Steemit Without $$$: The 24 Hour Challenge Follow Up
Yesterday I finished an experiment on myself. How would I feel about Steemit with no prices on any of the comments or posts?
In an ironic twist, that experiment turned into my highest grossing post so far. In summary, I set up a Stylish style to hide all price values on Steemit.
My first impression was surprisingly a sigh of relief. I didn't realize the low-level feelings all those $ signs were bringing up. With them hidden, I was no longer thinking thoughts like, "Hey, wait, why does this post only have $0.12? It's a great post!" The home page also felt different. I no longer had a "What? $5 grand for that?!?" response. The intensity of everything went down. My own feeling of responsibility as a curator (which is funny to say, considering my vote was only worth about $0.20 at the time), went away completely. I went into "Facebook mode" and started liking all kinds of posts. It didn't matter if it was 2 weeks old. If it was good, I liked it. Before I knew it, my voting power which was previously in the high 90%'s got down to the low 80%'s and eventually the high 70%'s.
I was encouraged by the comments on the thread. Some even said they would try it out as well. As the day went on, I started to feel that curration responsibility rising up again.
Had I been squandering my votes?
I had some conversations in Slack with those with much more voting influence than I, and realized how important those $ are for distributing this new currency around. As Sean King discussed recently, this site is essentially a cryptocurrency funnel. Those with high Steem Power are being asked by the whole community to get out there and find the gems among the rocks, to reward those creating great content, and encourage a sense of fairness in the system. They can't do that by number of votes alone.
The only time I almost blew it was waking up first thing in the morning and grabbing my phone to check on things. (I know I'm not the only one that does this... let's be honest, we're all addicted.) Standard routine: Check the price on Bittex. Check the wallet. Check the blog... WAIT! I almost blew it right there until I remembered my phone wouldn't have the CSS style running.
At the breakfast table my wife @corinnestokes teased me with a smile, "I saw the price on your latest blog post." Thankfully, she didn't say more. At this point I had actually made the bottom of the trending list on the home page so I was really getting curious. I waited until after the post paid out, and I found myself more excited about the SBD and the Steem Power anyway. The $ didn't really matter to me.
That, to me, is a sign of where we're going.
Someday, hopefully soon, we will no longer need government-backed, coercive currencies. Instead, we can all interact voluntarily with encrypted tokens of value transferrable to anyone, anywhere in the world, in a matter of seconds.
Ultimately, I'd be happy to see all the $'s go away permanently, but I'd want them replaced with Steem Power symbols. :)
So, did you also participate in the experiment? What do you feel about the site without $'s?
If you haven't tried it yet, you can do it anytime. Just import the css script into Stylish, and you're good to go.
Money may dramatically influence us, but it's also an important signal. It tells us what we care about, even if it's just an abstraction.
Steem On
The day we get rid of government-backed currencies, it will be the day when change really does happen on a global scale. I long for that day.
As do it. :)
"Someday, hopefully soon, we will no longer need government-backed, coercive currencies."
Yessss ^^^
Exactly how I feel man. This is a bit of socialism online almost ;P
Great post anyway, I've made about $80 aud in the first week but I'm pretty much just gonna keep investing my income back in til I have decent amount of steem power. I'm in this for the long run in the end. Steemit is revolutionary for sharing ideas, people just need to give it a chance and do their research, more investors need to see how great this is as well. It's a new crypto in a crazy and sensitive market but there is some incredible stuff under the hood of this beast.
Well said!
cheers man :)
I've seen a few others talking about implementing this and actually a tutorial on YouTube of steps to make it happen. This idea organically helps new users get their content seen as equal. Only, I honestly don't see this being utilized with a majority of users...but I like and admire that you made options.
The hivemind man :o Kind of also touching on the reason why so many people on reddit upvote their frontpage without even clicking on posts.
I saw a proposal mentioned in the Slack channel to hide the voting buttons on the summary pages. I think that would be a good, important step forward to ensure people actually read the content they vote on. Maybe even put a timeout on it to ensure they don't click the vote button quicker than it would have been possible to read the post in the first place. But then there's also the bots... which, if done right, can actually be pretty cool.
I was curious to see how this experiment ended - and it is absolutely lovely to hear you not only maintained but significantly boosted your curiosity as a direct result. I do however feel the dollar value displayed beneath posts and comments is invaluable when it comes to newcomers seeing the real power of Steemit first-hand by directly highlighting why we have the platform content creators have been dreaming about for years. Perhaps, if we really wanted to, a toggle option for existing users could be implemented, though even then it would still function as a motivator and strengthen continued interaction.
I agree. The price signals are important on multiple levels. I appreciate that more than ever now.
You know, maybe I'm a bit repetitive about this, but I'm not seeing the profit of the posts, not because of the values, I see this a virtualization of the youtube trends. I mean, those trending blogpost are the same view of what some videos gets trends on youtube. Let's make some example, I explained it in one of my latest post, NyanCat, Epic Sax Guy or something like Gangnam Style. It just happens.
That pretty much summarizes the vast depth of social human interaction. :)
I agree, social group phenomenon are pretty incredible.
The prices on the post really changes how we read! So what if the dollars and prices associated with the posts are kept private to users. What if we only make public the number of votes that are associated with posts?
Check out my followup post for more thoughts on this... but I do think the $ are important.
Thank you! I've seen so many post that I would normally click on out of sheer interest but avoided because I saw no so-called value in $s showing.
An idea could be to have the values (in SD$ preferably) and votes only visible inside the blog post itself a the bottom... but not on the list of blog posts.
Oh, that's an interesting idea. I do think the $ is an important signal though, something we all benefit from as we can enjoy the hard work of the curators. I like the idea of making it optional, allowing us to customize our own experience. That's what this stylish plugin does.
With great steem power comes great steem responsibility.