Value served through relationships

Working from the home office this morning in the hope that I can shake a bit of this head cold, or at least not spread it further. I don't think not going to work actually changes much to stop the spread, as there are so many points of contact that unless completely isolated from all others. Life is a series of handshakes and one can never know who's hand someone has shaken before, or whether they used soap in between.

I figured I would take a lunch break around now and then take the dog out for an additional short walk for something different for him. He really enjoys having someone here with him during the days as since we are both working now, he spends most of the days alone. Because we have overlapping schedules it isn't that long, but still.

Talking about relationships, I am heading into a milestone that is perhaps one of the slowest moving metrics on Steem for me:

It took me 5 months to get to get 500 followers and after the rush of accounts around the 2018 spike, probably two years to go from 5000 to 6000. Most of the accounts in that group are likely dead, alts or dead alts. Follower count doesn't mean much in a stake based platform, however once there is significant onboarding and spread of applications, count will have more significance, like it does on other platforms that have no value attached to the userbase, other than follows and likes.

Don't you find it strange that while Mark Zuckerberg is worth 74 billion dollars from a platform offered for free, Uber which offers a paid service is yet to turn a single dollar in profit and is making enormous losses? Goes to show what has value in this world - relationships.

I have mentioned this before but why the data collected from social networks is so value is that it can be used to leverage network connections, relationships in the system. Through those handshakes it is possible to not only spread advertising messaging, but also influence individuals by targeting groups and preferences with tailored content pushed into the eye line.

The right person, gets the right signal, at the right time.

The algorithms purpose is to not only locate content, but also identify and serve that content to an audience that is willing to accept it, to be affected by it, to act upon it. Each of the 2 billion Facebook users get a feed tailored to who they are, and Facebook know precisely who they are through the millions of clicks they have made all over the internet through Facebook APIs that collect the data, and of course what they can get from other sources like Google, Microsoft and Amazon too. All of them are running data funnels, most of which are not easily identifiable.

The potential for nefarious activities through social group manipulation is not only very high, we keep seeing it actually being used to influence how we live our lives and the ways in which we think about the world. As I mentioned yesterday, the media is the driver of public perception and with the distribution and reach of the social platforms and their curation activities for inclusion and exclusion, there is a high degree of accuracy and value to be gained by those who hold the information. These are corporations remember, and their only loyalty is to their stockholders and that reaches only as far as to provide profits.

The relationships we create are vital to our experience, whether personal or in the business world, as they create the handshakes of opportunity and, credibility through association and word of mouth.When it comes to social media influence, that influence isn't in the number of followers or likes, it is in the ability to push information messaging through the network and enact a behavioral shift, perhaps it is to buy a product, perhaps an idea.

That network is of course linked to extended networks making the most influential for dissemination the ones who have other influential people in the network willing and able to push content further out. This is why the majority of those paid resteem services promising to get content scene by so and so thousand people are irrelevant, because those thousands of followers are largely insignificant and most likely dead accounts, as no one would want hundreds of resteems pouring through their daily feed. Thankfully, since Hardfork 20, much of those "services" have disappeared.

We probably have all heard of the idea of 6 degrees of separation where each of us could meet pretty much anyone on earth through the handshakes possible in our network. One friend knows someone, who knows someone... However, this doesn't actually mean anything real unless those handshakes are able to be connected. To connect the handshakes, proximity and trust have to already be developed, and each link in the chain has to have the trust with someone they know to be able to introduce an increasingly removed stranger from their own social network.

But, social media networks can circumvent the need for trust as they are able to push content out to handshakes with the ability to remain anonymous. While at the surface level the Facebook user is known, the information sources that are spread through the network are largely untraceable by an end user, and the sheer volume pouring through the feeds make it extremely impractical. With most people not fully reading the articles they share, the sources are further obscured from end user awareness.

Remember: Russian-made political memes shared by US citizens as if their own.

The web of trust is live and well on the internet, the problem is that the web is owned by a very few and it is highly untrustworthy due to the obfuscation of sourcing and spread. People tend to trust the content that comes through their Facebook and Twitter feed enough that they will spread it on, mostly because it supports their current opinions.

It seems I picked up a follower to complete the round number.

I will likely lose one or two in a moment.

What people need to remember is that since we are social animals, the relationships we form and nurture are vital to our ongoing experience. Changing times can push people together and apart, but when it comes to the strongest bonds, years can pass and the relationship hasn't degraded at all.

Part of the problem I see with the online life is that it has cheapened relationships and made them much more business orientated where unless it can be leveraged for immediate gain, it can be disposed of. While this works for some period of time, as the years advance people may find themselves quite isolated and alone as rather than having developed strong relationships of friends, they have weak ties to what are internet colleagues. They might meet in the corridor and share a few words, but it will never be through thick and thin together.

What I see on Steem is a lot of people who have made it this far and have created bonds that can last a lot longer than a 7-day payout window, and a lot longer than a bear market. The Steem community is made up of clusters of groups who have created various types of relationships among them, some for profiteering, some for social growth, some for technological development. The beauty of it is that not everyone has to work together, but the best way to lift all boats, is to raise the tide of Steem, the blockchain and the currency value.

If we take a small lesson from the centralized social medias and consider what makes them their value and apply it to what content is valuable, we would have to consider whether the content in question has a positive influence in the system and how far that reach can spread. If someone is producing and waiting to be found, their content has very little reach and therefore very little value to the network, no matter how high the quality is. It isn't about comments or resteems or vote value - it is about the affect it has on the readers and whether it leads to actions that generate value to raise the tide of Steem.

There are many ways to think about and approach this, but it has to be considered and, it has to be supported by relationships within and external to the community. What you know is important, but for a community, who you know is the gateway to making the what, valuable.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]