RE: Justin Sun, This is how you win our support...
"...there isn't much we can do..."
So, you weren't speaking factually in your post?
Frankly, I vehemently disagree with the quote. We can reveal our actual strength and abilities to Sun and Tron by continuing to move forward with the improvements and continue to make Steem an acceptable platform for mass adoptions - which it has not ever been and is not yet.
If we get a wave of new users, our current retention rate of ~5% will squander that resource. We'll blow off all the expense and marketing Sun can deploy to bring us new users.
Steem can focus on retaining new users and bring our retention rate up to industry standards, and we don't need to await dispensation from the Pope to do that. We need to rein in profiteers that sacrifice authors for their ROI. We need to create communities for the purpose of easing the transition of Fakebookers, Youtoolers, and Twatters to Steem's culture and SOPs.
There have been attempts to do this, but due to several factors, they haven't been persistent or comprehensive enough. When new users with potential have come here in the past, various bots and trails have been aimed at supporting them for a limited time. It was a common phenomenon during the boom days that such users would get enough support to seduce them into thinking they could become full time bloggers on Steem, and quit their day jobs.
However, this curation effort was time limited, and cryptically undertaken so that those users wouldn't know they were being seduced into becoming dedicated to the platform, which was understandable, but sorta backfired when those it worked best on did quit their day jobs and then saw that temporary support dry up.
Such transitional support for high quality new users needs to be undertaken openly, so as not to fool them into quitting their day jobs and making it clear that it is time limited, because this will prevent them from rage quitting and feeling they have been betrayed.
It is ten times more expensive to get a new user than to keep one already here. Retention is not Sun's responsibility, and not what we need him for. We need to handle our business, and make retention acceptably supportive of the expense of marketing and bringing in new users.
Thanks!
You don't hear people admit that very often. There was a concentrated effort to upvote new users just long long enough to get them to buy steem. Its one of those shady things not enough people condemned, like vote selling, or like automated upvoting. These things couldn't possibly be good for the ecosystem.
There is a certain viewpoint that sees any purchase of Steem by a new buyer as good for Steem. I disagree, because if they become deeply disenamored of Steem as a result of that experience, they'll never buy it again, and that is bad for Steem in the long run.
While we can't control folks buying Steem and what they end up feeling about that, if we deploy duplicitous means of getting them to buy, we strongly raise the likelihood they'll regret that decision, and then we did influence whether or not they'll buy Steem going forward - in a bad way.
The most effective weapons to control a people are indoctrination, propaganda, and fear. We see where these weapons are used most, the people suffer the most, and are least devoted to their leaders. We shouldn't follow that path. It's stupid.
What I could have said is “this right here is what we can do”. We can always do SOMETHING but I was responding to this idea that we need to impress Justin Sun, and I say “What for?” He bought steemit, if he actually figures out what the hell he just bought he will be impressed and want to listen to the reasonable members of the community about how to move forward. I just don’t like the idea of people kissing his ass and trying to curry favor with him In order to get on his good side which I already see some people doing. I think we can be above that and I think being above that is how we build a relationship with him
As for how to stop the problems you mentioned, perhaps it’s hard to stop because everything is so grey. Some of the most obnoxious abusers have protected us from even more obnoxious abusers. Some people help others immensely but benefit disproportionately, so it’s not so easy to manage. I’m not saying give up, but that’s why I think we should be proud of how far we have come already
A lot of things seem grey when not viewed from extreme positions. I tend to extremity =p.
I also note the obsequity of so many. I quiver with revulsion at the pandering I've seem aimed at whales hereabouts, and Sun is THE whales' whale. I certainly don't advise we do any such thing.
But I do advise we undertake an extreme position regarding retention. For me it's natural to take extreme positions, others may find it uncomfortable. Sun's gift is marketing. He has suddenly become available to our community, and I reckon we should maximize the benefit to Steem potential from that gift.
A lot of folks realize that Steem token value derives from the market for it, and because of this they desire mass onboarding. Well, they're absolutely right about value, but we have had a spurt of mass onboarding, during the pump. I got here in May '17, just before a lot of others. Almost all that cohort are gone, because Steem isn't able to keep them here.
A primary driver of retention is rewards, and folks that expect rewards from their posts that see others better rewarded for lesser quality posts (everyone is biased to favor their own work) get disappointed and proceed to try stuff to get that paper. They'd try bots and learn that wasn't quite as profitable as it looked, and most try pandering, which is just annoying to all but the most narcissistic whales. When all that failed, they'd ragequit.
Nothing works because financial manipulation via stake weighting sucks ~90% of rewards into whale wallets. Whales can back that off and allow ~30% of rewards to go to actual content creators. Something that works on gamblers is occasional jackpots, and whales might consider dropping big votes on folks that have put up something of higher quality than normal from time to time. That rare remunerative event is far more retentive than it should be, but that's the human condition.
If we can get retention up to industry standards, that sacrifice of ROI by whales can be more than offset by marketing from Justin Sun's expertise bringing more folks to the platform, and actually driving up the price of Steem.
While this is not to prove anything to Sun, it is going to prove that Steem will make him money if he doesn't break it. He is a Tron booster, and his immediate vision for Steem seems to have been something like folding it into Tron, to make Tron more attractive. If he realizes Steem is better as an adjunct to Tron, rather than a component, we'll be happiest with that relationship, I think.
We have been pioneers in a new frontier, and while Steem has been through rough spots, it's still here and we should be proud of the community that has kept it going. Lets not rest on our laurels though. We really ought to find a way to manage governance and retention such that we can onboard millions of new users that won't ragequit AND keep them from voting Kardashians for witness.
I'd like to retire on my presently paltry Steem income someday, and the price will have to moon for that to happen. The involvement of Tron can be very good and facilitate that growth, or it can turn Steem into an organ of a centralized crypto competitor that turns my dreams into dust. I'd prefer the former to the latter.
Wouldn't you?
I do not feel that rewards are the most important thing to look at when it comes to retention. Many of the people who had the rewards quit and many of the people who didn’t have rewards stuck around and eventually made things work for themselves, some have stuck around despite never making much.
Rewards are just one aspect of retention. Feeling like your voice is being heard Can be just as much of a motivator. Most of the people I know who left (and I know tons of them) did so cause they felt the witnesses and dolphins weren’t listening to them and they hated bidbots. Before this acquisition I had a feeling many of them would come back and in fact many did.
As for retiring off my current stack, sure I’d like that but that’s not a guarantee no matter what we do and I agree with you retention is the way to do it, but I think giving more power to the community is the real way to do so. There will need to be some mechanisms put in place to control reward place abuse. I hope it will be the community that comes up with it and Justin just helping us to do so smoothly.
I don’t care what chain we are on.
I don’t have many preferences about how he decides to decentralize power. I only care that he makes attempts to decentralize it, otherwise Facebook or someone else is going to come along and do the same thing and do it better. We need something that can’t be replicated.
I agree broadly with what you're saying. @jarvie has just posted regarding this exact issue, that it is the independence we are able to have from censors on centralized platforms, and the coming communities we can build to improve our growth in the directions we want to go, that are the really important values people have that Steem can provide.
While the few cents we make aren't important, as you point out, the bidbots and profiteering really rankles. Even dogs care a lot about fairness, which may seem counterintuitive. Dogs will literally fight to the death over scraps even when well fed, if those scraps are distributed unfairly. For dogs, food establishes dominance and their social value, and rewards are sort of similar for people.
I need a censorship resistant platform to speak my mind on, or I'll get censored. I'm censored everywhere else. I'm a decentralization booster, because I think it's the basis for freedom. I have concerns that the CCP is somehow linked to Tron, and I don't think either free speech or decentralization will long be permitted on a platform the CCP controls.
I’ve already been self censored on this issue :-P
Probably wise.
Yep and if you get people to come here for other reasons we know we can control and that will always be a part of the Steem experience then they'll always have a reason to be here. If it's reward money then retention is based on something we kind of can't control because it's more speculators or the price of bitcoin which we can't control either... Don't put your dependency on things you can't control.