Official Announcement Post for the Transition from TKC to QOTD
Hey everyone, I've gotten a ton of questions about how TKC and our community are moving forward with the new QOTD initiative and I decided I would make a post that clearly outlined how we'll be moving forward! Thanks for your patience and please let me know if you have any questions/suggestions in the comments below!
The New Structure of TKC - QOTD
So, the previous structure of TKC was to promote a few articles each day by featuring them in a daily TKC post. The reason I want to transition to QOTD (question of the day) instead of keeping this post-featuring system is because of a plethora of submissions that were made in hopes of just getting a reward. TKC became a contest rather than a curation service to promote the best content.
QOTD (Question of the Day) is something that I think will bring much more value to the community and Steem as a whole. QOTD will be used on each of my posts in the following manner:
- I'll write a post about a given topic
- I'll include a question of the day (QOTD) at the end of each post
- You (the community) will comment your answers to the QOTD and any other thoughts you have on the subject that's posted
- Upvotes will be distributed to those who leave thoughtful comments/insights on the post
I tested this out on my last post and it worked out extremely well! Everyone left such thoughtful comments and insights and it really reinforces this project and makes it that much better!
Why Is This Better?
There are 4 main reasons why I think this QOTD initiative is much better than the TKC project:
- More Upvotes will go to a larger number of people and those who leave the most thoughtful comments will be rewarded the most.
- The conversations in the posts about the subject at hand will be much better and more engaging than during TKC, when the conversation had to be spread across a multitude of posts.
- It will give me more time to respond to all of your amazing comments and insights!
- Many of you contacted me in the discord and said that you don't have the time/ability to post 1-2 times per day or even per week and that you still wanted a way to participate. I think it will be much easier for you guys to respond to a QOTD rather than write an original post and tag it with TKC every single day.
The QOTD is going on right now. Below, you'll find the Question of the Day for this post. The format for QOTD will look similar to this post in all my future posts, so stay tuned!
QOTD: What do you think would make the QOTD system even better for your fellow Steemians? I'm open to all your suggestions!
Don't forget to leave your thoughts below and I look forward to seeing you in the comments!
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YAYYY! Finally, the QOTD is out :D and here is my response.
1. Inclusion of diversified topics
I totally agree with @mineopoly and his perspectives about this matter. All of us have different interests and expertise to offer in this community. In order to maintain and lift up the incredible spirit here in the #tkc community, it would only make sense to rotate the QOTD targeting different topic areas and interests. In my teaching world, they call this differentiation and I am very sure that many of you would know about this concept too. Perhaps, we can get a ‘pool’ of topic areas from our fellow Steemians. What would you guys recommend? In my book, I would definitely recommend something about education or parenting – simply because that is my ultimate passion. :)
2. Use visual prompters to support QOTD
AHA! QOTD can be more interesting if it comes with a visual prompter (pictures or photographs). For example, a picture of young children playing hide-and-seek in a beautiful park with the question, “Should children play more in the outdoors? Why or why not?”. It sparks creative and critical thinking skills among our fellow Steemians to write constructive comments as well as enables us to embrace originality and varying depths of creativity. Alternatively, for a more open-ended QOTD, an abstract painting or photograph can be coupled with the question, “What do you think is happening here?”. I feel that it will invite cool, imaginative responses from us. Don't you think so?
3. Promote different ways to ‘comment’
When I first joined Steemit, I was perplexed with the amount of contests that are happening here ranging from 300-story word to photo contests. What if… we take all these different ways of responses and offer a special platform right here? Opening up new opportunities to respond our QOTD through poems, song lyrics or covers, story and even illustrations will attract more valuable and quality contents from our fellow Steemians. I am not sure if this trend has started somewhere by another community or blogger, but hey, we can always be the new pacemakers.
Look forward to read other responses too! Thank you for reading mine :)
@heartscally, these are some amazing points! Thanks for sharing them. You've sparked a lot of ideas for me and I will definitely be adding these to the future QOTDs. I especially like how you're talking about bringing creativity into the fold by adding alternatives to plain text like pictures, lyrics, paintings, etc... I think these will make great additions to future QOTDs and I look forward to seeing how this all plays out. Stay tuned and thanks so much for your input and support! I really appreciate it!
Wuhoo! Glad to know that my points are beneficial for #tkc team here. Excited for you, your team and everyone here!!! :)
This community is a collective "cultivating curiosity and spreading educational awareness to all parts of the world." The coolest part is that everyone is welcome to join in here freely. @khaleelkazi @samiwhyte @xyzposter @danielwong Thank you so much for your hard work and the opportunity to work with such a great team of friends. We all learned a lot in a short period of time. Of course we learned about Steemit and human nature and we found some quality posts. But the greatest lesson I learned is honestly admitting something doesn't work is is the next step to success. If something is broken we need to fix it, throw it away, give it to somebody else or put it on a shelf and look at it later. QOTD is what brought me to this community in the first place. I followed Khaleel in his readings and his approaches to blogging and investing. Now we have the QOTD:
"What do you think would make the QOTD system even better for your fellow Steemians?"
The QOTD is an awesome way to interact with Steemians but I would like to offer a few suggestions.
Comment on the comments. Don't just drop a comment and leave. There are some great comments we find. I encourage each person who visits QOTD to take time to answer the question well but also take one more minute and look at the other comments and comment on the comments. If there is something interesting or a good point or even something you agree with then please let that person know. Those who comment on comments well can also be rewarded for creating dialog.
Finish your comment with a new question. Comments don't have to end with a period. Asking a new question after the comment helps everybody here. It helps the person giving the comment to bring out a reserved question that can be addressed. It helps Khaleel and other bloggers to understand what members of the community are interested it so we can address these issues in upcoming blogs.
Offer a competition or contest associated with the QOTD. In the contest require exact results associated with the QOTD and choose winners based on those results. Some examples are scavenger hunts, bounty prizes, poetry contests, DSound contest. It is best if the research can be done within Steemit itself but can send people on missions to find facts about ICO's or exchange rates at a specific moment or anything instead of just talking B.S. about what we read on the news or Bitcointalk.
Offer a variety of topics. Today the falling crypto market is big but it doesn't mean that's the only thing going on. Sometimes we can ask a controversial question. For example Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's birthday just passed by. He gave his life for the civil rights movement in the 1960s. What can we do today to help his dream be realized? How about interacting in Steemit? Have you ever meet discrimination or felt discriminated using Steemit? Is there anything we can do to reduce discrimination when we interact with users on Steemit?
You are completely right, being a part of the kazi collective has been a great way to explore steemit from a more interactive angle instead of just watching and hoping for the best. It laid a base to start from and gave me as a curator a better view on how steemit works. I am curious to see how the QOTD evolves as I didn't follow @khaleelkazi back then.
you made some good ideas, and hope people will interact in a honest way.
I sometimes feel like there is too much obsession on votes. The constant pressure of being the first one to make a good comment that might grand you likes. It is still better doing it here than on any other social media, but sometimes it gets on my nerves.
Thanks for your support throughout the initiative @xyzposter! I really think QOTD will be a great way to bring more value to more people and also encourage thoughtfulness rather than just being first or "most often".
Wow @mineopoly, you really put thought into this. I really appreciate these ideas and pointers to everyone in the community. I highly recommend that people read through these and follow @mineopoly's tips. These are truly the keys to creating an engaged and valuable community filled curiosity and interesting conversations. I love that you also talked about how we analyzed the situation of TKC and decided that it was time to switch directions and do something to fix the problem by establishing this new initiative. I appreciate all your hard work and I've had a great time working with you! I've learned so much! I look forward to the abundant future that we build together in this community! Thank you. 🥂
@xyzposter. Thanks for your honesty. I can see your point about being first. I could never be the first to comment. My head takes a while to digest things. But I like the challenge. I'm really glad to see that you replied here.
I can see how the TKC became a contest and diluted the efforts for the best content. I am impressed how rapidly you responded to this!
The only suggestion I have is that maybe there is a specified period of time before the upvoting by you happens so that your vote power doesn't get depleted before all the responses are in. What do you think or maybe you are doing that already!
Thanks for the kind words and support that you always give to me and the community @sequentialvibe! It's greatly appreciated!
I agree and actually monitor my voting power. I do my best to spread out my responses to comments and upvotes in order to keep my voting power high. Thanks for sharing your thoughts! I look forward to hearing more from you as QOTD progresses and hopefully gets bigger and better! Thanks again for all that you do! ❤️
Felt the same way too. I think it was just the structure not really people being greedy per say.
At the moment I can't think of anything that could make it better coz it's already that AWESOME!
I think too many rules just makes things not enjoyable and I think QOTD has always been fun to participate in because it doesn't have so much rules and regulations where TKC was looking to go down that route.
All in all, on a personal note, I'm excited and happy that you've brought back QOTD :D
Thanks @danielwong! I appreciate your input. Yes, I agree, the structure was too similar to other contests and definitely was the source of all the trouble. The looseness of QOTD should be a lot better for participation and fun and I'm glad you think so as well! I appreciate all your support!
It's great you spotted the chinks and hiccups in just 10 days. Kudos to you man!
Yes. Great work. @danielwong You have a really good point. What's the use of doing this if it is not enjoyable?
What about open sourcing the Qotd?
For example in your article you could ask people to ask questions about your post and the one with the most votes could be the next question of the day.
This would probably only work if you are writing on a similar topic in the next article.
Is TKC finished then?
That's a good idea @tony10! I'd like to implement something like that alongside a QOTD... I think they would work together really nicely. I'll think on it some more and see if we can do it! TKC is not finished but rather making a sharp turn in a better direction (at least, this is my hope). I think QOTD is a lot better for engaging with eachother and allowing everyone to earn rewards in a more even and distributed way compared to just featuring 3-5 posts per day. There were a lot of issues with featuring people. A few of them being:
I started the whole project to encourage good content & engagement within the community and we had both of those, but they were frankly getting diluted by the noise of people wanting to "win". I think this QOTD system will allow the best comments/conversations to rise to the top and break through the noise and allow us to have real conversations about meaningful topics. Please let me know more of your thoughts on this. My hope is to just make the community as involved and valuable as possible, I believe QOTD is superior to the post-featuring system in that regard. Thanks for your support!
I agree with you. Anything that spreads the love to more people rather than the select few will be a winner. I will definitely be taking part in the QOTD.
I am thinking about also adding a QOTD to my posts as it clearly stimulates the community.
Should we stop tagging TKC then with our posts?
Thanks
I'm glad to hear it! Thanks for your support!
You can still tag with TKC if you want, there is still a solid amount of attention going to those posts, I'll do the best I can to read through some posts in the tag during my off time, but there will be no more competitions within the tag. Any competitions of any kind will be conducted through QOTD from here on out!
Thanks!
It is absolutely true Khaleel. The pointers you have mentioned for the transition explains it all. For me, the most concerning part was writing the article for the sake of reward than to participate in the community. With a dispersed set of articles across various niches, it is hard to always go in as a community member and check every article, then participate under that niche. As an example, Sometimes it couple be possible that week can pass by without any article mention from the niche I am interested into and gives no participation from my end. Though I spent time looking at those collective but did not participate because niche was not interested in me the whole week.
So, to me, it is a good move which will help build a community around good content and people with the common interest in learning. Also, helps create and curate better-focused quality content.
I run a small travel blog for last 8 years now and while my other fellow bloggers were busy writing more and more articles, I was always busy with the readers answering the questions or comments for them in all my articles. Few years passed by and I realized that every now and then I started getting requests for contributions more and more. When I reflected upon what has happened, I figured out that the massive number of comments conversations that happened overtime has build up a community in itself around the blog and its niche content. In 2013, I was forced by the readers to launch the forum so that they can also contribute to the website.
So, I do believe that the power of comments and being able to build up a community around niche topics, benefits the community and it's members/author in long run than working towards diversified topics scattered across various users making it an information organization/sorting nightmare.
Looking forward to this awesome community of tkc to grow and have loads of learning topics as well as conversations.
I 1000% agree @devilonwheels! I think that huge, engaging and valuable communities are built by the conversations around the niche of the community and by the people driving those conversations. Community members like yourself and many others who leave such thoughtful comments in hopes of sparking conversation and knowledge sharing are the reason why I love posting and engaging with the Steemit community. Thank you for everything you do and please continue to engage. It means the world to me ❤️
Question of the day would be great if we had all sorts of topics especially for people like me, who are beginning to purchase a crypto, using a wallet, an exchange, and much more. In order to bring more people over, this process should be simplified more, with less steps. I think there are over 1200 cryptocurrencies out there. thanks for the question.
I think it will become more clear as time goes on and it actually happens. What you did here by just reading the post and leaving your thoughts is what the QOTD is about! I'll work on wording the steps in a simpler way, thanks for sharing your thoughts!
thank you so much. I appreciate it and hope to see more content for the layman folks out there. I think we have enough posts for the advanced investors.
Thanks for supporting me and @khaleelkazi! I agree we will both work on posts for investors who are experienced and inexperienced as well!
We can do with simplicity here please, the steps are really too many. Waiting to see what you come up with.
Turn it into a vlog post on Dtube or maybe even a live stream on dlive!
I interview members of the Steemit community on my @MSP-Waves Radio show, perhaps we can chat sometime!
I've messed around with Dtube a bit but haven't taken the deep dive to get some equipment. I'm actually looking into some microphone/camera equipment for an upcoming vlog series I want to do about my real estate projects! I definitely would be interested in doing your radio show at some point and will check it out right now! Thanks for sharing it!
For sure, do you use discord chat at all? That's what we use to conduct the interviews. We could have you on the show tonight if you're interested or maybe next Wednesday.
That sounds fun. Msp radio is like pirate radio for the world. I used DSounds and had no problem at all. The post went well. Dtube was too slow to download. Maybe it's quicker now.
Nice, as much as I loved #tkc, I think you focusing on QOTD will be just as good, if not better. I always loved the articles that went along with QOTD and I know that tkc was taking away from your ability to do them. Glad you prommoted a couple of my articles, but now I can try to improve yours with some quality comments.
Thanks for your support as always @jakeybrown! I appreciate it and look forward to talking about interesting topics in QOTD with you!
This is better for me. The interactive nature will likely bring out very nice comments and contributions to each question of the day.
I don't know if it is only me, I enjoy commenting on people's post more.
It's definitely not just you, many others have also told me that they enjoy commenting and QOTD much more! Thanks for your input!
You are welcome
Thanks for supporting me and @khaleelkazi in this transition to the new project! I agree with khaleel, it's definitely not just you. There's a ton of people who have also said that they prefer commenting and conversing over making their own posts and trying to "win". Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us!