. Reason number two is when a simple statement or rather a content deprived posts receives similar massive upvotes. Again, the voters appear to be voting for other reasons than the actual content in the specific post. Quickly I wish to add that I am too guilty of these actions from time to time. I am at least as flawed as anyone else. What I observe is that a very limited number of persons seem willing to acknowledge this openly, even in post that is meant to guide you on how to succeed with your post.

Why the hesitation to speak out loud on this? One of my first though is that it is not that openly accepted to be too critical towards STEEM and Steemit. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE both the currency and community. One key feature of Steemit and other cryptocurrencies in general, is the total transparency. That should also go for potential flaws and weaknesses. My proposed reasons for this behavior is of course my own speculation. Yet, to me they feel like sound assumptions based on my current knowledge.

Some observations
In my last post; I’ve got 11 votes, yet only 6 views. I do not know for sure how a view is counted; if it’s all unique IP/users opening the post, spending a certain amount of time on the page or scrolling all the way through. My guess is on the first one. Regardless, on this post I got almost twice the number of votes than views. To me that say that at least 5 of those people did not read the post before voting. Some may have been bots, but in this case I think most were not. My assumption is then; they voted for a payout or perhaps following someone else. Since I’m a new member I do not think I have managed to collect a considerable group of followers that upvote me “blindly” on sight. =) All this is speculations from my side, and none of it is directed criticism. For all I know it could be out of pity or simply an act of kindes toward a newbie like myself. I am deeply grateful for every single upvote on my posts. At the same time, I cannot help myself for trying to better understand how my topics is received.

From my “Preikestolen”-post I can withdraw some additional information for analysis. I got 21 votes, from those it seems around 4-5 came short in-heels of @jerrybanfield upvoting me. He also listed my post in one of his “Upvotable” post, for which I’m very grateful. In the same breath, I want to send my deepest gratitude to @aarellanes, who was the first in this chain of event to read my post and like it enough to further propose it. I can only assume a few more came and upvoted me following that link.

In the same post, I only have 1 more vote than view, which pleases me greatly. However, I have one more piece of information to analyze. I edited my very first video, which I added in this post. I created a dedicated YouTube account for the single purpose of hosting Steemit videos. I’m trying to avoid possible publicity on YouTube itself. In the YT statistics, I can see that the video had 11 views, and I know that 4-5 of those is my own streaming of the video. This means that only 6-7 out of the 21 people that voted on my post started the video. From here I can only speculate again; did they scroll past it thinking it was another photo – possibly, or was it only about half of the voters that read the post before voting?

These are some of the thoughts that are rolling in the back of my mind as I routinely check my previous posts to reply on comments and help me decide on what to write about in the future. Perhaps some of you are having similar thought about your own posts and this have some interest for you, or perhaps I’ve made some of you fall asleep.

Thank you for reading to the end, and please give me a piece of your mind in the comment section below. Right away, or whenever you wake up from the slumber I may or may not have been complicit to.

Best regards,
warjar

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PHOTOS
The photos used in this post is from the outside façade of the Soumaya Museum in Mexico City. Source: warjar.