RE: My HF21 after thoughts and impressions of new steem trending page
I think that at the moment, the Steemit trending is not about attracting users and probably shouldn't be, it should be more enticing to investors as the goal is to have Steem holders. The community/tribe/frontends/applications etc are another matter and sould empower the content they create.
If I was an investor, I would be happier landing on Steemit Trending now and seeing development and SteemFest type posts to show an engaged community.
The Steemit Trending page is a place where the overvalued whatever content was highly visible for those who might come in here as investors and be turned off from. Downvoting them has turned Steemit.com into more of a frontend home for crypto and steem development, application, investment and the like as well as hopefully and eventually returning some Steem to those who are interested in Steem long-term.
Sorry to tell you but the non steem traffic landing on trending is not full of investors. The people that land on steem, land here due to user-generated content. 66% of traffic to steem is organic search. you do an organic search as an investor and see if you land on steem. so would you like to rename trending 'Investors page' . It makes us look desperate as a content platform.
Maybe I didn't explain myself well. If you search for investment stuff you are going to find banks. If you are interested in getting into crypto at some point and considering buying in, you might want to find somewhere like steemit trending at the moment and start exploring from there, not what it was. It is better than a random forum for crypto or a telegram group.
Sorry, but that's crap.
If I'm an investor and I'm coming around with a cool million dollars to drop on somebody's lap regarding a blockchain-based social media network, I don't want to look at the Trending page and see the platform talking about itself. It's the worst kind of wank, the worst kind of public masturbation, and as an investor what it tells me is that as soon as someone burns out on the topic, someone moves on, someone realizes all the fanciful stories are just that – fancy, they leave. They no longer remain social.
As an investor, what I want to see when I look at activity, popular activity, on a social media platform is a diversity of ideas and opinions. I want to see people talking about their personal lives, about longer form articles which do analysis on recent political events, about people's trips to the grocery store and their trips to Honolulu. I want to see that there are a lot of people with a lot of different interests being rewarded for pursuing those individual interests. If I see that, I know that my investment is at least going to get spread over enough topics and subjects that as things fall in and out of fashion, my money will keep earning me more money.
Trending has never been very good at all. It either gets dominated by bots, which at least generally have the advantage that the number of topics people are willing to pay to have pushed to the top are slightly more diverse, or by a masturbatory monoculture. Neither one of them are particularly good because neither one of them reflect the actual interests of individual users who are on the platform.
Right now, Trending is exactly like a random forum for crypto with a preference for STEEM or a Telegram group. Identical. It's the exact opposite of what somebody really interested in investing in the technology wants and needs to see.
Word...
"masturbatory monoculture" sponsored by
upvote circles, lacking in quality... but pretend
like they are it...
"Masturbatory Monoculture"
You summed it up in 2 words. Outstanding.
Sorry but that’s crap. If I’m an investor considering dropping $1m bucks on a blockchain I would absolutely want to see a blockchain with active dapps development.
I’m not saying that the trending page is good, those things are not mutually exclusive. Just saying your opening sentence is as crap.
You would absolutely want to see active digital application development – but what are those digital applications supposed to be doing? What is their purpose? The point of their existence?
They exist, at least in the Steem blockchain technology, according to the white paper and everything else that people say, in order to find and promote the best content.
If you go to a site and look at the content which is popular, trending, hot, whatever the term is for the day, and all of that content – every single bit – is just people on the platform jerking each other off about how cool it is, you don't put your money there. You would be an absolute idiot to put your money there.
Somewhere in an out-of-the-way corner, the people who are building and supporting the blockchain should have a page which specifically talks about their digital applications and success stories and how they work – that's important too. But it needs to be not anywhere near the top page, not anywhere near the front page, not the big promotional angle, because the whole damned thing is supposed to be a platform for users to get value out of the platform.
As an investor, if the thing I'm looking at doesn't look like it actually does a job well, if it doesn't do the job which it says it's for well, that is a shit investment and I should avoid it. Of course, the world is riddled with investors who bet the other way, but most of them aren't investors for very long.
If the most rewarded content on the Steem blockchain is all made out of the masturbatory monoculture, it looks terrible for investment, and it doesn't matter how much you think that saying so is crap, it remains true.
Ah but there we arrive at yet another layer... is the current dev show worthy. That’s another topic yet again.
Echo chambers are masturbatory monoculturen which more often than not don’t give a damn about the actual quality of the delivery or its product.
As an investor, not a trader, you will understand that the ROI is in taking the token to $2, rather than in all other wank we see. Wank we see because most people talk about investors but don’t know how investors think. Investors are not here to maximize is an inflationary down pressure market. They will assess if they see token utility and whether that utility has any chance of creating both complexity and scarcity.
Remember that unless C- and D-round, an investor seeks at least 6-8x. Not just some increased number of tokens, they most likely won’t care about those. They did calculate the inflation before investing and interest is most likely less than their funds management fees they charge their own investors.
Then make a DAPP trending section, simple!
It's open-source, go for it. Make it happen!
While I think there is something about the concept of creating a "dev updates" section, the delivery - one often heard - of "Not my cup of tea, get it out of the way [to a tribe/less visible section]" sucks.
There's two other alternatives:
News flash: trending will always suck for a majority because not tailored. And I'm pretty sure neither of us wants to go there because it just opens too many damn cans of worms as last decade online has shown us. Meanwhile, in China they now pay by smiling as a facial scanner. As if there wasn't enough tracking and ID in place there. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Go to the front ends. there are gateways in trending to those too.
That is exactly the opposite of what I should be doing.
If I look at what purports to be a general purpose social media platform without a up front declared subject focus, and I see that everything that is considered "popular" on that platform strikes the same note and that note is the platform itself, I know it's imploding. I know that. The most important thing that they have to talk about is themselves. And that's just from looking at the headlines. If you actually start looking at the content, it all has the same monotone delivery of how awesome everything is and how much money you can make, and here is 1 More Way you can make money.
That is not a social network. That is not a social media platform. That's an echo chamber which is looking to implode at any moment.
If I then come around and look at the New page and see that there is a lot of very minor activity which is not masturbatory but none of it ever seems to get traction, none of it ever seems to get attention, and none of it ever seems to get rewarded – I know what's going on. I know this is not a place to put my money. The contrast makes it worse.
Now to be fair, this is not a new development. This has described the Steem blockchain roughly since the beginning, with some variation in the times that it was running high in value. When the token is valued high, people feel like they have the elbow room to spread their SP out across multiple lower bets because they feel assured they're going to make their basic with the safe ones and other kinds of content can then flourish under that banner.
In times when the token is valued low, like right now, nobody wants to risk a bad bet. No one can afford to. Anybody that could afford to take their money out of the platform and wasn't socially intimidated by the people who kept screaming that removing your money because you need it is a betrayal of everything holy – all those people are gone. They took their money out. They are doing other things. Some of them probably pay better.
This is a terrible time to believe that an investor would want to come by, see Trending, and think "this is a place we want to put our money." But that was true last week and last month and last year. Hell, you could probably make a good argument that bid bot activity at least forced some synthetic diversity onto places like Trending because people would chase the bots, trying to get their vote in before the bot closed the deal. It wasn't real valuation of quality, but at least it was breaking up the monotony a little.
It remains to be seen how effective the current rewards curve is going to be at breaking the bid bot power but I have no doubt in my mind what it's going to do to diversity of creators and pressure on curators to become a monoculture. That is is clear to me as the nearby star.
It's a common problem here.
Looking out for investors warps your mind. Distracts from creating a good product first.
Look what all the investor focus has brought us. Bid bots. "They expect ROI", I hear. Nice 20% ROI on a 90% loss.
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I think the obsession with investors has a broader toxic effect on the community, because first and foremost, it tells those who are involved, who are actually doing things, that they are less important than people who haven't done things or people who have done one thing (bring money) – and that affects everyone negatively.
Investors want a real thing to invest in, for the most part. They want a profit, reasonably enough. They want to get on board with something that's going to grow and provide them money later. If you focus on just trying to lure investors with hooks until they bite instead of building something, a technology, a community, something that sustains itself on content, what you end up with is a lot of really stupid investors who may have brought a lot of money but they've paid for nothing.
Nobody walks away from that relationship happy.
steemit.com is a front end... the first and most popular especially when people are coming through search engines ... so the point the trending page there needs to reflect the diversity of content is well made.
That will not just be reached by upvoting or downvoting...a redesign of the landing page to show excerpts of trending of a range of topics would help accomplish that.
In the top 10 or so there is a gaming post, a travel vlog, an artist and another travel post. In the top20, thre are a few more artists, a travel post and a photography post. Considering this is 2 days after HF21, 6 hours after HF22, that isn't too bad, is it?
It's a start .. only a start... When I see comments like.. "It's looking good now" .. It tells me that they see the job of downvoting shit off the page as the job.. that is a good start.. now.. curate and upvote varied, good content onto the page. Then it will start to look like a vibrant community to attract attention .. the right kind of attention.
A long way to go for sure, that was just the obvious entry point.
We have steemleo for that????
So investment focused content can only be displayed, and trend, on SteemLeo? gonna need a huge DAO proposal to make sure that SteemLeo gains domain authority and ranking in SERPS then.
Also, how are new visitors supposed to even know about SteemLeo? Isn’t the learning curve already difficult enough? Made difficult enough by Steemians because we assume that most want to know as much of the mechanics than we do, rather than just have a fun relaxing after work time on their device of choice.
News flash: unless you’re going to mine interest data, or use signals from other large data miners, which track users across sites and devices, then trending will always suck. Because value in content is in the eye of the beholder. Tabloid rags sell more than the WaPo.
That is for investing yes, but is not about investing into STEEM. What I'm hoping for is that people who find Steem consider buying into the infrastructure and, I am hoping that the content on Steem can encourage those who are already here to power up into it too.
people won't buy into the infrastructure because there are no users. we won't get new users if we keep putting out this shit. Most often we agree, I think this will be our first :-)
If the interfaces / applications become the onboarding points, then this isn't an issue.
As long as stake weighting is the primary source of ROI via extraction of rewards, we won't have investors in Steem, because profiteering decreases capital gains.
We need to enable investors to get ROI from capital gains in order to get investors. Since almost all the rewards are sniped via stake weighting instead of encouraging the marketing department - content creators - capital gains are as discouraged as the creators.
Experienced investors have a skillset, and it isn't self voting or delegating to bid bots. It's building value into businesses in order to increase the value of the underlying investment vehicle. Steem does not present much opportunity for investors to do that, because whales put that value in their wallets instead.
Penny wise, pound foolish.
Thanks!
Wouldn't it maybe make sense to not already making conclusions after just ONE day right after this HF. Let's first wait two weeks how this turns out and THEN come with conclusions how the Trending page looks like ...
Just saying.
I had a "quick scour around steem" does not deem this a conclusion by any means. but how many people while we wait for how many days will visit steemit and just leave again never to return because thats the bullshit we want to show them