Rep, Followers and Pageviews

Well, yesterday @oflyhigh wrote a Chinese post marking his Rep 75 milestone on Steemit (Congratulations bro!!) and this got me thinking of the missing pageviews from Steemit.com for quite some time now...

If we are to look at some important personal parameters on Steem, here are the most likely candidates: Steem Power, reputation, followers. These are all on-chain data. But as I mentioned, pageviews on Steemit.com, to me, is also a very important number.

Let's skip SP as those money related numbers of course matter and I assume that most people come to Steem would know this. So, let's look at Rep, followers and pageviews, which I think all have some intrinsic defects but of course still carry some information with them.

Rep

Reputation is supposed to be a measure that tells the general public about how this user is evaluated by the community, that means include the user him/herself and others. While this might be true before HF19, it is getting less so after the reward mechanism being changed to linear and the tendency to only care about self and own close circle prevails. Because you can buy your way up the Rep ladder with ease now since vote buying/selling is enabled by delegation + linear rewards. The index is contaminated. I am not saying that it was a perfect measure back then (yes, I am aware of the old whale self-voting, sock-puppets, and stuffs), but at least was a good reference point. Now, the future of current Rep system seems pretty doomed.

Followers

Yeah, this is also a non-monetary incentive to encourage bloggers to do better. Let's ignore the problem of Dead Followers and look at what this number means. Obviously a lot of users celebrate follower milestones too.

Let me put it this way: followers ... they ain't no fans. That's for sure. I have 7,785 followers now. Wow, gee, my mom would be thrilled! It's like I have a whole town following my work!! No, it is not. I know. It's not entirely un-true that followers are your fans, but I am only saying that while fans are followers but followers most of the time are not your fans.

It's simple - following people don't cost anything. People can follow others for all sorts of reasons - a) that guy is rich! b) I follow any trending authors I see c) this guy is incredibly retarded, let me mark it so I can tell my friends next time and d) I am a following-everyone bot ...

If I have close to eight thousand fans, comments to my posts and pageviews won't be just single or double digits. Although part of the reasons are that I have been writing mostly in Chinese in the past year, still, I know that this phenomenon applies to others, with exceptions of course.

Pageviews

Therefore, the only seemingly good indicator of the influence of your post, before it vanished a week ago, is pageviews on Steemit.com. I am not sure if other UIs have such a design (busy.org does not). Pageviews can be pumped without much cost too - simply refresh the page and you will get a +1 view. I know. But, since this number is not associated with any rewards, so far it functions as a good feedback measure about my posts. I am happier if the pageview goes higher...

So, actually my main incentive to write this post is to appeal to the Steemit Inc ...

Please bring back the pageview number, or at least tell us why you took it off the website and a future plan would be even better...

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At the end, let me say something less frustrating - all of the above issues, I think, is partly caused by the encouraging fact that Steem is growing fast!! So, in a way, we should be happy about it and only need to think about how we can improve all these before we enter the massive growth phase as promised by HF20.

Hivemind obviously might be one of the answers. So, look forward to that too! Come on... makes us busy bees again.... ^_^

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