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RE: Scraping and Analyzing the Steemit Trending Page – Blockchain Business Intelligence
So the ones on top stay on top.
Great system.
I knew something rubbed me the wrong way, but this lays it out plain as day.
A real dynamic system would have different distributions of people reaching trending, not pareto distribution of a few and the rest languishing in the "tails".
Guess we know which one Steemit is.
In theory – and note the phrasing – it could be that only a relatively small portion of the Steemit posting community writes articles that the majority of the Steemit reading community find valuable enough to upvote, weighted heavily by those with the greatest stake.
So, even with the most generous reading of what Trending actually says, it translates to "really rich folks who have been around for a while like these articles so you should too."
Maybe it's true that the repeatedly top exposed writers are, in fact, the best writers on the platform. Possibly that's true. Maybe.
In practice, that's very close to ludicrous.
Looking at the word cloud provided immediately reveals some of the incestuous nature of the content as presented. Unfortunately, the Categories displayed really doesn't capture exactly how much of the content is monocultural. (I'd really like to see a breakdown which takes into account all the tags on a given post that makes it to Trending, because merely the first one doesn't necessarily reveal anything like the number of high traffic tags it may be pulling on.)
What we do see from the straight Category presentation is that unless you are writing about cryptocurrency or about STEEM and Steemit itself, you can probably look forward to never, ever being on Trending at all. (Unless you get lucky and happen to be interested in homesteading, for some reason. Or hit the lotto with your post and get a bunch of upvotes from follow train or distribution bot, which is something you can never come to count on consistently.)
Ultimately, I think @PaulaG has it absolutely in the right when she talks about the necessity for Trending to take into account the expressed interests of an individual who has come to the platform. That is the missing secret sauce. Alternately, Trending can be the same as it is now, and something more useful based on an individual's expressed preferences can come to be equally promoted.
My breath is currently not being held.
Nicely stated.
My core complaint is you should see new people hit trending, often. The very fact this isn't the case refers to the "incestuous" nature of the back-patting-vote system going on here.
Languishing in the "tails" is okay if you have a shot at the big-time, but not if you're doomed to never get out of that purgatory in the first place.
This is why I think Steemit is largely a self-congratulatory exercise where circles of voters use their piles of tokens to reinforce their standings, at the exclusion of everyone else.
That is the definition of "high barrier to entry" and it will doom Steemit unless something changes.
I also, am not holding my breath.
I'll just watch it happen, and try to support a few minnows on the way down.
I have a very simple suggestion: Eliminate the Trending tab. This is just reinforcing the Rich-Get-Richer phenomenon. Is completely useless, once you have built a feed by following people (at least I don't use it NEVER.)
And let's see what happens with this Pareto figure :)
Is there any way I could warm you up to steemit a little
@talltim ?????
You're a rare jewel in a sea of vote-pandering people, so in a way it is your involvement that keeps me browsing the platform. I'd like it to change, but I have no means to effect that change nor a comprehensive plan to do so.
I leave it in more capable hands, like yourself, to reveal the flaws and potentially suggest paths towards redemption.
Keep doing what you do, you're one of the stellar examples of what Steemit could be if the flaws were addressed.
aweeeee that you @talltim, thank you very much