Yet another one
Some time ago, in one of the posts which is linked in the footer that I recently have, I have written a short story about people leaving the platform:
A few months ago I started to follow some pretty unpopular minnows, that took me some time to find, but who had pretty good content in most of the cases, trying to make their way up in Steem, to gain followers, visibility and why not, money. Do you know what happened to them? They quit!
Now it is yet another one. What intrigues me so much is the fact that this guy does not leave because of rewards, but because the content that he creates is not even read. He thinks about posting on Medium, which does not reward content producers, but still, it becomes more attractive than Steem...
Why do you think this happens?
Some posts that you might be interested in:
It feels as if there is no audience here, only voters trying to make a buck**.
For example, if you go to steemstem, one of the communities I'm part of, there are posts by well-known Steemians writing about the details of cosmology and string theory. These posts receive 200-300 upvotes within 20 minutes. I have significant physics training, and I don't understand the article. Do you think that 300 people read and understood this article within 20 minutes. There are literally 100s of users that blindly upvote $uccessful authors because they think they can make money from curation.
Then I post... ...it feels like giving a talk to a mostly empty convention hall. (Yes, I've done this in real life so I do know what it feels like.) I think I have 3-5 real readers, and I appreciate them, but otherwise my upvotes are people simply tossing a coin in at 27 minutes to see if they can profit.
What's more, my posts that are over 24 hours old never have upvotes -- or views as far as I can tell -- so what is the good for keeping these around? Why not simply discard all content after it is 7 days old? Very few people read these old posts -- there is no incentive.
My, and other's, frustrations isn't about the money, but the futility of talking to an empty room. Maybe there are people there, but upvotes, which are basically free to give as a sign of "Hey, I saw your post. Kind of neat!" are not forthcoming. I'd be content with a zero-valued thumbs up vote, that simply acknowledged that someone was watching. Upvotes on "expired" posts would be great too, even if there is no payout, it demonstrates that there is an audience.
As I mentioned in my "VLog #001," there is a Harvard Business Review article, from around 2014 or so, that claims that the root of happiness is feeling that one has an impact on the world. I came here because I thought the model of paying people to read and view my posts would give me a bigger audience, but it seems almost to have done the opposite. (OK, so when you start very near zero you can't really go lower, but you get the idea...)
To be clear, I am not leaving Steemit anytime soon, but I'm watching to see how it evolves. Presently, I'm planning to use Steemit and DTube to host my content, and then create an external website that links to it. I want to attract external viewers, since I don't think there are many internal ones.
(**Admittedly, I have authors that I autovote too, but on top of this, I am reading and voting manually on a daily basis.)
Sorry for the late reaponse!
I have read your comment in the day you posted and I couldn't agree more... I guess that in this world and on this platform as well, it is the money that matter. So, unfortunately, in order to be successful and to gain audience here, at this time at least, you have to either be very good at what you write about and have a huge perseverance or to have a big amount of money and be willing to share.
Maybe in future things will change, but the current situation here is because some users are into making money, so they will try to produce content while they are not interested in reading anything. This saturates the small audience here with content and does not let you to reach many people with the articles that you write. This simply makes the report between (content producers / content consumers) too big.
As I have said, maybe with the onboarding of new users, things will change, but for the moment, this is the situation that we have to face and maybe the money are not encouraging healthy interaction, but more like fake people commenting on the posts of different whales, while others are continuously pushing garbage content into the blockchain...
Thinking that posting on Steemit means your content will be read is about as silly as posting on Twitter with no followers and thinking those will be ready too. It's about reputation and relationships. Rewards come later.
I think expectations are out of whack because some people are comparing their start in social media/blogging with others who have been doing it for over a decade. It's just not a rational comparison.
I completely agree. On the other side, I am curious how much monetary rewards pay into content discovery. Allow me to put things in other perspective:
What if paying people to produce content is the root of all the bad things related to content and interaction on this platform?
For example, there are a lot of platforms on which nobody gets payed. On these platforms, like stackoverflow or even medium or redit, people are not payed to produce and discover good content, but they still do. Here on the other side, a lot of people are more interested into self rewarding rather than finding the best piece of content and bringing it to the trending page.
I am curious whether or not paying people to produce content encourages manifestations of greed rather than altruism. I am not saying that this is a problem of how the blockchain is designed, but more of a social values.
The whole system is made to induce the feeling of scarcity. It appeals to the wrong part of the brain :). Is not about paying people, but having a limited time to do so. The content is also made to squize immediate reward, because that's how it works. Who on Earth comes on Steemit from any search engine?
Is all broken man :)))!
The answer for your article was given by @spbeckmam already.
One of Steemit advices is to be sociable which means comment on other posts. Ok. I honesty decided to dedicate some hours to find good posts and support minnows as whales always have plenty of begging comments or pretty good ones but with the other aim...
However, I was surprised. It was almost impossible to find a good content post - pictures, jokes, cooking recipe or just one sentence of I dont know what. Moreover, if I leave a comment most likely it will be ignored.
Yes, Im a minnow too and my upvote costs almost nothing but it's not only abt money... although I maybe wrong as I was wrong with my forecast for yesterday play Spain-Russia. Thanks God I was dissuaded from betting.
Just wanna say it's do difficult to find good content minnows among all others...
I had a very similar moment very early on. When I started and saw a lot of followers coming in, I felt like I had a good start with many people wanting to follow me. Gave me the feeling of people, probably as new as me wanting to support each other as much as possible.
Now, almost six weeks later, I am a bit older and a bit wiser and I know what it actually is. Making a wild estimation, of my close to 400 followers, only every 4-7th users is probably a real and active user. The rest either already quit or is just a bot that is part of some curation chain.