RE: Whoever is front-running my comment section is a genius 😉
The obsession with gaming the system for "maximum profit," even in the face of the fact that STEEM is about as close to "fake game money" as you can get while still having some distant connection to fiat currency, seems to be pretty endemic to the entire platform.
You're right in that it does seem to get in the way of the ostensible "social network" aspects of the whole thing. If one does use it just like they would any other social network, it mostly works all right. The lack of individuation, the assumption that "more steem means more value", the complete absence of design around the idea of communities despite trying to leverage curation, these are things that provide a definite pressure against the social network being social.
I'm absolutely with you when you are publicly against of the 30 minute "race for money" when it comes to upvotes. The last decade of social media analysis tells us that the long tail of content, and discovering value to individuals in it, is where a vast amount of quality lies. That flies directly in the face of both the 30 minute limit and the fact that posting is no longer valuable to you after seven days. There is no real motivation connected to the rest of the implications of the platform to write content which will be useful or interesting to anyone beyond the one week horizon.
Maybe that's fixable, maybe it's not. I just can't say.
I can say that from a game theory point of view, there is a very important phrase:
"You get what you reward."
If you look around Steemit and see behaviors which are directly counter to the social network presentation of the platform but are clearly rewarded by the rules of the platform – no one should look surprised.
And we're not.
We're just disappointed.
There's a reason that that has happened.
Steemit has been advertised primarily as a means to make money, and also, as a sidenote, to be censorship-resistant.
That's why there's been an ongoing influx of people who are here to make money on the fast and easy.
steemit hasn't said what it wants to be in terms of a social network. Just that it's a place to make money with posts that are censorship-resistant.
You want to be disappointed, take it up with those who promote steem in terms of only making money.
Further, there is no reason this can't be corrected for.
But using Whales will never solve this.
You'll get the same result that you got with YouTube promotions and featured.
It's not simply "you get what you reward"; it's that the interface lacks the ability to get to what you want to see.
It's not that the posts aren't or are rewarded - they can't be found! At least on YouTube I can search for videos.
I can't search for steemit posts. I get google search.
There are so many different interface issues.
I'm surprised that no-one is focusing on that.
Make a site functional, and people can use it.
If you can't use it... you won't!
I mean, what's the issue with the subscriber thing on YouTube not working anymore, eh?
I'm saying it's not just the money.
It's the structure of the site, too.
Oh, and people advertising steemit as mainly for making money. But I repeat myself.
You are absolutely correct and I've said so in several posts.
It's funny because most the people who are "big on promoting Steemit" also simultaneously are willing to tell me to my face (virtually) that the most important thing about the platform is not that "you can make money," simultaneously while promoting under a banner that explicitly refers to the ability to make money on the platform.
I can't really figure out if they're lying or simply that deluded. I'd really like to know, if we're being honest with one another. That would help me to form a better idea about the community.
The first thing that leapt out at me as someone with some knowledge of the history of social media platforms was that there is absolutely no good method of discovery in the system. None. "Curators" are pitched as that mechanism – but the systems which underlie "curations" (and I keep using scare quotes because what they do isn't actually curation) have nothing to do with the actual content of any of the posts. They're all about making bigger numbers appear on certain places on screens for certain users.
What we need are systems that make good content (and by "good" what I mean is "content that I, personally, will like") appear in front of me and good content ("content that you, personally, will like") appear in front of you – especially if you and I have different tastes and desires in content.
Search on Steemit is crap. It's not even a good, well integrated Google search. I have no idea how someone thought that search system was the right one to use for this platform. Whoever made that call needs to be thoroughly beaten. Search is just this side of being a solved technology for online fora, but this…
You get what you reward.
Actual curation isn't rewarded. Community building isn't rewarded. Creating good content is like entering the lotto; maybe you'll get lucky and somebody with a lot of voting power and a lot of SP will give you a thumbs up, but maybe you spent eight hours on building a piece of content just to see that you end up with $0.35 at the end of the week, having trudged by people copying memes from other sites who are pulling in over $100 a pop (theoretical, because Hades knows how many of those votes they paid for out-of-pocket).
For a creator, it gets pretty quickly disheartening.
I'm seriously considering taking my content creation back to Medium, because while I will never be one of their focal creators or in their "rewards program", at least the interface doesn't make my eyes bleed, it's pleasant to write and create in, and it seems to be largely absent a lot of the drama that gets pulled in because people act like this is "real money."
There are systems that would work. I am debating within myself whether or not this is one of them.