Solving the Problem of URQC (unrewarded quality content)
![](https://steemitimages.com/640x0/http://geke.us/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Quality.png)
Here on Steemit, we have a love/hate relationship with the whales. Most of us hope to attract their attention and upvotes, and to one day become one. But we also tend to blame the very existence of whales in our frustration that good content often goes unrewarded.
Whales are neither the cause nor the solution to the problem of URQC (unrewarded quality content). Gaining a one-time whale upvote or a temporary steem delegation will not make anyone wealthy in the long run and it won't solve the problem of URQC. That's because the solution to URQC ultimately relies on three things: time, diversity, and dissatisfaction.
It's not a sexy solution. People want to get rich quick. They want to pop a pill. They want a meteoric rise to the top. They don't want to hear that the answer involves patience (time), cooperation (diversity), and competition (dissatisfaction). But it does, and here's why.
Let's look at the problem of URQC through the lens of basic economic theory. At its heart, economics is the study of human action (a field of study called praxeology). Human beings act in order to achieve goals. Goals emerge from a state of discontent in the present moment. Murray Rothbard explained the role of time in our economic behavior in The Foundations of Modern Austrian Economics:
“All action in the real world, furthermore, must take place through time; all action takes place in some present and is directed toward the future (immediate or remote) attainment of an end. If all of a person's desires could be instantaneously realized, there would be no reason for him to act at all. Furthermore, that a man acts implies that he believes action will make a difference; in other words, that he will prefer the state of affairs resulting from action to that from no action. Action therefore implies that man does not have omniscient knowledge of the future; for if he had such knowledge, no action of his would make any difference. Hence, action implies that we live in a world of an uncertain, or not fully certain, future. Accordingly, we may amend our analysis of action to say that a man chooses to employ means according to a technological plan in the present because he expects to arrive at his goals at some future time.” (emphasis added)
Time starts the process by defining the process: we want something better than what we have now. We have Steemians today producing quality content that languishes unnoticed and unrewarded. The goal is to change that dynamic in the future. All goals are future goals and the goal here is for any producer of quality content to be able to enter the Steemit environment and reap reward for the value their content brings to the platform.
But time also exists as the only vehicle through which we can move forward toward that goal. It's only through the passage of time that Steemit will be able to grow, and through growth, diversify, which is the next requirement.
An economy is scale-dependent. What that means is, the size of the economy matters. A smaller market is more susceptible to rent-seeking, fraud, and monopolies, but a smaller market also allows for a greater sense of community among its members. A gigantic market is more diverse but less intimate. It tends to self-regulate, reduce corruption, and keep members in line precisely because the market members are not all close friends.
Right now, Steemit is a collection of several cliques of intimate friends. That's great for community building, but not so great for objective critiques of its content. Friends upvote friends. It's human nature.
However, as diversity in Steemit increases, you will start to see these niches multiplying. Chaos theorists describe such niches as "patches," (for a better understanding of Patch Theory, read Stuart Kauffman's At Home in the Universe) and it's in these patches where good content starts to get noticed. Writers tend to hang out with the writers. Painters with painters. The cryptos and sports fanatics and quilters... you get the picture. That's how systems evolve and handle their growing complexity.
But what if you join the crafting niche while your skill set really isn't up to snuff? You have a choice. Your first option is to find other niches. Perhaps you started life as a quilter but later found your passion and skills better suited to poetry. Eventually, you'll find the content you're best suited to produce. A large, diverse market will help you do that, being comprised of these various patches that tend to reward good patch-focused content. Patches will begin to grow and split and overlap in new ways that diversify upvoting and payouts.
Communities on Steemit will multiply and morph, a network of intertwined patches of interest and expertise that begin to distribute the wealth of the platform more evenly than before. It's diversity in action and it allows us to move around and try new things.
As these bigger and more diverse communities grow, reaching their tipping points, splitting into sub-groups, top-earners will again emerge, but not as the whales did in Steemit's first month. Some people will simply earn a little or a lot more than others. Some will have more skill and talent than others. This will cause further shifting and splitting, et cetera. But what about the person who doesn't want to shift or split or find a different niche? That's when their second option becomes apparent: they can compete in the patch they're in.
If you really believe your calling is quilting or photography or teaching economics, but you're not getting the kind of recognition you want on Steemit, you really have two options: you can find another niche, or you can improve what you're posting.
It's praxeology all over again. You're dissatisfied with your Steemit standing now. You develop a goal. You act.
Any market will see this occur. When a producer is dissatisfied with their reward, that producer tries harder. He writes better. She edits longer. He learns new ways to format. She mixes more vibrant colors. And as this process churns along, content improves. People innovate. And the whole platform benefits. That's how markets work. That's how market forces solve URQC.
For a while now, though, we've seen attempts to unnaturally redistribute Steemit wealth by hosting what amount to popularity contests. This is actually a backward trend. Steemit started out as a popularity contest, but it will evolve into patches of specialty in which many can be rewarded. As that process plays out, those who are dissatisfied with their reward will compete and spur improvement and the cycle will play out again and again.
If we allow Steemit to devolve back into one popularity contest after another as the only way of redistributing Steemit wealth, we're trying to circumvent the market processes that lead to innovation and improvement in the first place. Keep that in mind the next time your friends pressure you to vote in yet another popularity contest on Steemit. It might strengthen your friendships, and that's okay. But popularity contests amplify the problem of URQC by focusing on the author rather than the content. To solve the problem of URQC, you need to let the processes of time, diversity, and dissatisfaction play themselves out.
You need to trust the decentralized, open markets you claim to support.
And check out @rawbinhutt's project Looking for Niche!
![](https://steemitimages.com/640x0/http://geke.us/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Steph-Main-Sig.0011.jpeg)
Time, effort and community creation is what I preach people's ears of with. Thanks for the the link to this market analysis of how Steemit can grow in time. I think with the correct implementation of (hopefully soon to be) Steemit's Community features, it will be easier to find sub-tags.
In my opinion engaging similar minded people is the best way to grow and have meaningful discourse about one's content on Steemit. It leads to friendship's, which has its own pitfalls as those you describe, but I think it also leads to people not giving up, because they feel too alone. Besides, networking with someone like-minded usually leads to networking with even more people - in the end organically giving everyone who participates in community creation a larger network on Steemit.
There is so much content being written every minute on Steemit, that being found randomly is a tough business.
Also thank you for mentioning Looking For Niche! I hope in time, it can grow to be a big community-hub, where everyone can find similar people in their favorite niches.
Wow. I just want to find some GIF of a guy clapping forever and post that.
The post however deserves better. Damn, this is good. Evocative yet concise, poetic yet detailed. Your patch metaphor was so vivid I could literally see them multiplying and subdividing before my mind's eye like a dementedly optimistic version of Conway's Game of Life playing out in a macroscale petri dish. Beautiful work.
Also? New word alert! "Praxeology." This is a good day.
Sadly, on a meta level, this post is a perfect example of URQC in and of itself. If a whale had written it (or something of far lower quality), it would be at $661 by now rather than the $6.61 on my screen as I type this. Have my humble upvote and Follow anyway.
So good.
I'm speechless. Thank you. Just sat here for a full 60 seconds unable to formulate a decent response. 😊
How did I know you'd be a Rothbardian, you woman after my own heart? And how was I not following you already? Sigh the number of times I go into my following list to click on someone's blog and they aren't there... it's embarrassing really.
We have a definite problem with time preference and opportunity cost. Too many of us have a very high time preference and little real understanding of the opportunity costs involved in chasing these dreams.
Time is finite. Opportunities are finite. Every choice I make to do a contest post costs me the opportunity to write what might be better. Every choice I make to critique a piece with the attention it deserves costs me the opportunity for some curation, new followers, income.
I weigh the opportunity cost of critique or other hours spent in the Workshop carefully, and what I come away with is this: I am becoming a better author while helping build a community of better authors. There is symbiosis there. I am usually able to keep my time preference low and look at the long game. I believe wholeheartedly that what @rhondak started with the Workshop, @SFT, and even the radio show, are good things that can someday be very big and very beneficial to us all. Even if there is never an imprint, even if SFT can never do more than 20 SBD awards and a minor bump in upvotes, even if all we do there is continue to become better writers and maintain that community, it will be reward enough if--and only if--we maintain a balance and grow our individual accounts as well.
When I see the calls for the contests, which are at least weekly now and sometimes daily, I have to look at the opportunity cost. What will I sacrifice to do another contest post that I am almost certain not to win? My own blog which sees a post a week these days if I'm lucky? Curation, which is the best way to gain followers and I haven't been able to do in a month? Or critiquing others' work so they can write at a more polished level and maybe qualify for better rewards?
So far I have been sacrificing my own blog and my own curation. I don't have a spreadsheet or anything but I'd be willing to bet my average payout is under $5 on a post. Of which I can get out one a week these days. I'm not going to do that anymore. I'll sacrifice my blog and my curation in order to be present in the Workshop, review others' submissions, attempt to bear some of @Rhondak's load, walk folks through the process, because I believe deeply in the community.
But I'm not going to sacrifice it to participate in these contests anymore. I'd rather send a gift of 3 weeks earnings to someone I feel deserves it than spend three hours trying to pander to judges. And I can't tell you how much I appreciate you putting it in the terms you did because however voluntary everyone says it is, I feel like a total asshole saying "no thanks" when everyone else seems so excited about these things. I feel like you articulated a logical and sound basis for rejecting the model, or at least not spending time on it.
I really hope I'm not seen as some party pooper. I am 100% dedicated to the long term success of the Fiction community. I am 100% dedicated to seeing that @Rhondak's hard and revolutionary work is rewarded. It is for exactly those reasons that I'm going to continue working at the long term plan and that includes finding some time to work on my blog as well. I'd far rather take that time from contests than from the Workshop.
No matter how you dice it, this is exactly how it is. Let's keep our eyes on the prize and not get distracted by tiny shiny baubles along the way.
I certainly don't see you that way. I agree wholeheartedly with Geke's post and with everything you said here, @jrhughes. This sounds hypocritical coming from me, someone who found herself nominated in a contest based on popularity vote. I'm going to go along with that to show my support for the MSP Community and other moderators, with no expectations whatsoever of winning. The kind words in the nomination posts meant the world to me, so there's already a takeaway.
However, I'm totally on board with you when it comes to wasting no more time chasing contests. I don't need to win this one to feel validated for the work we've done in the Fiction Workshop. All I have to do is look at you and at @Geke and at the powerful, professional, literary quality of your writing and what it brings to the Steemit platform, and I know we've already won the most important challenge of all. We're putting in the time, doing the work, and paying the dues. At some point I believe we're not only going to reap financial reward for our contributions to the blockchain, but from royalties made off book sales in the mainstream. So I'm willing to be nominated for a contest. I'm also willing to lose that contest, if winning would require me to pull my focus off the long game. I think we're on to something big here. And I say let's keep going full STEEM ahead.
You don't sound hypocritical at all, Rhonda, and nobody expects you to spurn a kind gesture. That would be silly. But I always like to bring a little economic sobriety into every situation. 😊
I agree with your future predictions, btw. Share them completely!
100%! I'm even going to do a post myself, because it would be super cool if Rhonda got the delegation and because I know she takes hours and hours of her own time out for the workshop. She must never ever sleep! But now my cards are on the table so going forward my stance is of record lol.
Thank you for your kind words. I am so on board with what you've started there and I truly believe along with you that it will pay dividends down the road. And even now, the friends I've made, the fact that I'm writing regularly and improving... it's already such an incredible boon. I can be very patient, because to me, priority one is not losing sight of the original vision you had. Priority two is not overtaxing you or anyone else to the point that the road to that vision is disrupted. Full Steem ahead, @Rhondak Spamhamner!
And I left out higher-order economic concepts like opportunity cost and time preference and tradeoffs because I thought that'd be going over heads.... I think I love you @jrhughes!
Thanks for pointing this out. And yes, I wanted to show that there are some very concrete, rational reasons for not traveling down this road - the biggest of which is that these contests don't solve the problem of URQC! They amplify the problem!
And I left out higher-order economic concepts like opportunity cost and time preference and tradeoffs because I thought that'd be going over heads
I could sense you dancing around the edges, so I just grabbed you and fox-trotted, baby!
The trouble I'm having is finding content to vote on or get into a discussion in the comments. I've been going through the trending and hot sections trying to find similar people to me.
I ended up looking through Cat posts. A lot of cat posts.
That said, I have hope people keep trying different things and the good stuff gets upvoted.
You probably wont find them in there. That section is the most misleading of all. Should be called the whale vote section. That does make it difficult to find what you are looking for. That's where a growing network comes in. That's the only way I know.
Your comment spurred me to edit the article to include info on @rawbinhutt's Looking for Niche project. That might be helpful to you @andrewgenaille!
I'm checking it out now
Excellent write up on the economic theory of Steemit.
Actually I think it IS the opposite, it's not the whales fault if your post is unrewarded. But you should be thankful if they gave it their vote.
Wow!! I thought I was philosiphical... this is a lot of convluted philosiphy
I agree.. that these things will make content with more quality emerges.. though I think we should add fourth point: Community.... not the steemit community but the community built around you.
The word of mouth was and still the biggest reason for someone to read someone else posts, and if you have many people who you talk regularly with, even if not all of them upvote you... you'll get rewarded a lot in the long run than a one time whale vote.
I agree with you that you shouldn't let your friends pressure you to upvote for them, you should upvote only what deserves your vote!!
There will always be a creative tension between intimate groups and non-intimate self-regulating markets. Combine the two and you have community.
@geke, great post... and yes, I know you from one of the many patches :-). However, your article stands on its own merits, had I not known you. I think Steemit would provide a very good basis for someone to write a paper on patch dynamics as it applies to social media populations. It is very apparent that there are many habitat patches sprouting (visible through the Topics list) and as the dynamics evolve we are seeing the fracturing and a multi-mosaic taking shape. You point out the URQC (Unrewarded Quality Content) problem, and I agree. The problem with Steemit is that you need to be able to discover those sub patches. Discovery is somewhat problematic on Steemit. The URQC for Bacteriaolgy (Science |> Biology |> Microbiology |> Bacteriaolgy) are not discoverable and probably buried under the Science Topic (very difficult to get a post on the trending there). Difficult for the lay Steemit user to find(sure build your url directly), that great content stays as URQC. @rawbinhutt's Looking for a Niche project is a great start. I'm still not sure how we build a ubiquitous user experience that allows all the different social media types to discover and participate in their particular niche, sub-patch and finally lead to the discovery of that Unrewarded Quality Content. Again, great post and a very interesting topic.
This is a good discussion to be having; thank you for posting this! I'm curious about this looking for niche project as well. I find myself agreeing with a lot of the others' comments here as well. It's interesting, because I think it needs to be a little bit of a pendulum. When I joined I had a hard time getting followers, getting engagement. I had a hard time just even figuring how to format my posts. I figured out a lot the long way, but once the discord for minnows arrived, things got a lot easier ALL around. And now there are the patches of people who are concerned w/the quality, but the fluff comes with that too. About a month ago I started to drift away from discord and check out random steemers as I used to do before, and it was enlightening. It made me realize that I need to refocus and choose how I spend my time more wisely. I want to be reading and writing and collaborating, not just fooling around in chats. (Although, that is great in its own right.) I think there is a market for both however, and I think the focus will swing between the two for a while before it finally lands and really chooses a direction. Either way it's exciting to be here now, and with all you talented people! I feel so blessed, and really hope I can make the most of this opportunity.
There are niche communities forming under the umbrella of the @minnowsupport project. Various geographical communitues, radio, art and fiction writers.
What you're saying is coming true - it's how I see Steem growing.
@geke, this is great article, however unsexy it might seem.
Truth is truth. Thanks for the reminder that we need to develop and build a strong community that allows the market process to take place.
Thanks @sumatranate. I'm usually the unsexy one arguing a point, standing over by the wall. 😊