RE: Daily Discussion No. 4: How Important is Engagement and Community for the Future of Steemit?
I worry that short-sightedness is creating a situation where we're killing the goose that's laying golden eggs.
I fear that's exactly the environment that's developed here, or maybe it was there all along and it just took time for it to bubble to the surface.
Since I arrived here in May, I've come to recognize that there are cliques here. Both societal and Steemit based, the latter is off limits unless you have a buttload of SP.
The upside of that is that you're almost guaranteed great payouts if you have it.
The downside is that you'll have to work your ass off and be very lucky to get noticed if you don't.
All along, the mantra was, "Get paid for creating content."
Expectations have not been managed well.
And unless I've missed some announcements, I don't see any movement towards changing the things that need changing. Lots and lots of suggestions but no announcements leads me to believe this toy has been relegated to the bottom of the toybox.
Ooooh look, EOS and SMT's.
And you can easily enough end up working your ass off and NOT get noticed. The delegations make some sense to me IF there were given to the hardest workers and busiest manual curators. To me, that would be a totally appropriate way to delegate. But that's not how that happens.
Somewhere up front, there was some "marketing anxiety." That is, the FEAR that nobody would join the site UNLESS the "money card" was played immediately, up front. So many expectations were built around people posting elsewhere about Jeff Berwick's infamous $40,000 post... AS IF that was what Steemit was all about. Which is a bit like claiming you should go to work for Miscrosoft because Bill Gates made $100 million last year.
If the pitch had been "You have the possibility of earning rewards if you post quality content" rather than "Look! This guy made $40,000 for a single post!" we'd probably be having a different dialogue right now...