RE: Thoughts on the Current Experiment and Potential Strategies
With the whales not voting or having their votes being countered, we can no longer try to garner support from single (or few) sources as we have been able.
Trying to garner support from a single source is against the idea of social media. The point of having many followers is to earn more money, its like youtube the more sub you have the more money you have. Imagine if youtubers had to be friends with the right persons to get the most money, then the whole revenue model of youtube would be skewed and there would be no way for people to gauge progress.
Now more than ever engaging with more and new people is crucial. The more people you are able to interact with and get on their radar, the higher the likelihood you can receive a vote from them. Now this doesn't mean spam your post in their comment section, this means engaging in conversation with them. Give them a reason to want to know more about you and your work without even having to ask. While never perfect, this greatly increases the chance they will look at your blog and hence most recent posts.
Giving power back to the people promotes engagement, who would have thought? /s
If you don't want to really do any of these or are so bothered by what is going on, just take a break from posting for a while.
One thing that I noticed is that users who are currently being autovoted by whales seem to be the most upset. This is logic because currently they have some kind of guaranteed revenue which provides some stability which is good for them. However what they fail to understand is that this stability is an illusion, it is very fragile actually because any whales can decide to stop the autovote for any reason at any time. This experiment will provide a much more predictable and stable way to earn a revenue which is why I find it hilarious that so many people say they want to quit because of it. Authors who are serious about building a rep/following and want a stable source of revenue should be ecstatic about this experiment.
Anyway, good post @sykochica
I can fully agree with everything you said here! While I can sympathize with those who see their rewards suddenly drop (for any reason whether a flag or a whale removing them from their autovote list) because the first thoughts are naturally 'What did I do wrong?'
But like you said, in the end it's really quite fragile and there is a danger to expecting the stability. I remember when I first came on here and was ecstatic to make my first penny...a penny!! I'd never been so excited about something that I often don't even bother picking up off the street. Then I'd frequently make a few bucks that made me excited, but when I made pennies I'd have the same 'What did I do wrong' feeling. Often we get into these states of 'normalcy' that much like building a tolerance, requires more and more. Like Admiral Ackbar says:
Source
I would say almost everyone before the experiment was saying " what did I do wrong?" because rewards are very inconsistent for the large majority of authors.
The one who complain are the only one with some kind of stability but for most users on the platform rewards are a complete rollercosters. They would get a few pennies for days and then a post with $30 then back to few pennies ( this is the situation for a lot of users) and everyday they are asking what they did wrong. This is very problematic for authors to gauge popularity of their work within the platform.
I can agree with that. At least while a roller-coaster I'd think it's not as much of an impact compared to the person with quite consistent results. It was a little easier (at least for me) when have a decent payout x number of times a week versus daily. But I do still get exactly what you're saying.
When I was setting up and running the Steemprentice mentor group we really focused on getting most people (typically those that weren't on the whale radars) setup and noticed by curie. At least in those instances I was able to provide them with that groups rules to give them an idea of how often they could reasonably expect a decent payout. Imo curie did wonders. I remember when I first started and you were either on a whale radar or not.
One thing that might help outside the payouts would be to see an increase of views on posts as a 'meaningful' metric (at least for some people.) Simply removing the upvote button from the thumbnail/list view and forcing people to open and scroll to the bottom to vote would he useful. Even with the strings of bot votes, it would at least provide a view per human voter. (Though I don't know if views of other platforms like busy are recorded.)