The Vital Few and The Trivial Many & How to Align Yourself With Reality...
@cryptoctopus
What happens when your philosophy doesn't match reality? What happens when you have ideals that fundamentally goes against basic fundamental laws of the universe?
To put it shortly, those people set themselves up for a big disappointment.
Unfortunately, this is exactly what happens in 99% of the post that complains about the whales or the distribution of stakes within Steem.
They stem from people not being aware of a force at work, a law, a principle that arise wherever we deal with physical reality...
The Pareto Principle / The Vital Few and Trivial Many
Whether you believe in God or not. Who or Whatever set the rules of the game we call reality didn't have even distribution in mind. Quite on the contrary. EVERYTHING is distributed unevenly, and the ratio seems to be somewhat constant. Very Few Factors Are Responsible For The Majority of The Results.
Not only that but it's fractal! There is another 80/20 within the 80/20 (95/5 and finally 99/1).
NOTE: 80/20 is an expression. It's everything between 80/20 to 99/1.
Here are some examples:
- 80% of the traffic happens on 20% of the roads
- 80% of beer is drank by 20% of beer drinkers
- People wear 20% of their wardrobe 80% of the time
- 80% of sales come from 20% of your clients
- 20% of the leaf on a tree get 80% of the sunshine
The list goes on and on. No matter how much you hate this fact...its a fact. Nothing will change this. Its "hard-coded" in the very fabric of reality.
The 80/20 Rules applies to Steemit too
For the second, let's exclude the newbies who probably just came in, have no clue how to make a proper post or didn't get a blogpost to earn any rewards for a number of factors. Let's start from the people who's earned enough to be called "users"
I'm sure if we keep drilling down, we will find another 80/20 in the 80/20 and so on. (between super-users and legend for example)
How terribly Unfair!
Yes indeed. It's "unfair". But is it "just"? I let you decide on that one.
I've been here for 2 months and that may give you a little perspective...
The stake % in each category didn't change much and the pareto principle teaches us that it will likely never change or very little. What has changed is the number of accounts in each category!
If the number of users in the upper category didn't change, I would agree that it would be alarming. But as far as I was able to observe the upward mobility up the food chain is staggering.
Now you may cry, moan, ring your hands in the air...that won't change a thing.
Best course of action for each person
NOW that you know the setup and how it's going to be, you can align your actions with it. You can learn to optimize your post for payout, start bringing value to the community via software development, network with the whales and bring them value, start a witness campaign, etc.
You ain't going to get a communist utopia here were everyone are equal in results. If that's what you want, you are just in the wrong place. What we are given here is an opportunity to bring value, use our skills and ability to play the game and be rewarded for it. Some will generate huge amount of results while many will generate very few.
Pareto Principle Is Brutal and We Are More Than That
I admit, the Pareto Principle is brutal and it is not the "be all and end all" of reality. We are human with an innate sense of ethics and morality based on equality in our humanity.
So if you care about the poor, the sick and the elderly please sharpen your skills here to be in a position to help those people in any way that you see fit and appropriate. But please, don't lobby to change the algorithm to make it more equal...you will only kill the goose that lays the golden egg.
I was reading your post carefully, your post is very inspiring you are absolutely right many people complaining I was one of them before but I have ask my self a question is it stemmit fault if I'm not making money the answer was : it's your fault ben so I have just read, watching videos about steemit and search infos, the result was a fresh start and I try always now to give better posts , thank you for this wonderful article bro
Congrats on this psychological switch ben99 - I hope many read over this comment and consider to join you in your re-assessment of self ;-)
Thank you for the replay bro
Anytime bro - just petted your penguin ;-)
Thanks
Hi! This post has a Flesch-Kincaid grade level of 6.5 and reading ease of 81%. This puts the writing level on par with Stephen King and Dan Brown.
that's actually a pretty cool bot. You are welcome on my post because I usually do it manually! ;-)
hey @cryptoctopus i don't usually do this but i spent a lot of time on making a 3d logo build for steem, if you have a second to check it out and give me feed back ill be so grateful , thanks so much
https://steemit.com/steem/@warrensteem/steem-logo-build-i-created-original-content
ps . if you don't have time it's ok as well
My Steem game also didn't get any attention but I'm just moving on warren
Maybe it should to, thanks
I love your posts so much and how they respectfully approach topics that other users may dislike and then come to realize the importance. People don't seem to realize the long term investment that is steem power. Whales can't afford to upvote trivial posts so instead of people trying to write a long post that makes 1.00 and give up and bash steemit, they could take it and continue through trial and error. And the people complaining of "circle-jerking" should also realize that steemit is one of the few places where comments are valued. Yes some is flattery for votes, but steemit is such a powerful voice for those tired of trying to get exposure for their craft on other social media sites. How much is 100 likes on Instagram worth if it doesn't provide quality feedback or help get more work for you or reward you for trying to make great content. Hope you might have a chance to read this as your name suggests you may be an animal lover or at least an octopus lover. (One of my fave usernames here) maybe you can read my post about my best friend https://steemit.com/steemit/@bendjmiller222/how-my-best-friend-saved-me-from-suicide
People either keep complaining or they improve themselves - freedom of choice is dealing also with the consequences of your actions ;-)
I agree with some of what you say. However when you say that "whales can't afford to to upvote trivial posts" - I would strongly disagree. They clearly can and do. At least two of them have used a bot where posts get upvoted without being read and I've seen a couple of them myself expressing support for a know plagiariser and thief.
There have been many low quality posts that have hit the trending page too so I think saying that whales have some kind of monopoly on making good decisions about quality is wishful thinking. They are just as bad or good as the rest of us.
It just pays more to pretend that they are better and suck up to them:)
its very difficult to come to an objective stance on "what is a quality post". If a meme makes me laugh, it's hard not to vote. If I'm stoked that a pregnant mother joined the platform, I'll upvote. What has "value" to me, may not have "value"...so there is always going to be people who feel like the trending post isn't the highest quality.
I think a cool way to stop the "bandwagoning" would be to have blind votes and payout being displayed after vote + getting the vote buttons out of the index pages and leave the vote only once people actually visit the blogpost.
But that is all UI stuff I am sure will come sooner or later.
Hey you're not alone. If something makes me laugh then it gets a vote too. It is highly subjective. I was just referring to using bots and the issue of plagiarised content. If you don't actually read a post then your not doing any quality assessment.
I agree that these things will eventually get ironed out until they are at least "good enough" if not some other copycat network will come along that does it better and gets it right. (The same way that Facebook took over from Myspace, Bebo, Orkut etc.)
Very inspiring to be on that top 80 - 90% list.
" What we are given here is an opportunity to bring value, use our skills and ability to play the game and be rewarded for it. Some will generate huge amount of results while many will generate very few. "
Oh yes and a great opportunity for me personally and very grateful.
Great read
Steem games I really like although I have not regained the attention of the right whale
this is good article, bookmark it :)
0,01% want to be a leader, but 99,...% want to have a leader. Heard somewhere
Awesome post @cryptoctopus! Short concise, a lot of wisdom, especially in the end.
Thank you for this awesome post cryptoctopus.
I'm sure many are aware of the 80/20 concept, but this is the first time that I have even considered the inert fractality in it leading eventually to the famous 99/1 having made so popular a few years ago when then masses where unhappy with the status quo but only a few set out to actually change it.
I'm very happy and proud to be part of a community of the few that let actions speak louder than words. I have spent more time researching Dan and the core team on here than trying to enter the underwater race, because I want to know how strong the vision is.
If we can collectively muster up a visionary strength of an Elon Musk or a Steve Jobs - imagine how many blocks this chain will still turn upside down. A very exciting prospect to wonder about ;-)
Thank you !