DO NOT FOLLOW
I realized that I have 244 followers today. This is minus those that had followed, un-followed then followed my blog again and again.
When I first joined Steemit, it meant much to me, these ratings; reputation, number of followers, number of posts and the number of blogs that I was following, but now I wonder.
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Today about five blog accounts followed me simultaneously. That was not the weird part. The weird part was that each of these accounts had reputation ranging from 30-50, they all joined Steemit about 109 days ago and they had followers ranging from 5000-8000.
The first thing I noticed was the discrepancy between the followers, their time on steemit and their reputation. This could mean several things;
They are not active. Probably posts once a week or something.
Their followers do not check out their posts, do not upvote or comment on their posts.
Now while the first is the probable reason behind their low reputation, it begs the question; why do people follow blogs on Steemit? What is the rationale behind following a blog you do not read?
Let’s look at this matter closely. If you follow a blog, the blog is not obligated to follow back. In fact, the blogger might not even know that you followed him or her. So what do you gain from following a blog that you do not interact with?
Those who do the follow-for-follow system also need to explain to me the benefit of those huge number of followers on their blog. If your followers are not contributing to the growth of your blog, they are just dusty pictures in your wardrobe. Large number of followers are no guarantee of upvotes neither are they a sign of growth.
In regular social media, a large following signifies valuable or interesting content or a superstar personality. On steemit, it means absolutely nothing! You can have a million followers and get 0.001 upvotes all day, if you do not pimp your posts. I am speaking to redfishes like me.
This morning I made a post and I tried out an experiment based on my suspicions. I left the post for an hour without pimping it on steemit chat or on discord. I got 0.003 upvote in that one hour. That upvote was not from any of my followers, I can tell you that. The person probably saw it under new posts.
After an hour, I dropped the link on steemit chat's post promotion channel and left it to simmer for another hour. The same thing occurred; some small upvotes came in. When the one hour was done, I entered discord and started dropping links with friends, with discord servers I belong to and then some additional upvotes started coming in but in all these i got only one comment.
What is the point of this experiment? I am trying to prove to you that my 244 followers mean absolutely nothing in the scheme of things. Most of them forgot my account immediately they followed me. Some of them will unfollow the moment they realize that I am not following back.
This makes me question the community sense of Steemit. If people are following people randomly with no clear goal in sight, what is then the interaction and friendship and community that is being touted as the main stay of Steemit? What is the benefit of followers when they cannot even look at your blog posts? I am not talking of comments or upvotes, I am speaking of views.
The feed of every blog is filled with posts from strangers. We do not know these people because they are so many and varied. We are like kids gorging on cake without letting our tongue get a taste of what we are eating. There are no flavours, scents to catch our attention, we are roaming about like bats, picking any random stuff and putting it into our mouths.
This is what separates the whales from minnows. The ability to stand aloof, outside the scramble for upvotes and delegations, gives one a clearer picture of the whole. While we scramble about, fighting for our share of the reward pool, they sit and study the shifts in tides and when they see an opportunity, they jump in.
Another matter that makes the follower thing weird and possibly redundant is ginabot. Yes, the goddess of crypto discord as I call her, has made following a blog a waste of time. How you may ask. If you type ..set in your ginabot chat, you will be given a link that takes you to where you can add the names of those whom you want to receive notifications on when they post. Yes, when your favourite blogger makes a post, ginabot sends notifications and you can click on the post link from discord and you are there reading, commenting and upvoting. Has following so and so persons given you such an opportunity?
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Source
So many bloggers on Steemit use this service on discord. So at the end of the day, the people they are following mean nothing to them. They don’t use it. The number of followers you have are a shallow ego trip that your blog account can do without.
You will observe that you who use ginabot notification service do not have up to 1000 blogs in the form you filled. You only have those blogs that you are truly interested in, filling the spaces in that form. Why then are you following 4000 accounts? What is the relevance of that? What is the benefit of that?
Another matter that comes to mind in relation to what I have been discussing so far, is manual curation. Twice now, some persons have sent me 0.001steem, then invited me to send links to them to upvote and resteem. They tell me they have over 8000 followers. Once more, number of followers have come in to play. Are these huge numbers a guarantee of upvotes? No!
When I resteem posts, I do not do so because I hope the writer will get upvotes, I do it for exposure. Why, because if my followers cannot read, upvote or comment on my posts, why will they do so on a stranger’s posts? So you see this thing is pointless.
The only time your followers are of value is if you are actually interacting with them, If you have a relationship with them. How many of you can boast of this? Then let us not kid ourselves.
As a suggestion to the steemit developers, if I may. I am not a techie guy, an economist, a mathematician or a big picture kind of guy but I do see glimpses of what is working and what is not. This follow feature is not contributing to the growth of Steemit.
I advocate for the modification of the follow feature. I advocate that the friend request feature be introduced to support it.
Yes, this is a blog but this is not a traditional blog. It is also a social media and like all social media, interaction is the key to relevance. Building a circle of acquaintance, making friends and connecting with people is important. If the friend request feature is added to the blog, those who truly find a blog’s content interesting or like the personality of the blogger will become friends with the blogger, allowing him or her to have his or her own circle within the steemit family. He or she could have a chat room with just his friends there. We won’t have to join so many discord servers and steemit chat groups to make connections. The connections will be made right there on the blog.
I may or may not be making sense, after all what do I know. I am still a wide eye redfish with below 59 steem power. I am not among those who make policies, or those who control the purse strings but I do know that this idea has benefits.
People will actually read your posts, not just scroll to upvote, click and leave. Why, because that it why they became friends with you in the first place.
Newbies will find encouragement especially if those who introduce them resteem their posts which their friends will definitely look at.
These are some of the possibilities I see. Once again, I might be making no sense but you might be able to make sense out of this. So i would really value your opinions and suggestions. Steemit is still in beta. This is the time to make it a beautiful home for us all. Thank you for stopping by.
Note:
Photos were gotten from pixabay except otherwise stated as sourced.
art and flair courtesy of @PegasusPhysics
Seriously friend requests would have been better, that way there will be a personal relationship between bloggers. 99.9% of my followers are not active on my blog.
Yea! When you accept a friend request, there is value. The new friend knows this and is appreciative. He or she has become a part of your social network. You see his or her posts, he or she sees yours. That is how it should be
Yours is good bro. Mine will be following 30,000+
At the end, you have to understand, Steemit is like a beauty queen wearing an ugly mask. With that, a lot of new users have no idea how exactly this thing they "heard" pays work, so they go with their default social media-think - follow for follow, upvote for upvote etc.
Exactly! That is why i feel the feature should be amended. It gives people the wrong idea of what growth means in steemit.
At the end of the day, it is how much sp you have acquired that determines success here.
Thank you for seeing with me. I thought maybe i was crazy.
I totally agree with you @warpedpoetic. I celebrated my first 100 followers and then saw very quickly that a lot of those that followed, especially as my reputation went up, were just chancers.
There are only a handful of people that regularly engage and these I consider to be my true followers.
Yea. I can count the number of people who truly follow my blog in one hand. It is so weird. It is not as if you get paid to follow. You get paid to post, comment and upvote; basically to interact.
I should have added ME to the title of the post
Yep. Agreed. It does not make any sense. I suppose the newbies might not have worked it out yet but it does not explain the one who are not chancers who have a decent reputation. Not worth bothering about I suppose. 😊
Yea. Everyone is following but there is no rhyme or reason. The system is broken
Steemit is just bones. And it's bones chased by a ravenous pack of zombie used car salesmen.
I jumped in fully knowing that it was a crippled social network, but it ain't a bad blog. And it has this way very unique attribute of actually valuing content. I'm in.
I'm hoping to be able to crosspost here and implement something in my business' world.
@warpedpoetic, I think you have a valid point here. The whole followers thing on Steemit is a pointless part of it. It truly is meaningless because of the lack of interaction needed prior to following.
I do like your idea of friend requesting rather than just being able to follow someone.
I have been using the follow feature as a tool for curation. Meaning, I follow everyone I curate as a way of "checking the box" on their profile. If I am looking for a new person to curate, but I see that I am already following them then I know I have already curated their intro post.
I do write down each day's curation on paper, but sometimes this saves me from needing to sift through the papers to see if I have already featured a person's intro post. (It isn't unusual for a person to make multiple introduction posts, and I don't want to curate the same person twice on an intro post.)
So that't how I use the follow feature to my advantage. It must be noted that I never look at my feed-EVER. It's so full of you-know-what posted and resteemed by all the newbies I follow that it is less than worthless to me as a source of reading material.
That's why I started my Discord Server - I needed a place for people to bring me their best articles, and it is working beautifully for that. I have more great material than I can possible handle each day from people like yourself who take the time to drop articles that meet my guidelines. (Thanks, by the way!)
I have found that I have a few people I really enjoy reading, and when I have a few spare minutes I actually remember their usernames, and go to their blog page or on a Discord I know they drop links on, and see what they've been up to, especially if I have not heard from them in awhile.
I hope someone notices your idea, and makes some kind of change that deals with the stupidity of followers as they are now. (@theUXyeti maybe?)
I've upvoted and resteemed this article as one of my daily post promotions for the @mitneb Curation Trail Project. It will be featured in the @mitneb Curation Trail Project Daily Report for 07 MAR 2018.
Cheers!
That is the exact same thing i face. What i did was drop the username of blogs i like into @ginabot settings page, so i get notifications when they post. It saves me all the hassle.
When i first came on steemit, i followed so many folks whom i don't even know, thinking that they would follow back as is on facebook until i realised that many are not aware that i follow them! It was rather annoying.
I hope someone considers the friend request feature truly, it would make this platform a more friendly place. I can choose to follow you, or to be your friend...lol. We are friends already though, right?
Thanks for stopping by @mitneb, always a pleasure to read your comments.
Thanks for the heads up. Since asking to follow someone is too much to ask and creates a mechanic that although is personal but disrupts the organicness of content. I’m creating a tab titled favorites adding a way to add a person to the tab and then as you select favorites it has all the ppl you want to view for content as a side sorting method.
@theuxyeti, I thought that one of the changes you are working on would help with this issue in some way. And the number of followers remains a number which lacks any true meaningfulness other than to confuse newbies, and give them something to beg for.
Cheers!
Hmm... i appreciate the mention! Thanks for thinking of me.
I think my ui goal is to add additional personalization to the user.
The current ui is so generic and misleading to a new user.
By adding a way to favorite other users, would allow an alternate way to sort your followers.
I agree when following 200 users the way the followers list is treated needs some work. That is on my list to improve.
For a small win though i think if you just add a Star next to ppls name, content, and tags that allows for enough macro sorting to occur.
We gotta remember Steemit seems to be more of an information site with a social media aspect.
But where do you draw the line between aninimity and social presence.
Since my baseline of the ui leans more towards content and aninimity whereas extensions like dtube and discord open up the social mechanic i tend to steer with Steemit.
I feel the content space ever evolving allows discovery for interested reading by authors and in turn you could prioritize those authors in a way so a daily routine on Steemit could ensue.
At this time scaling in smaller sizes allow for improving bed user testing to identify how much more “like Facebook” you’d want to go.
Already i have a list of 30 ppl i follow in discord and those same ppl it’d be nice to follow daily on steemit or mine.
But agreed there should be a better treatment for “following” and how that works.
Favouriting some followers could help if those who are following use it. My concern is those being followed. The impression given is that your followers stand for your core readership base which is not true. There is no incentive for followers to actually read the blog they follow.
On facebook you have friends you may know. Can't steemit have something like blogs you may like, based on your search, from which you can pick who to follow?
I still feel that the friend request feature will greatly improve the lives of newbie blogs here on steemit.
Thanks @theuxyeti for your contribution. It is good to get the ideas of some one who is into developing a user friendly interface for steemit into this discussion. I have been to your blog and I see your efforts in bringing steemit to a better place. I hope @ned gives you opportunity with the developer team.
Thanks for stopping by. Peace
I’m working on a few mechanisms to improve content by author. My first pass at this platform it’s def not a social platform like fb but you might be into something. The platform is definitely lacking on authentic users and how to follow them
It is the process of seeing beneath the veneer and it is not pretty but it is what it is and is up to us to do good and make it better. There are people on here who have made THOUSANDS of accounts but it is a decentralized morally neutral (at best) place. Keep at it, don't give up .....your message needs to be heard....
Thank you @battleaxe. It is what i suspected; the numerous account thing. It was what made me really question the follow feature today.
I just hope those who can fix this thing, hear me and fix it.
Thanks for stopping by. Please do come again.
You spoke about the main reason people have to earn me to follow them, I have a very low standard 'I like your posts and remember seeing your name many times before." Despite following +200 I can easily check my feed and there's isn't all "the junk" I expected from this number.
Reminded me, I have to unfollow some users.
Lol... If you truly followed those whom you find their posts interesting, you won't find junk on your feed but the follow feature is being abused. People are following 8000 accounts; why?
Well I did some unfollowing myself but I still mostly use ginabot.
Thank you for stopping by. Stay safe. Peace.
Yeah! you're so right @warpedpoetic.
This post has received a 0.18 % upvote from @drotto thanks to: @banjo.
Maybe that will come with Hivemind?
I think they can't implement that kind of interaction because there is no interface within steemit to handle the friend function. The community and friend function is handled in Discord at this point in time.
Well that is why there are developers here. They can implement it. They can the interface into it. Its open source after all. This Beta stage is the best time to build something grand
Sneaky Ninja Attack! You have been defended with a 1.27% vote... I was summoned by @ejemai! I have done their bidding and now I will vanish...Whoosh