Analytics and the engagement potential through personal feedback

Asher (@abh12345) created one of his infamous personal statistics posts and this time had a look at all the votes from 2018 and plotted them on two pie charts; whether they went to accounts with more or less SP and then, to which user classes.

Obviously, the first pie chart is going to depend quite a lot on what the SP holdings are of the voting account being evaluated so I thought I would have a look at where I am positioned in the rankings. I checked this from steemfriends.org which is a fun site to explore a little and found that with 36,646 SP, I am in 447th position when it comes to own SP powered up. That means there are 446 accounts with more SP than me powered up.

and my chart looks like this:

No real surprises there as there aren't that many accounts with more than me but after 2 years on the platform, I know quite a few of them and vote as I see fit. 11% of my votes landed somewhere in those 446 accounts above with 89% going down the list. But down the list to where? Enter pie chart number 2.

What this says is that 70% of my votes go to accounts with less than 5000 SP and almost half of that goes to accounts with less than 500 SP of their own. This is based of course on number of votes, not value of votes themselves but it goes to show something if you look at the numbers in the top chart again.

Some account feedback views

In 2018 I cast 27,964 votes (all manually) on the platform which is, 76.6 votes on average per day. Of course, I don't read 76 articles per day but, I do read a hell of a lot of comments every day from those who like to engage. The vast majority of the votes I cast by number is on comments I receive as I see it as a good way to reward my readers. On a side note, I have also replied to most of those comments as I believe that if someone takes the time to comment, try to comment back something of value at least. It isn't always possible of course but, it is much more possible than most seem to do.

At the moment due to price, I am likely averaging 6-7% voting weight on comments to make sure it goes above the dust threshold. Last week I cast 180 votes on comments (average weight 6%) on 80 different accounts, which means that in the seven days it is about 11x100% votes on comments. This is lower than normal because I have been so busy and have been posting less than average and therefore get less comments than normal too. I can see this as my ranking in this post is 49 but I have been in the top 30 for most of the last year at least for encouraging discussion and engagement. Something I value.

Gamify the numbers to engage

These various charts that Asher creates are interesting for as you can see, one is able to get a better idea of behaviors and perhaps even see some opportunities to improve in various ways. For me at least, this is why I think that gamifying the platform and providing much better analytics for groups and of course personal accounts would go a long, long way in increasing interest in the platform. This in turn would also increase engagement as people find out interesting ways to improve and of course, interesting things about others.

The platform's users are hungry for this kind of feedback and Asher's post from 5 hours ago already has 65 comments on it and, it wasn't a post about some drama or complaint, it was offering personal feedback. This idea of providing services that offer direct feedback to users should be leveraged heavily and hopefully with the upcoming possibilities of Hivemind (the full version) there are going to be more capabilities to more easily develop tools and get much more granular information.

Add personal feedback

Personal analytics should be a key focus of every application and interface that is looking to build a consistent following on Steem. However broken it was, people liked having the view counter (VERY BROKEN) but in this day and age, it really isn't enough when Twitter and Facebook, Google and Instagram are offering much more finely tuned (albeit mostly bullshit) statistics that encourage and direct people to develop and get emotionally invested. Funny how numbers can do that.

What it also does is help users find a path by being able to see what other users are doing as This is Steem and the numbers are transparent, the good, the bad and the ugly. This creates various dynamics and conversations and ends up developing cultures and sub-group communities of various types as they model off each other.

For example, sure there are a lot of maximizers here that want to grow with as little effort as possible but as I see it, not many of them I have observed over the last two years have out-performed my results. Of course, it has taken a lot of work as I haven't taken the 'as little effort as possible' but, the work I have done has allowed me to build a very strong foundation considering I was a zero starter two years ago. Sweat becomes equity and on Steem, it then becomes a type of collateral and along the way, I have developed social capital. It all sounds very business-like but, it has been enjoyable, I have made many friends and likely helped many people along the path.

In my opinion, it really is social media done right although, there is still a long way to go in the way it is done. Perhaps, Social media done increasingly right, would be a better tagline. Earning by being part of a community, offering skills, learning skills, helping people develop their skills, making friends, supporting a wide range of programs, growing responsibility and breaking dependencies on economic authorities... It really isn't so bad is it?

Time for some frozen pizza for dinner... go have some fun, make some new numbers on the blockchain.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]