RE: The largest REP in the world
Wow, you made me look. I'm at 55 today. If I search back through old posts I can probably find where I mention rep in the past. All I can accurately state is that my 55 rep was purely earned, I had minimal bot upvoting on my account from purchased votes (and if I did, they were small dollars). Most of my bot activity was through dividend earnings delegating some of my stake to minnowbooster, who I supported based on their "stronger" moral code and better anti-spam work that they actively pursued (at least back when Steem SQL was still free, they always promptly removed votes from crap posts if I notified them about the junk in discord or live on the blockchain.. and they set up bans on bot accounts.. I respected that.. but I digress).
I don't actively post much on here anymore. Partially because of the value of Steem, partly because I was discouraged by the abuse of the old platform, partly because HF20 devalued original content vs voting on content, thus creating a smaller circle jerk of voting, and mostly because I have limited time to spend on Steemit to generate content that I would "be proud of" from a format and content perspective. I don't know how much my rep will change from my limited content posting (or comment posting), but 55 feels good for me at this point. Maybe one day that will change.
Until then, all of my "old" favorite writers get my upvotes, and an occasional comment or two 👍
I think this is not the case, at least for some of the curation projects as they have expanded their reach a fair bit. As for the limited posting, if you want to post, post. Sure quality does matter and make it something you want to post, but relax a bit and have some fun with it. The platform will change many times for better or worse, but look long and the experience is much smoother.
For a "social media platform" like Steemit, you need content. Expanding on that, you need quality content. Which means that there needs to be an incentive for producing quality content.
Since the creation of quality content requires effort and effort requires time, and time is a known limited resource, that means someone who generates quality content has to make a choice: spend more time generating quality content and less time curating, or spend more time curating and less time developing quality content. Time is unfortunately not limitless.
Sure, you have an alternative to support a curation chain, but now you're not voicing your personal preferences through curation in the same manner as you are performing through your content/writing. Also, you might as well let a bit vote for you at this point (there are very minimal differences in final outcomes between a curation "circle jerk" chain and a random/automated/AI bot voting system).
Everything in life requires balance and trade-offs, including Steemit. I like that the "new new Steemit" has fewer bots, but until the Trending page is fixed (a ridiculously silly problem since beta), we're going to see continued adoption issues and continued lack of support for new users with limited stake. It's still like trying to find a needle in a haystack for good, original, content. And when you find it, it doesn't matter because you STILL need to "team up" with other minnows in order to try to become more than a blip on the radar.. because everyone with enough stake to actually support good content is too busy giving their votes to an automated curation chain rather than searching for and supporting new users.
Perhaps all new users' content should be on the "Trending" page for their first 1 to 3 months (once they initiate their option to be on the page- when they're comfortable with using and navigating Steemit). Of course, something like this requires added scrutiny on new accounts to ensure that someone isn't just creating a new account every time their timer runs out... But it's at least a new and (possibly) original idea that I've never seen discussed by devs or witnesses..
I think that there is incentive now and there will be even more in the future, but quality (of any kind) will always be in the minority, which is what makes it valuable.
I approach this (as I write more than I curate) by finding people who I believe are builders and supporting them (I normally read what I vote on) and people who resteem quality and I can find new people to support, some I follow too. I don't have the hours to spend searching, but I am pretty good at finding through the network connections.
I think that communities will help with this a lot as they have the chance to onboard people directly into where their interests lay, instead of a content soup. There are some good curation initiatives out there, I wish there were more at this time with stake.
I think onboarding will have an easier time in the future and trying to repair what the current situation is might be futile as so much more can be created that is fundamentally better, not just a patch.
I agree, but is quality on Steem actually being given the value that it is worth? I'd argue that the answer is "no" more often than "yes". Which is why I say that the incentive does not yet exist.
I just read a post from @paulag that indicated communities have quite a long way to go before they are to be considered the "solution". Based on her comments, it appears that communities have far missed the basic mark of what might have been expected in any sort of "first launch".
The fact that P2P direct messaging is not available in a community is a severe oversight from my perspective. Sure, I'm cherry picking a flaw, but communities have been discussed for years and that's something that I feel
that most people would have thought to add-in from the start.
I'm not trying to be negative, it's just disappointing to see such massive potential get floundered so often. It's like Steem never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity... Hopefully someone figures it all out for Steem soon, or Steem will quickly be replaced by the competitor who saw epic failure after epic failure on Steem and decided to make their own (better) solution.
Again, I'm still on the Steem Train.. I just need to see more success. It's been a long road of "the next big thing is coming in 3 months!" followed by "the next big thing is coming in 3 months!" and when it finally arrives, another 3 months later, the blockchain crashes for 90%+ of users for 3 days..
The incentive is there, but it depends of timeline and perspective. The immediate return is not available for most, unless living in a very cheap country.
The community framework is just some code. What needs to happen to make them really functional is to have apps built for them in the same way, Appics, Steemhunt or others have built for the basic blog. Once developers start thinking wider, a lot of innovation can take place.
The crashes need to be sorted out, instead of people worrying about their missed earnings. As I see it, stability is fundamental to SMTs, not the reward pool, as every SMT will have its own.