From excitement to frustration… to understanding
Dear readers,
A few lines to share my steemit state of mind today, after 2 epic days on the platform. I went through 3 distinct phases that I share with you today. From the heart to the brain to the fingers to the keyboard.
From excitement to frustration… to understanding.
Excitement
That happened very fast, literally right my first thread witch got a significant amount of traction. Seeing people liking what I wrote, seeing the $ signs really made me feel like I created value.
This excitement quickly became a small addiction. I was checking my posts every hour… I decided to write MORE…
Frustration
Excited, I wrote a couple more articles; which I believe were way more interesting that the very 1st one, which was a simplistic rant against facebook and an idealistic praise of the steemit god. Why did it get attention ? I belive that I just got lucky with the 1st story. With timing maybe. Good story, happy ending.
The site was not yet crowded. Less than 12 hours after this post, I started seeing articles on the Internet about steemit. It looked, and still looks like the new Gold Rush: people think they can make millions just posting things.
"it's Facebook with real money !! hooray !!" (Yes, people do not get what steemit is)
We witness a huge excitement phase, at a massive crowd scale; and like a stampede this is truly scary… and frustrating...
More people, more content, more hopes of money quickly could make the platform crowded with bad content.
Today I see people upvoting “Vapor Girl” pictures… They are the fools: behind them I see people taking advantage of what killed Facebook: Emotion triggering stimuli without any form of intelligence. I can already foresee a tide of #NSFW tags getting massive up votes (and maybe even worse...listicles !!! aaargh noooo)
All in all, I start to see less QUALITY CONTENT upvoted. We are close to be back to square one, and this is the Facebook square… not a great one.
Understanding
Greed may kill steemit. Like crack for a junkie, the monetization system makes the platform run high and fast, but can kill it.
In the end who is the responsible ? the junkie who clicked on the “vapor girls” boobs pics ? the one who created this content in order to use our emotions and make $steem out of it ? or the community that simply lets these things happen, and even worse… play the game by upvoting ?
In the end, this is nothing new. This is how the world is since the beginning of ages. But what we have here is a breve new world, and this is is OUR responsibility to walk this learning curve “Excitement – Frustration – Understanding” up to the end and to make something useful of this platform.
On a final (personal) note, I think I had it right before, but I really understand this only today…
Ty for article!
Like mining the potential to abuse the system is there for those who upvote any early post in the hopes of being rewarded more for being an earlier voter.
I believe this is actually a cool feature. It helps people discovering good stuff. I don't know the mechanics behind it.
The risk could be that we are building a Ponzi scheme based on reputation (but it looks like one that cannot break down)
It is one of those cases where time will tell. Acting against or for anything at this point could lead to overreactions. I like the system as it appears to be.
As people flood in, it will inevitably pull the content down towards the 'average' intellect. Luckily, the early adopters will drive the popularity of post the most, and early adopters in Crypto are usually above the average. This should help it work better long-term.
I upvoted you.
Simply Great Information and Presentation