Trying SteemBoost, a Service for the Promotion of Steemit Posts

I do not like much the idea of having to promote the stories you write and publish on steemit in order for them to be seen by more people (not everyone here is a celebrity that coems wit a big follower base), but the current state of the platform apparently requires that. Earlier today I saw an announcement post published on steemit for a new service called SteemBoost that has the goal of helping users promote their own posts and getting more people to read what they publish on steemit. Sounds like a nice idea, I noted in my head, and went on looking for other interesting things on steemit...

Normally I probably would not try the service and I initially did not register to check it out, but a few hours later, after publishing this "short" tech review and in 1 hour the only vote that it still had was mine, I have decided that it is time to give SteemBoost a try, as apparently that post was the perfect test subject to use for a quick experiment.

The main thing I liked about the service was the fact that it does not encourage let alone force the users to vote, comment or do anything other than just visit your post and get a point for doing that. That point then means that if they add a steemit story of their own (could be somebody else's story as well), they will get one reader to their link back. As soon as you register you get 100 5 points, meaning you get 5 people to check a link you publish on the platform.

You can get 100 extra points if you bring somebody to register as a Referral, and you can get 10 extra points if you share the Introductory post of the service on Facebook. You also get 1 point for each story that you read from the list of links added in the platform by other users - you need to read other's stories, so that the other users can read yours. Again the service just incentivizes users to read specific posts on steemit, not to vote to comment for them, you can of course do that if you like the post, but it is up to you and you are still getting a point just for reading the post.

One thing I have noticed is that currently you can read a story more than once and still get a point for doing so every time apparently and this way you could essentially earn more points, but at the same time drain the points of the other users. There are currently not much stories available and not many users, when I registered I was apparently user number 33, but in my understanding you should be able to read each post just once and get only 1 point from it. This could as well be a bug that will be fixed or something that was not thoroughly thought about.

Also do note that the service manually approves links submitted by users, so there could be some time that you need to wait before your links are added and become visible to others to read. I had to wait a bit for my link to get approved. After getting approved there is a Delete button if you want to remove a link, probably it will be a good idea to also have a Pause button, so that you can just stop temporary a link and not remove it completely and then having to go through the approval process again if you want to make it show in the platform again.

There are some small bugs in the design, mostly associated with different elements not scaling properly when not in full screen, but these should be fixed soon probably (some changes are being made even at the moment). So now the only thing left to do is wait, I'm yet to even receive my first Read on the platform looking at the points I have available and the chart for points earned and hits received. The reason for that is that apparently the very little users that SteemBoost currently has, but if more people join it can actually become useful for people that just want to get more readers see their posts on steemit.

Yay! Just got my very first reader from SteemBoost... and the 2nd... and a total of 6 while getting this post ready to be published. A few hours later all 108 points I've had are gone, apparently transformed to visits of the article I've added in the system. What is the effect on the article, not much have changed since initially posting it. So I'm still worried that some people may in fact abuse the system by "reading" multiple times the same story just for the points they will be getting and that can be a problem for the usability at least until fixed. Now there are more users and more links in the system available, so apparently people are interested in checking SteemBoost out and seeing if it will work for them.

Some more changes that well, I don't like much:

You will pay 2 Boost Points for one visit. You need minimum 50 Boost Points in your account for your link to reach the Steem Booster list

This essentially makes it an unfair exchange of visits as it is 2:1 now, and not 1:1 as it was earlier. Furthermore the requirement to have at least 50 points in your account at this point essentially makes users exploit the system and the fact that you can visit a single link multiple times and get points. So I'm seeing users just pointlessly clicking in order to get to the required points just so that their link will be shown in the list of stories to read... where other users will just click it mindlessly until it disappears.

SteemBoost still does not have a lot of users and the stories available for you to visit are not that much and the above requirement just makes them even less, then again what happens if there are no users with 50 points and there are no stories to visit to get points? I know the people behind the service are trying to find the right formula, but this is surely not the way to do things at the moment.

What I'm currently seeing is like 5 people mindlessly clicking on each other's links on SteemBoost just because they need more points and they have already like visited tens of times each of the available links. The others are doing the same and there is pretty much nothing useful happening at the moment, besides a couple of steemit users just wasting their time... I know, because I've been doing just that in order to get to the 50 points and see if they will start going down again and I expect others are doing it as well as some stories briefly disappear from the list and then start showing again.

Again the service does not encourage or promote vote exchange between users of steemit, it only brings readers and it is up to them if they like what they find to vote for it or not or to leave a comment or maybe even follow you!

• If you want to give the SteemBoost service a try yourself you can do so here

If you have any questions or want to add something, then please feel free to do so in the comments below...

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Did you like what you have just read? Check my other posts on steemit @cryptos