RE: Thoughts on the Current Experiment and Potential Strategies
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:
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.)