Videos tend to get way more votes on Steemit than actual views.
Why is this? Is it something to be concerned about? If so, what can we do to resolve this?
I have seen the same things on my unlisted videos that went only to steemit. One video had 300 something votes, 40 comments and the video itself after a full week had only 11 views. The #witness@proctologic has also done an experiment on this post: https://steemit.com/american/@proctologic/best-saturday-night-in-stockholm-sweden where the large part of the article is "lorem ipsum" blocks, and nobody has noticed it yet and/or commented on it :)
[] Hello @Mrs.Steemit and @piedpiper
I looked at the video and I always do. Steemit is a new thing. People try to get everything here at the moment because it is something new, me to so I use 10 hours a day here. That will change. When you by a newspaper you look at "your" stuff there. If you by a new magazine you never seen before you will try to look at everything. On top of that, this is something completely new to people: paid to vote, STEEM, cryptocurrency, blockchain, and getting better in English if it is not your native language, WOW :-) They can not do it all at once. So something will have to be left out on the way to understand it. The whole project was to take the cryptoworld to the mainstream and that has started. So strange things will happen all the time for a while. Some years I think, and that is nice. The evolution in a big scale has finally started.
Regard
Ramta the Viking of Norway
I love this project :-) and I vote when it looks like something I like. It is not anything to be concerned about and absolutely nothing to solve. I need to get a grasp of it all and then it will be solved by itself.
This project is only some months old. Nothing else to expect in my opinion. I have never spoken english in my whole life, but I can read and write it. Do not understand so good when i look at videos.
I think @mrs.steemit is right that video length matters, as a lot of people either don't have the time to sit down and watch a long video or just don't have the attention span, that's the world we live in..
On the other hand this post clearly shows that vote count quickly becomes decoupled from actual views even for short videos. Part of the reason for that is people who have a lot of accounts and automatically vote with all of them, I tend to do that for example. So say I watch the video and vote with my main account, that triggers voting from 2 of my other accounts.
Another reason is what @craig-grant said in a comment here that a lot of people, especially some of the whales, have this miner mentality where it's all about maximising profits. So they vote automatically for certain authors and setup bots to maximise their curation earnings and basically milk Steem for as much profit as they can. Unfortunately there's not much we can do about this at the moment, although the vote recharge changes that were postponed/cancelled might've helped with this. Making voting power more of a scarce resource would make "spam voting" harder which is a good thing in my opinion.
The reason videos don't autoplay is to optimise the performance of opening a post, as loading lots of videos will slow down the rendering a lot. What Steemit does now is simply render a static preview image that you have to click on to actually load the video, it lets the page load a lot faster.
I know Facebook autoplays videos in your feed when you scroll over them and that might be an option in the future here too, but I'm not sure it would really help with people actually watching the videos to the end. I rarely watch the videos on Facebook to the end even though they start automatically. There's a bandwidth concern there as well of course.
A few of my thoughts on the current situation of steemit posts.
Let's say I am a user who used to browse facebook and youtube only, and have recently joined Steemit. I know for a fact that many of my friends who do the same have gotten tired of even trying to read those comments added to the facebook content or youtube videos, so it might just be a bad habit to most readers not to read the comments here or not even the full post just skim through the images.
As a long time Redditor, I loved reading the comments and the ability to vote and filter those out yourself too. I think Steemit needs to fix the incentive of users commenting quality responses and showing they have watched the content. Thus eliminating spambots (maybe not A.I bots...) and rewarding users by doing so without being afraid of losing Voting Power for it.
With the quality lately rising in content I am sure comments will be the next thing to improve, and I personally can't wait for that to happen. One thing I've learned from previous platforms is that even if the post isn't of too much quality or the trending one of the day, the comment section can be a place full of innovation, quality and entertainment just as much as reading blogposts.
219 up votes currently, but 26 Views...and I don't think that people even click on the video and check it's length as @mrs.steemit said, I think that It doesn't even get clicked on. I've had a post where a video was part of it, but from say 80 people only 3 bothered to actually watch it, the video had a disclaimer that It had to be watched, clearly stating it's part of the post and that the video wasn't mine and very high quality content worthwhile watching. The conclusion I can draw from my experience on steemit is that:
Automated voting is still high
People base their up vote/comment biased on the Title of the post.
the top voters have a cryptocurrency mining mentality, they earned most of their money mining, and voting to them is like confirming a crypto transaction, not about content
lol Thanks, Chitty. The backdrop is just a projector screen. I put a white-balanced fluorescent light behind me, shining up at it and another one in front of me, by the camera. I'm using a 50mm lens on a Cannon DSLR and the exposure is dialed up to +2
Most articles take about two minutes to read max, whereas a "short" video is 4 minutes, and that's really too long.
It also depends on where the reader/viewer is. If they are steeming from work, they can't risk watching videos, the sound will attract the attention of their boss.
Finally, bot are voting more than humans on this site. Human voters melted away when they found that their minnow vote increased the value of the post they were reading but they didn't get a curation award (because they're minnows).
Also, human voters like reciprocity. They vote for you, they expect you to pay them a visit back and vote for their stuff. If you don't they stop voting - if there is no social reward and no monetary reward, what is the point? Whereas the bot voters will vote regardless because it is profitable for them.
I have seen the same things on my unlisted videos that went only to steemit. One video had 300 something votes, 40 comments and the video itself after a full week had only 11 views. The #witness @proctologic has also done an experiment on this post: https://steemit.com/american/@proctologic/best-saturday-night-in-stockholm-sweden where the large part of the article is "lorem ipsum" blocks, and nobody has noticed it yet and/or commented on it :)
He should join us on http://steemspeak.com/#!join-radio/ and talk about all these things with us!
Yeah, I keep meaning to come and check it out. I should have some free time tonight :)
YESS!!! @piedpiper I agree with @poeticsnake - we need your voice on SteemSpeak Radio
That would be great! :D I hope you will find the time this evening to drop by and say hello!
The Bots are taking over! ;)
Yup. This has been my experience ever since I started. :-/
Didn't read the post or watch the video, but I saw a good discussion going so I read that.
That's funny because Lorem Ipsum is a common block of text. Where are all the anti-plagiarism bots? :D
[
] Hello @Mrs.Steemit and @piedpiper
I looked at the video and I always do. Steemit is a new thing. People try to get everything here at the moment because it is something new, me to so I use 10 hours a day here. That will change. When you by a newspaper you look at "your" stuff there. If you by a new magazine you never seen before you will try to look at everything. On top of that, this is something completely new to people: paid to vote, STEEM, cryptocurrency, blockchain, and getting better in English if it is not your native language, WOW :-) They can not do it all at once. So something will have to be left out on the way to understand it. The whole project was to take the cryptoworld to the mainstream and that has started. So strange things will happen all the time for a while. Some years I think, and that is nice. The evolution in a big scale has finally started.
Regard
Ramta the Viking of Norway
I love this project :-) and I vote when it looks like something I like. It is not anything to be concerned about and absolutely nothing to solve. I need to get a grasp of it all and then it will be solved by itself.
This project is only some months old. Nothing else to expect in my opinion. I have never spoken english in my whole life, but I can read and write it. Do not understand so good when i look at videos.
I think @mrs.steemit is right that video length matters, as a lot of people either don't have the time to sit down and watch a long video or just don't have the attention span, that's the world we live in..
On the other hand this post clearly shows that vote count quickly becomes decoupled from actual views even for short videos. Part of the reason for that is people who have a lot of accounts and automatically vote with all of them, I tend to do that for example. So say I watch the video and vote with my main account, that triggers voting from 2 of my other accounts.
Another reason is what @craig-grant said in a comment here that a lot of people, especially some of the whales, have this miner mentality where it's all about maximising profits. So they vote automatically for certain authors and setup bots to maximise their curation earnings and basically milk Steem for as much profit as they can. Unfortunately there's not much we can do about this at the moment, although the vote recharge changes that were postponed/cancelled might've helped with this. Making voting power more of a scarce resource would make "spam voting" harder which is a good thing in my opinion.
The reason videos don't autoplay is to optimise the performance of opening a post, as loading lots of videos will slow down the rendering a lot. What Steemit does now is simply render a static preview image that you have to click on to actually load the video, it lets the page load a lot faster.
I know Facebook autoplays videos in your feed when you scroll over them and that might be an option in the future here too, but I'm not sure it would really help with people actually watching the videos to the end. I rarely watch the videos on Facebook to the end even though they start automatically. There's a bandwidth concern there as well of course.
Hehe, cool experiment.
A few of my thoughts on the current situation of steemit posts.
Let's say I am a user who used to browse facebook and youtube only, and have recently joined Steemit. I know for a fact that many of my friends who do the same have gotten tired of even trying to read those comments added to the facebook content or youtube videos, so it might just be a bad habit to most readers not to read the comments here or not even the full post just skim through the images.
As a long time Redditor, I loved reading the comments and the ability to vote and filter those out yourself too. I think Steemit needs to fix the incentive of users commenting quality responses and showing they have watched the content. Thus eliminating spambots (maybe not A.I bots...) and rewarding users by doing so without being afraid of losing Voting Power for it.
With the quality lately rising in content I am sure comments will be the next thing to improve, and I personally can't wait for that to happen. One thing I've learned from previous platforms is that even if the post isn't of too much quality or the trending one of the day, the comment section can be a place full of innovation, quality and entertainment just as much as reading blogposts.
Great points. Thanks for the input :)
219 up votes currently, but 26 Views...and I don't think that people even click on the video and check it's length as @mrs.steemit said, I think that It doesn't even get clicked on. I've had a post where a video was part of it, but from say 80 people only 3 bothered to actually watch it, the video had a disclaimer that It had to be watched, clearly stating it's part of the post and that the video wasn't mine and very high quality content worthwhile watching. The conclusion I can draw from my experience on steemit is that:
the top voters have a cryptocurrency mining mentality, they earned most of their money mining, and voting to them is like confirming a crypto transaction, not about content
Yeah, that's an interesting way of explaining it.
agree. i vote a lo to support people but try to really read all of it.
With the attention span people have these days the shorter, the better...
Yeah. Bite-sized little nuggets of goodness.
Resteemed and tweeted!
LOL I'm commenting on actually watching this video :)
lol Thanks ;)
Thank you for your support! Followed !
Thank you :)
Thanks Mrs. Steemit :) great experiment :)
Very interesting post! I did watch the entire video!
@kus-knee (The Old Dog)
This is a comment to indicate I watched the whole thing hehe.. I have been following you for a while but only just discovered @mrs.steemit
p.s: I always wonder how you get the white wall on your back!? haha.. can't really be that clean! lol
lol Thanks, Chitty. The backdrop is just a projector screen. I put a white-balanced fluorescent light behind me, shining up at it and another one in front of me, by the camera. I'm using a 50mm lens on a Cannon DSLR and the exposure is dialed up to +2
Most articles take about two minutes to read max, whereas a "short" video is 4 minutes, and that's really too long.
It also depends on where the reader/viewer is. If they are steeming from work, they can't risk watching videos, the sound will attract the attention of their boss.
Finally, bot are voting more than humans on this site. Human voters melted away when they found that their minnow vote increased the value of the post they were reading but they didn't get a curation award (because they're minnows).
Also, human voters like reciprocity. They vote for you, they expect you to pay them a visit back and vote for their stuff. If you don't they stop voting - if there is no social reward and no monetary reward, what is the point? Whereas the bot voters will vote regardless because it is profitable for them.
Yup. Good points, for sure.