The Troubled Minnow
By Modman on pixabay.com
When I joined Steem in June 2017 (with @suesa of course), I was full of energy. For half a year, I pushed out one post after another after another after ... you get the idea. It was 1 post daily, sometimes two.
The Steem price soared.
Then it dropped.
I didn't care much. But I started posting less, due to other reasons. There are 3 science posts and several scifi stories I'd like to write and publish, but ... the excitement is just gone. The user interaction dropped. And the trending page is reserved for those willing to pay for bots.
I'm not the only one facing these troubles. And while there's still a flourishing Steem community, it's a community that spends most of their time off the chain. Comments and feedback are given via steem.chat DMs or Discord. And while I personally value the Steem blockchain especially because of the community, I can't help but feel sad. Because user interaction is what made me so excited about Steem.
I love writing stories. I love reading other people's reactions even more. But nowadays, I only get comments from people who already know me.
Now, I joined during a time where it was not super easy, but still possible to reach a big audience by just being active in the right channels. Now?
Now the minnows join, are overwhelmed by bots, and don't know where to go. They're alone.
The Troubled Minnow. A shitty drawing by me, inspired by @geekpowered
Welcome bots started out as something nice. Steemitboard still kind of is, if you're into achievements. But especially introduction posts are swamped with bots and no real users.
Barely anyone curates manually anymore.
High SP users sell their votes.
Content doesn't matter when you can pay for your own salary.
And while Steemit Inc. is hiding their funds off chain, witnesses are discussing forks that will (probably) never see the light of day, long-term Steemians wait for SMTs and hold on to their Steem, ... the new minnows vanish quietly, to never return.
Because who wants to be part of an environment that doesn't care about you?
An environment, where you don't understand the politics, and the reasons why nobody supports you but bots?
There used to be so much support for minnows, but even that degraded into automated bot votes and comments.
Where's the human community?
Where's the warmth?
I see some of it in my comments, from time to time, but even that vanishes.
And the worst thing is, I am not without blame myself. I'm active on steem.chat, yes, but I'm not curating myself either.
How do we return Steem to a welcoming space?
That is very deep, didn't expect this to be that real 🙃
Me neither, the drawing was supposed to be fun. Then I realized how sad it actually is.
Sadly it’s a ton of valid points. I think the only thing we can do. At least those of us who still have some faith...is to just keep on doing. Try to find new users and encourage. Manually curate. That is a big problem. I know.
I’m share a ton of the same sentiments but I’m going to just keep on doing what I’m doing.
Haven't seen you in a while but glad to see you here :)
Yes, carry on no matter what might be the way to go. I'm doing the same.
Yeah the past 5 or 6 weeks I had to step back a bit which stinks but I’m getting back into the groove again. Holidays were tough here though!!! Hope you are well my dear.
Posted using Partiko iOS
Reasonably well. Still trying to get back to writing, but that happens sloooow xD
Absolutely. I was averaging 2 posts a day. Then holiday season kicked in and I was once every other day. Taking forever to respond to comments. Seem to be finding my groove again though gladly.
Hi there! I'm a human, and if you send me 0.001 SBD, I will wake up tomorrow morning and I will say my first "HELLo" to you! I promise! :))
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Real Talk... Well said!
So then, was all the genuine engagement we used to see around here just make-belief and pretentiousness to rake in tokens?
Probably not!
But morale does suffer in a bear market where only greed without passion continues to thrive on a broken curation system.
I'm pretty sure a lot of the previous excitement was real. It just suffered a lot. :(
I'm still following the likes of @welcoming and @neuvorstellungen, and sometimes I care enough to greet newbies with a handwritten comment. I am also curating myself, even as some of my power also goes to a voting trail. But tbh, curating manually also costs time - the most precious thing we have. And i can get why many people don't want to invest time any more.
There's so many ideas how to encourage manual curation and how to counteract vote selling etc. But the truth is: those who are responsible for electing the top witnesses are those who profit most from these "services". Attendees not excluded. Hence, these ideas will never become adopted.
I'm putting my hope in SMTs and splitting off active communities.
Everyone puts so many hopes on SMTs... I'm afraid the effect won't be as great as anticipated. But let's try to be optimistic...
Everyone needs a last straw of hope. Of course, we could also set hope in introducing a new reward system that is fair dispite the somwhat feudal-medieval distribution of wealth... But it won't happen. ;-)
200% agree with your point. The automation, the bots and the curation trail have liked the entire curation system.people hardly think of curation as they know they keep getting passive income through delegation....there is null manual interfrence
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I mean, I'm guilty of curation trails myself. How do we best get out of it again?
I think part of what you're seeing, aside from the low STEEM prices driving people away and the bots, etc., is the continuing fracturing of the entire STEEM community as more dApps come on board.
I think having more dApps is a good thing, but when there's fewer total users being spread out over different dApps, you see fewer people reading blog posts and commenting on them.
The bots go where the money is and where the most users are, which is still the blogging parts of the platform, but they've been making the rounds, too.
It takes some effort, and time, to welcome others. I know of quite a few users who have done so to the detriment of their own stake, meaning, they've spent so much time in trying to build a community around the plankton and minnows, that they're not growing themselves, even though they're are primarily plankton or minnows, too.
I believe there are people here who still care, and still try to reach out, but there's only so much those folks can do, and it really ought to be reciprocated by those who are on the receiving end in some fashion.
I don't think hope is lost here. There's a lot of things going on right now. I for one wouldn't mind if everyone would come back on chain instead of spending so much time chatting (for free, I might add) off it, but no one seems all that interested in integrated chat into their dApp where it might benefit from the reward pool.
There used to be a chat on chain, it was... Not that good.
In theory, all dApps should lead back to the same community, shouldn't they? Just different interfaces. I mean, I'm not using steemit but steempeak.
But yeah, the community is spread thin, the few that haven't left due to the price drop hide in their own small communities.
re: chat on chain
Interesting. Good to know. If it wasn't very good, that would explain why it's not around anymore.
I think most dApps do end up pushing their posts to our feeds and such, but I've spent quite a bit of time on Musing the last couple of months, and so if I didn't check my feed on Steemit, busy or Steempeak, I would just see what was being asked and answered on Musing. The same would be for dTube—they would just serve up the videos, and you wouldn't see, say, blog posts from Steemit.
Musing does show up as a comment with a link back to musing to see what was said, but those won't show up in a feed, but in the comment page of a person's blog.
What I'm getting at is, there are different places for us to go, and depending on what front end we're using, we may not see the posts coming from Steemit, etc. because other dApps tend to only show what's happening on their sites.
Good point, I didn't even think that far. I've never used one of the "view limiting" dApps for anything but posting.
leider stimmt das, was du da sagst. Mir fiel es gerade auf, als ich mir einen zweiten Account gemacht habe und einen Vorstellungspost für diesen gemacht habe. Direkt hatte ich 8 Kommentare. Aller von Bots, die mich auf diese App und dieses Funktion hinwiesen. Eine natürliche Person war nicht dabei.
Genau das. Ich erinnere mich, dass mein Vorstellungspost damals noch tatsächliche Userkommentare hatte ... dann bin ich auf steem.chat und hatte sofort follower, die tatsächlich regelmäßig gevotet und kommentiert haben. Das klappt heute nicht mehr so leicht.
I am still only a Plankton and joined the first of September 2018. I also came in with enthusiasm even though I knew the price of Steem was down at the time from it's better days. I really wasn't concerned about that and knew I'd have to work to earn a place here.
Even though I am not a minnow yet, everything you said still applies to me. I did stop posting for a while during the holidays. With so much fun to be had and so little happening here, it was easy to justify. Although I truly didn't intend to take so long to bet back to it, the lack of "real" community participation didn't send a strong draw for me to give so much time back to posting. I did post a time or two last weekend and I do plan to give more time to it.
I was fortunate that I knew a couple of people that were already here before I signed on and they have been great support and some of their friends have accepted me in, but gathering new people is very slow. I had tried to make sure that besides supporting those I knew, that I spent a bit of time looking for others I didn't know to follow. It's been a real challenge.
When I joined, "Minnow" referred to everyone below a certain level (who thus wasn't a dolphin), so this post is about you, a plankton, too :P
I'm glad that you found friends in this community, despite joining so late. It can be difficult for newbies.
This is something that was counter-intuitive for me at the beginning but later I realized that it's actually the outcome that could be expected:
The solution is simple: monetarization of everything, strong communities with narrow focus and the production of something that could be considered as "valuable" for non-steemit users (5 billion) rather than steemit users (5 thousands)
Agreed. But how to build those strong communities? There's a bunch of communities but no strong ones in my eyes. As usual, it stands and falls with the money - and people willing to work for (almost) free.
Exactly! Basically, all the communities are trying to become stronger - measured in Steem. They keep relying on Steem alone. It's simply not sustainable. However, there are many things that are functioning without crypto support.
Let's take STEM community as an example.
Scientific consulting is something that exists already. Companies have their questions, experts are providing the answers, experts get paid.
What would be our comparative advantage?
We could do the same for half the price!
Or... Why someone strong doesn't offer the account, filled with 1000 Steem or guaranteed votes to a proven content creator to use Steem on their website?
Powerfull Steemians should focus on promotion.
Imagine that 100 great content creators are using Steem...
Imagine that the price of Steem is 3 $, rather than 0.3 $.
It would be waaay better than trying to create perpetuum mobile with bots.
Photographer from Discovery Channel asked me what he could expect if he joins. I asked 10 strong accounts and their answer was - nothing.
Good for you strong people, Steem(it) is still obscure, but your account is HODLing more Steem.
Ich schreib jetzt einfach mal in deutsch, dass geht früh morgens schneller :-)
Leider muss ich dir da recht geben. Es sind aber nicht nur die Bots, auch die persönliche Einstellung der "Newbies". Es geht doch hauptsächlich nur darum schnell reich zu werden und wenn die ersten 5 Post nicht wirklich was bringen gehen diese auch wieder. Das habe ich zu genüge schon gesehen.
Ich sehe aber auch ein Problem im "Kasten-System" . Ich habe das Gefühl, dass sich STEEM in 3 bis 4 Kasten aufteilt, welche sich anhand der Reputation aufteilen. Da gibt es die User mit low, mid und high Reputation, die sich innerhalb ihrer "Kaste" unterstützt und die Beiträge kommentieren.
Hätte @terrylovejoy mich am Anfang nicht an die Hand genommen oder @sco mich auf meine Fehler aufmerksam gemacht, dann währe ich wahrscheinlich auch irgendwo in der Versenkung verschwunden.
Leider muss ich aber auch sagen, dass die Qualität der Posts immer mehr abgenommen hat. Wenn ich nach Foto-Posts zum curatatieren suche, fallen mir täglich zig Posts auf, die mit "My photography" betitelt sind und irgendwelche Bilder zeigen die einfach irgendwo geklaut wurden. Irgendwie habe ich auch das Gefühl, dass da auch irgendwelche Bots dahinter sind.
Der Treibende Gedanke ist halt leider immer das Geld. Solange das aber so ist, wird sich an der Situation nicht viel ändern. 95% sind hier um Geld zu machen, die anderen 5% sehen einen größeren Sinn hinter allem und freuen sich über die Rewards als netten Obulus.
Dem kann ich auch zustimmen. Im Chat tauchen so viele newbies auf die Fragen "Warum hat mein supergeiler Post, an dem ich Stunden gesessen habe, keine upvotes bekommen?". Ich checke das Profil, vielleicht ists ja ein minnow den man unterstützen kann.
Der Post ist qualitativ so niedrig, dass ich ihn gerne aus meinem Gedächtnis löschen würde.
Es ist schwierig newbies zu unterstützen, wenn 99% nur auf schnelles Geld aus sind.
Ich bleibe trotzdem im #general channel on steem.chat, für die wenigen die doch was taugen.
Ich habe mir mal ausgedacht einen Newbie auszusuchen und für eine Woche eine Art Patenschaft zu geben. Mit Upvotes, Resteems und Hilfe wollte ich ihn dann unterstützen. Nach 3 Posts war er dann wieder verschwunden.
Im steem.chat bin ich jetzt nicht wirklich unterwegs und kann daher nicht viel darüber sagen. Irgendwie bin ich jetzt neugierig :-)
Vielleicht wäre so etwas wie Scouts, die nach neuen Usern schauen, die das potential haben guten Content zu bieten eine Möglichkeit. Allerdings bringt es das nicht wenn wenn es ein paar einzelne User machen, da müsste schon @steemSTEM, @utopian-io oder @curie mit dahinter stehen um auch einen hohen Anreitz zu bieten bei gutem Content zu bleiben und nicht in diese "Masse statt Klasse" Mentalität zu verfallen. Es gibt ja zwischen den ganzen kopierten Sachen auch Posts die wirklich gut sind, bei denen ich aber leider immer zweifel, ob das wirklich die eigene Arbeit ist.
steemSTEM hat ein Mentorenprorgamm das ich ins Leben gerufen habe. Ich hatte selber Mentees. War Pate. Viele andere auch. Es ist fast immer frustrierend und nutzlos.
OK, dass es so schlimm ist wusste ich nicht. Ich dachte, dass die Mentees sich schon mühe geben, wenn sie mit ihren Mentoren die Posts durchgehen.
Ich hatte ja anfangs auch so die ein oder anderen Copyright-Probleme (das sage ich jetzt mal ganz ehrlich) und mir wurde von Mentorenseite aus eigentlich gut beigestanden, vom einen mehr, vom anderen weniger. Es ist erschreckend, wie schnell man diese "Teilen-Mentalität" von Facebook und Co. verinnerlicht und sich um das ganze drum herum keine großen Gedanken mehr macht.
Leider sind tatsächlich die meisten steemSTEM Mentees absolut hoffnungslos. Nicht alle, aber die meisten. Und die Mentoren geben sich echt Mühe. Aber im Endeffekt ists den Leuten dann doch zu viel Aufwand für zu wenig Geld, sich Mühe bei einem Post zu geben. Alles nicht so einfach.
Es kommt halt darauf an warum man es macht. Wenn es nur ums Geld geht, geht es nicht lange bis das Interesse nicht mehr da ist.
Die Menschheit ist leider Facebook gewohnt. 2 Sätze in einem unverständlichen Deutsch, kaum leserlich, aber alle Freunde liken und teilen es. So sinkt der Anspruch von Post zu Post.
Btw. Wie wird man eigentlich Mentor?
Du bewirbst dich bei mir über Discord :P
Suesa#4095