The Steemit Post Experiment - Everyone's Here for the Money
I've noticed something interesting, after not posting for six months - I always get the same response to my posts, regardless of the quality of the content. I decided to test my theory.
Today, I've spent a couple of hours, editing good quality photos, taken with my DSLR, and then published this lovely photo story:
DEK Photography: The High ISO Black & White Trip
I've watched other posts, posted in the same time frame, with inferior content (both images and text) get more likes and ten to a hundred times more profit. At the time of this post, I have 8 likes and $0.32.
Then, a couple of hours later, as I was walking down the street, I took a photo with my phone. It was not edited in Lightroom, it was not taken with a high quality camera and only had a single sentence to accompany the image.
Again, I've watched other posts, posted in the same time frame. Since this was a lower quality image with less text, it provided for an even better comparison to other, more successful posts, published at the same time. Again, there were other posts, which received much more likes and ten to a hundred times more profit. At the time of publishing this post, this single low quality photo with a line of text has received 12 likes and $0.47, which is more than the my previous publication which took a couple of hours to edit and publish.
So, apparently publication time was not a factor, as other people posted successful content of better, similar or inferior quality, at the same times as I did. So I decided to check out my followers.
Most of them have left Steemit and have not published in months. So, conclusion number one:
People are mostly unsuccessful on Steemit and eventually abandon it.
Conclusion number two:
This creates a high turnover, meaning that if you stop posting, you will soon run out of active followers, despite the follower counter showing hundreds of followers.
But then I thought to myself: "Wait a minute. I don't need followers per se, all new content is visible by everyone, especially when it's initially posted. So what else is wrong?"
Conclusion number three:
Minnows don't vote on content (they may not even open the post), but actually vote on content by a specific user. In other words, if a user consistently gets high profits on his posts, minnows will vote on his every new post, regardless of the quality of the content, hoping to get more Steem as curators.
And this, ladies and gentlemen, destroys the idea of creating, posting and rewarding unique and high quality content on Steemit.
I have to agree with you here. There's an imbalance to the curation and steem power mechanics at play. I honestly don't think that the minnows do a whole lot to move your post either because they are likely weighted far less importance than the big fish. So big fish upvote big fish which is where the rewards come from. The only thing the minnows likely affect is the trending status
So let's do something about it. What can we do to put our energy and effort into ACTUAL quality content here on the platform?
In a way this place feels like a monetized MySpace without ads. The horrendous formatting that you see on many of the $$ posts kindles old memories of nasty styling on MySpace pages.
An outsider looking in right now at steemit would probably feel like it's the Wild West of the Internet. In a sense it's working for steemit but I think it likely hurts the platform too. Quality content should do better on average than poor content, that doesn't feel true and probably turns off a whole lot of people.
It's like a monetized MySpace where most posts look like those single page marketing eBooks from the early 2000s. I swear all the people who fizzled out on selling their get rich quick eBooks and email marketing guides just migrated over to here, left their books and started creating more marketing pages for people to 'vote' on :D
Haha, I've never used MySpace but I remember the horrid mess it turned into, at some point :D
p.s. Followed you, you have a cool sense of humor :) Shower heads for the win! :)
Well, as I've said in my article, everyone's here for the money, so reposting content from other sites is the easiest way to go for most Steemians. However, reposting contents has two negative sides - first, it brings no exclusivity to our platform (hence, there's no reason for Steem to be high in value), and second, it violates copyrights (making cash on other people's work is copyright infringement), hence making Steemit look even spammier.
The solution is simple - we shouldn't tolerate non original content. Then everyone, who is here only for the money will quickly fail, seeing their posts downvoted. Steemit will be better off as an original content platform and content creators' posts will be more visible (unlike now, among all the spam).
That's a good point, I agree!
Very good points - up until now I didn't give this stuff too much thought, but lately it's been really obvious that factors other than content quality are determining most of the cash flow.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@sift666/have-the-payouts-on-steemit-turned-into-a-mass-circle-jerk
I'm a big fan of Steemit, and will ride it out, but I can see a lot of people will get discouraged.
For me the other big factor has been that what I've learned here about cryptocurrencies has been far more profitable than the payouts!
http://www.frot.co.nz/design/computing/cryptocurrency-101/
meep
interesting critique.
Personally I read every post I vote on.
There are a select few I follow whom get my priority, but even then I'll only vote up on content that I find interesting.
But it's true that, given a platform whose main allure for some might be money-making, we'll see a high turnover for those not ready to work through the slough and keep at it.
We'll lose all the people who thought they could do a Get-Rich-Quick using Steemit, and who are disillusioned by the weird tradition that makes their introductory posts worth up to ten times more than the next 10-20 posts they make.
We probably also lose some who get annoyed or lose interest after a while. (I personally completely forgot about Steemit for 2-3 months... I've just restarted Steeming 4 days ago XS).
Hm... what we lack might be a kind of recommendation feature, so that the curators who do actual curating ( as opposed to a bot upvoting everything by X 2 seconds after it's posted) can get together in groups and vote amongst themselves to create weekly Best Posts in all the different categories.
I could imagine having a kind of newsletter like that...
Another option could be a recommendation feature so you can selectively allow some people you are following to recommend posts to read. like sharing on a friend's FB wall works nowadays.
There's a lot of features yet to be implemented or thought up, Steemit still has some growing pains to go through.
I suppose the resteem option covers most of that, although I'd sure like to know who resteemed my posts - there's a lot of development yet ahead of the team, yes.
I agree. Howerver, Steemit is yet to become popular in poor countries. 10 SBD may be nothing to a Westerner, but it's a good daily income in many countries. Hence the multitude of copy pasted content, poor English and, I soon suspect, pornography. Let's hope it's artistic pornography :)
True.
hmmm... some of them, at least, will try with original content I think.
I have hope for the platform !
We'll see what happens in a year or so when all those global-internet plans come to fruition and EVERYWHERE suddenly has a connection for no other cost than creating a bloody FB profile or whatever "free as long as you do ..." scheme they come up with to monetize the systems.
I just hope those that do manage to earn a living wage somehow help their local communities too, and don't become social recluse sitting in front of the computer 24/7 copy-pasting for their daily Steems... That would be VERY unfortunate XS
Well said!
very interesting!
And also a bit sad, as it literally destroys one of the main reasons behind the existence of Steemit. But I do intend to continue posting - I find people here a bit more artistically inclined and providing good feedback for my work (as compared to Facebook, for example).
Yeah that's true. If everyone is just here for the money then it will soon start dying!
Not everyone. I'm just here, doing my thing whether anyone appreciates it or not. $$ are always nice, but I never expect to make any. That way, I'm never disappointed. To each, their own...
That seems to be my direction as of recently!
That's actually how the mass works especially social media. I just arrived here but was and am active on another social media for like 2 years or so. The thing that's important is that quality content isn't important. I might not be the pro in this topic but it helps if you show some boobs - to sum it up realistically.
Are man boobs OK? :D
I think it depends. Especially the female users have strange habits of upvoting. But generally speaking, I wouldn't advice to use them.
Haha :) I think female users may actually upvote a hairy naval. I should definitely experiment with that!
Will you use high quality photos? Maybe, some snapchat filters would be better
I think Snapchat filters raise the value of any photo by at least 100 SBD. I didn't think of that, I'm just using Lightroom.
hi ho new here to steemit ..
there will be a few shake outs here I am thinking and some tweaking that will have to be done to make the playing field a little more balanced that is for sure ...
Its up to the house to set the odds lets hope they want to survive cus we sure would like to see it go ...and this is way more fun than the rest ...
I remember people expecting tweaks months ago and even though some were introduced, nothing much changed. In fact, the only positive thing is the price of Steem, which did not increase because of the (questionable) direction or management of the social media, but because of Bitcoin's recent increase of value.
I have been doing a lot of reading in the three weeks I have been here ... and have learned a lot ... The crypto world is so new and there are people who want it to succeed and those who would like to see it die ..
It will be very hard for the operators of steem and other cryptos to keep it fair and honest "its up to the house to set the odds lets hope they want to survive " with good old greed always present ... and a banking system who would rather not see any competition .
There is great potential for cryptocurrencies and some real hurtles to overcome.
But I am sure we will not get it right the first time lol
So lets hope the creators want the game to continue and they have fed enough to just enjoy the game now and let us also...
next fork will tell if there feeding is going well lol
read up on the whale wars the last week ..... interesting .....
Oh, I've missed that - should search and read on what happened. Thank you!
you will get some interesting takes on it ... still trying to wrap my head around it all and come to some sort of a conclusion to where it will go ... giant pod wars lol
You make very good points, but I think a good post accompanied by good pictures will still get a nice amount of votes, what you get as rewards will of course depend on who voted for you, if you got a whale or a few dolphins you will make some good money. But I do think, after you have gotten a place among those who post good stuff and have real followers, not the number that shows on your profile (most of these are not here any more) you will start to make better profits, also curating helps a lot, you know every nickel counts and after a few months you just might have a nice amount of money, so I would just say don't give up.
Indeed. I'll just keep posting my photos for my and people's pleasure. And if I get some cash out of it, great! Thanks for the nice comment!
Hey, this is great post. To be honest i did that the first day, but now I try to actually upvote the posts that are really worth it. If Steemit gets the indian bloggers on the train, it is gonna get mad spammy in here...
Indians, Philippino, Thai... I'm sure even East Europeans like us find it lucrative. I've seen some Bulgarians copy paste content from the web already, with no added value from them.
Thanks for the comment!