Another perspective on the trending page
From time to time, I see some rather negative posts about the trending page on Steemit. For those who don't know, the trending page is where we can find the highest earning posts at any given time. I will admit that I've seen some not so great posts (sometimes referred to as "sh!tposts) on the trending page, but I've also seen some fantastic, meticulously craft posts on the trending page.
I too, once looked at the trending page with Envy. I once wished I could be on that page with my post. I think I made the trending page one day, long ago. I think it must have been a slow news day. But I think I was there once.
I am not exactly a newbie, I've been around Steemit for more than a year now. I've seen enough to know that there is real hope happening here. I know also that it's easy to focus on the negative. So when I look to the trending page, I look on not with envy. I look on it with hope.
That could be me on the trending page pulling $1k in upvotes. That could be me attracting more than 1k views. That could be me fielding a few hundred comments.
But I also know that I have much to learn about using Steemit. I also have a day job, a family and they need me more than my writing needs me. I'm learning to make my schedule work for all of us. I know that someday, I will have more time to devote to Steemit, and that now is not the time.
Like anything else, I have learned that with experience comes skill. Every time I use Steemit, every time I write, every time I post, every time read another article, look at another profile, I see what others have done to build their success. I look on not with envy, but with admiration.
I take this perspective because going negative with envy really sucks. Going negative ignores the effort, time and expense that others have put into Steemit, or more precisely, the Steem blockchain.
More to the point, going negative doesn't teach me any new skills. It is when I look at those who have built a successful business on the Steem blockchain that I can learn how to build my own business. I can see the problems they have solved. I can see what they did right and emulate them without copying them. Some of them even give tutorials on how to do what they did.
I don't have to be exactly like them, too. I can take what I like and leave the rest. I can mix and match. I can combine what I find to be the best that fits me. I like to try things on to see if they work for me.
So, if you're a newbie, or even an old hand that hasn't figured how to build a stream of income from Steemit, look at the trending page not with envy, but with a sense of the possibilities. I find it amazing that it is even possible to make money with social media, and I see people on Steemit who have quit their day jobs to go full time here. I have seen that a top 20 witness can pull $200k or better. Developers are building business opportunities on the blockchain, Steemit aside.
I have seen the whales. I have seen the dolphins and the minnows. I am but only plankton. Yet, Steemit is not a food chain. It is a community of people seeking a single goal. We want a place where we can post our content without fear of censorship, without the limits on propagation that are imposed by other social media outlets and that actually rewards us for our participation. We are rewarded in some way, for every post, every "like", every comment - the more we participate the more we are rewarded - the opposite of what we might find on Facebook. Our personal information is not used for data mining by advertisers or politicians on Steemit.
What we post is our content, for us and our audience. Regardless of whether we are a whale, dolphin, minnow or plankton, our posts are permanent on the blockchain. Unless every single node is taken out, our content will still be here. As long as a node is running, someone will still be adding blocks to the blockchain, building a historical record of all of our activity.
So I don't look at the trending page with envy anymore. I say, "Wow. That could be me." The moment I say that, my mind becomes open to possibilities that I might never have considered before starting to write here on Steemit.
Write on.
Sublime.
I like your perspective on this, especially about the fact that envy eliminates the possibility of learning those new skills.
That There's the difference between good and toxic energy.
While your topic of focus was the trending page. Your analogy's much useful to my "beginner guitar journey".
Glad i stumbled on this.
Write on.
I'm glad you liked. I wasn't thinking of newbies when wrote it. I was thinking of the people who've been here for a year and feeling frustrated.
@taskmaster4450 just posted an interesting article that shows that the reward pool distribution is starting to go slightly more towards the bottom end, which I think should be encouraging for the newbies.
When it gets quiet on Steemit is the best time to post.
This is not the first time i have heard such, i get quite a lot of "now's the best time to build up your blog" advice, or something along that line.
Starting to see quite a lot of sense in it. (With the help of some enlightening posts)
I'll hold on to that thank you.
I shall check that article out now.
I won't care less if they were natural upvoted posts. But every single one I click on have been purchased. This irks me, I'm just in the process of going through those I'm following and unfollowing from those who are resorting to bribery. The way I look at it is either one can earn upvotes by creating good content or you can purchase them. I don't think I will be giving posts with payed upvotes an upvote, unless it's something I feel is worth resorting to bribery to achieve publicity for.
I can relate on the idea of bribery, however, I've seen whales supporting the bots for minnows to get greater exposure or a better share of the rewards. I'm currently experimenting with them just to see if they work for me. I've also seen articles that show that bid bots are providing some return on investments held by whales.
So far, my conclusion is that they draw money into SBD and SP. If I'm setting rewards at 50/50, I'm never going to get all my SBD back. In most cases, people are lucky if they get better than 30% return, and even all that is split. If they make it all 100% SBD, they may eek out a profit.
I've watched some of the bid bots to see how they fill up with bids just before the vote and they fill up fast. Everyone is hoping that no one will notice that they're going to get a big share of the reward from the vote by waiting until the last minute, or buying a vote in the dead of night when no one is using the bid bots.
In the few times that I've used them, I've only increased SP and SBD and must either power down or add more money. I want to increase SP and I think this is a reasonable way to do it. I drop a few hundred into my account here, use it to bid for votes and then build up both SP and SBD.
If I didn't have a day job and a family, I'd be on this like a job and I'd really build a following. I know I can do it. I've been on both sides of the debate and I can see a case for both sides. As more people sign up here, we need a leg up. Bid bots give us that. Compare that to spending days trying to curry favor with people who have built up their own little nepotism networks, only upvoting their friends and family and ignoring perfectly good content written by someone else outside of their network. Who can get into that?
I'm agnostic about who is using bid bots. I don't really care. I only care about the content. If the content is good when I see it, I vote for it. It doesn't matter to me who wrote it (though I do detest plagiarism), or if they used a bot to promote it or upvote it. Ultimately, we are the arbiters of value here, regardless of how that value is promoted.
Whales who invest in bid bot's indeed gain a very hefty return on investment. They also get to cloak this investment behind the veil of "helping minnows," this bothers me. I don't care that they are making returns on investment, that is just basic economics. I do detest the fact that they try to claim to be helping people who are paying for the use of their steem power. Just call a spade a spade. It's just paying for an upvote(or bribery if you will).
I also understand that it certainly can be beneficial to use these services, or else they would not exist. My only real issue is that there is a set amount of reward pool allotted for any given day. So when someone pays say 10 sbd for an upvote this results in a vote usually just greater than the payment, usually not more than a 5% return. But the sbd that they used to buy this usually came from a prior days reward pool.
This behavior repeats day in and day out, possibly gaining a few % return on the bidders sbd, but the effect on the reward pool in exponentially increased. It leaves less and less for those unwilling to resort to using these tactics, while further increasing the share of the reward pool to those who are "investing" in these bots.
I don't blame people for using them, but I do find it hard to give them my tiny say in the reward pool. For they are already reaping much more than their fair share(even though most of it is going to those who are delegating to the upvote bots). I feel like this is a very simple logical analysis of the situation, but very few people seem to see it. Does this make sense? or am I just slowly going crazy?
I believe that in the long run, the problems you speak of will be addressed. @taskmaster4450 wrote this article to show that the distribution of the reward pool is starting to flatten and whales are beginning to lose their power as the rules are adjusted. I can recall reading somewhere that the rules are slowly being tweaked to favor production rather than sitting on SP and delegating it.
They are also planning on changes that could actually mitigate the effect of bid bots. Personally, I'm in favor of human curation. I think that in an attention economy, we must always err on the side of encouraging people to use their eyes, ears and brains to curate content here. So I am hopeful that the Hiveminds project actually works.
In the long run, people who write quality content and the people who are willing to perform manual curation, will eventually win out. We only need to look better than the scammers to maintain the value of Steemit.
So, I can't speak as to your state of mind. But I totally relate to what you are saying. :)
This is the one I speak of on Hiveminds:
https://busy.org/@taskmaster4450/will-hiveminds-communities-kill-paid-bots
If this comes to fruition then I think that it could very much help the Steemit community. unless I was reading a different one of this posts.
Write on.