It looks like steemians appreciate written content, not videos or links.
Among the top 100 posts, there isn't one single video or link-post.
I scrolled down the "trending" page with the intention of finding out how high a video or "link" reached. I gave up at 100, because there was none, which was enought to prove the point: Steemians appreciate written and original content.
Personally I keep an eye on the "created" page. When there are new posts, I just skip all videos and most of the links. Thinking about why, I came up with these reasons:
- Opening a separate link has a much higher cognitive cost. You have to switch to some external site with some loading time and intrusive popups. The cost is small but high enought to stop you from doing it.
- For watching a video you have to dedicate some time for it. You can't just glimpse at it to get a quick overview to decide whether it's worth your time. Knowing that intuitively imposes a cognitive cost, which often stops me from doing it at all.
- When I read a text, I can choose my own speed. I might skim some paragraphs, and stop upon something that requires thinking. You can't really do that with videos.
- Reading is much faster than watching to a video and listening to speach. Much faster.
- Images often convey the same information as videos. You can gaze at them as little or much as you like, then keep going. They load much faster. Static images are pleasant on the eye.
- Written content is usually original, which makes it more interesting.
- Posting a link or video is actually just telling that you like it. Just like upvoting. Telling everyone you like something isn't as valuable as creating value yourself.
It looks like Steem is working as intended to incentivize content and value creation. I like it.
That might be true at this moment, but I foresee it changing when steem goes mainstream. Youngsters don't do 'reading', they're all about visual content. Where do you think "tl:dr" came from? Or the succes of tumblr and Instagram? Visual content.
You have a point there, which might be true. Time will tell, but I think the economics of Steem favor people who create less but with more quality. The same mechanics can't work optimally with a constant twitter-like stream and with quora/medium/reddit -like content+conversations. Actually I think someone will create a twitter-version of Steem, which will optimise less for quality and more for quantity. Steem will attract quality content creators and the other will attract more entertainment and sharing.
I don't watch videos, its so much easier for me to take in written information. Plus there are often technical glitches with videos, bandwidth, audio, etc.
I agree. Listening to the Beyond Bitcoin hangout takes 2 hours, but reading @tuck-fheman's transcript takes only 15min.
Great post. I wonder sometimes how a gif can get 3x as much as recorded and edited (original) hangouts. Perhaps I should add funny gifs to them instead of the bb symbol :D
In my case it's more about time. It's hard to find the time to listen to hangouts but reading is fast.