RE: What's Important to Steemit’s Longevity? - Inspiried by @anyx ‘Tragedy of The Commons’
Great article as always! This time I have something valuable to say on the subject. From my point of view, from what i've observed with my friends i "brought" on steemit is that the trending page is disheartening. same names a lot [ i'm sorry, ollie, you are part of the problem :P ] it's like the trending is rented or sold on a few specific spots. you know this will get 1000$ (For the history i commented this at 155$) and trend. It's not OK we know that.
As long sa this is not solved, resentment will be high among users that seen little success with good content. THEY WILL GIVE UP. That's huge problem...The more effort and good content you invest in steemit with little succes the more you'll likely to quit. I like to spend a lot of time in "new" and I see a lot of good stuff: 1 upvotes, 2 3 ..10. How will these people be convinced that in time, they'll get there? These are the exact people we need in greater numbers.
I do not have the answer to this question, but for me, the trending page is too uniform and you can't get there unless 20-25 specific "whales" upvote you. that's 25 ppl vs 60.000 nea ccount...millions, heh.
I hope you realize i am not complaining, my succes has been [ if not of your magnitude ] very satisfactory for me and I'm enjoying my experience here and the freinds i made. But with the exception of some specific friends, i find it hard to convince someone else to join now, i know they'll just feel resentful and give up. It's in the design right now, i'm sorry ot say...
Also, Facebook analogy doesn't hold much water. Most people on Facebook you know from offline, I know in real life maybe 4 people from steemit! Here, you grow by befriending people ONLINE. I truly believe i made a few friends, you included, but... i do worry, form what i see on postpromotion and other channels, that a culture of upvote me to upvote you etc is growing. that's not friends, that business partners.
Even if 60000 people were voting equally do you think the trending page would stop having the same people on it? I sure don't. In every kind of content you have stars and bestsellers. In fact, 60000 might make it worse, because the swarm can't be reasoned with, and most will never take the time to find something unknown, they will just vote what is already popular. At least whales can be convinced to make a conscious effort to try to develop unknown talent (as some do regularly).
Also, nice post @hisnameisolllie
that's a great prep talk to become a "star"! :D
But on a more serious note, I do not know...i'd like to believe that talent can share the trending page and also that new "stars" can be born. I also tend to think that people get bored eventually of the same names. And not everyone is a sheep and new blogs appear and get popular every day, even after 20years+ of internet and blogs. Is there really something new to say? And yet there is.
But I do agree, finding and nurturing talent is incredibly important and a noble duty here.
strongly disagree. I think a "one man one vote" system wouldnt work because of sybils and other security issues but generally, and also because it wouldnt reward investors. Howrver:
What makes content good? Well, joy is in the ears that hear, so they say. Content's appeal and utility to the community as a whole is what makes it good. SO when one says content will be better with whales picking it than with everyone having a voice what one is basically saying is I know better what everyone else wants to see than they do. Stated like this, of course, it seems absurd. But there can really be no other logical conclusion from the starting point that whales can pick better content than the group as a whole.
Read my comment again. I said nothing about making the content better (Do not appreciate the fictitious quotes either. Someone may read that and think I actually wrote those quoted statements, when I did not.)
Replying here due to nesting
OK, i see what youre saying... that with the swarm voting it would be tougher for an unknown to break into the top of the trending page. I don't necessarily agree with that either, but i do see the distinction.
To me personally, the whole issue is wrapped in quality. I don't think most people's issue with the trending page is that its so hard to break into it. Its that very bad content frequently ends up on the trending page. While very good content ends up lost 84 pages from the top.
I think TDV is a bad example for a bunch of reasons, but lets use him anyway. My guess is that TDV probably also has the most earnings of any author since they started offering a feed and made the "follow" button do something. Id further guess that if you went down the list of "most followers" you would find an ordered list of the highest earners since the follow button was enabled with some well known whales like berniesanders, you dan and ned who don't post much interspersed.
Of course, youll say that of course theyre the highest earners. They get all that money because they have so many followers. And ill say "No, they get all those followers because whales pin them to the top of the trending page 24/7" Its kind of a chicken and egg debate.
incidentally, i texted an old girlfriend who is a magazine editor with the use of quotation marks above, and asked her what she thought
"The punctuation is correct, but no editor in her right mind would let you use that. You're putting words in someone else's mouth"
so i guess my bad.
ive changed the quotes to italics, though i maintain that a quotation mark is the correct punctuation in such a circumstance.
Sorry, but you absolutely did. I'm not sure if your point is that "worse" isnt the opposite of "better" but yeah when you say (direct quote before you punctuation flame me again) "In fact, 60000 might make it worse" yes, that is exactly the same as saying the whales only having a say makes it better (or at least might make it better).
That is to say, that the statement A is worse than B is precisely the same as the statement B is better than A .
pretending otherwise just sounds like doubletalk.
@sigmajin by "worse" I was referring not to the content itself but to the objection (from comment above, and the earlier portion of my comment) of there being the same people constantly on the Trending page. Perhaps a better a better phrasing would be "might make matters worse" instead of "might make it worse", since "it" is somewhat ambiguous.
I absolutely do believe that whales are far more likely to promote a largely variety of content from unknown sources than a swarm of users. That is not a statement of value or taste. Indeed, perhaps the popular somewhat-uniform content is exactly what people want. For example, I just saw that @dollarvigilante has the most followers on the platform at 2000. That's not whales, and probably not a sybil attack either, since the followers leaderboard is not widely-followed (yet).
In the future when the structure of the system is different with better mechanisms for discovery and many independent channels for promotion, that might no longer be true.
@sigmajin
That's probably the crux of our disagreement. I think he's a great example because he one of the people who are always on treading, and if you look at the others they are much they same. Remove all the whale votes entirely and they would still be there. By contrast, the quirky stuff that I find and push to page 5 of trending and sometimes makes it from there to page 1 on its own would not be there.
Anyway, I'm going to bow out of this discussion in part as a boycott of fighting with the atrocious nesting limit. Nice chat.
currently all favors only few people to get post rewards:
What could we do to evolve?
Thats all, happy steeming.
Not really. Curation rewards favor voting on the same things that other people are going to vote on. Later voters do not get significant curation rewards by piling on, though some do continue to do so anyway in the mistaken believe that they will.
If I vote on @dollarvigilante again after voting for him the first time and it turns out he doesn't get votes any more because others have lost interest, then my vote does not do well. Simply voting for the same people again and again does not generate good curation rewards unless those people remain popular and continue to get votes from others.
If later voters are voting for stuff they don't like, they are the ones screwing it up and responsible for not getting the content they want, not the whales or bots who vote early. The latter are responding to the incentives set by the former.
In short, unless you are a power curator (whale/bot), just vote for what you like. The power curators and profit motive will respond by giving you what you want.
This system is very similar to the record industry. What is consistently promoted, and marketed, will do well. There are a lot of users that can produce content that is comparable to what makes it to the trending page, but they aren't on the approved list of who should be upvoted automatically. Some articles, not all, are on the trending page for reasons beyond the quality of the article itself.
True, a swarm, that is ignorant of how the system rewards them, will vote for the popular stuff, but they are doing it because they think that is what will make them easy money, when in most cases it doesn't. Educate them they are doing it wrong or nothing will change. For the user that is getting a 5k payout, he doesn't care at all that a user pumping up his post is doing so against his own best interest. They are incentivized to keep the real way things work a secret or at least confusing.
I'm sure most people didn't listen to the full debate between dollarvigilante and the "hater", so why did so many vote on it? It's not because they upvoted it organically. They are misguided in thinking it will line their pockets.
As mentioned elsewhere in these comments, and I'm sure you agree, we need to get to a point where people are voting for what they actually like or what is actually worth being given a reward rather than some game to make a few bucks. Right now Steemit feels too often like a game to make money and less like a place to spend your time enjoying yourself reading something interesting.
But befriending people Online is really cool! I can only tell you from my own experience, but I was able to stay in UK going from nown to town, and crashing for a night at different people's sofas and the like for a whole month! And it was back i 2001, way before the rise of Couchsurfing and other travel clubs.
How was that possible? I befriended some of those people Online, and had some good reputation in their Online Community. If you are interested that community was DiscworldMUD. But it took me a couple of years to get there. Steem is now what? Four from the start, and month and a bit since the Public beta? I am sure that I'd be able Incredible things a couple of years from now, even if my income stays the way it is.
Steem is much more potentionally valuable as an Online Community, than an icome revenue source. And most online communities can't be used as such a source from the get go. Or if they can, the barrier of entry and participation is much higher, with costs of having a domain name, server and the like not feasible to some of the people. That is why they prefer Facebook. It is hassle free, its popular, and so the Steem will be if we allow it to grow.
I am guessing a lot of this worry comes from the fact that the STEEM userbase is a bit smarter and invested in the platform, so they keep thinking about its future. The ammount of posts like this one means we are on the right track as a community. And it doesn't matter if it is selfish selfinterest people are acting or some sort of altruism.
I think you make some great point @razvanelulmarin, and I certainly consider you one of a few friends on this platform too. Ever since you mistook me for @wingz on chat ;) I think the main problem is the Curation Bot's...(some humans) at the moment. But luckily, they are getting squeezed, and curation rewards are dropping rapidly.
There are certainly elements that need to change for the greater good of Steemit, and I believe this will happen. I do however think that, like centralised competitors of Steemit, having followers is how you get noticed. In time, I think that, the reason users follow other users will change from financial (curation) reward, to content enjoyment.
The user base needs to stop pursuing rewards for this to happen though, and to use Steemit for it's entertaining content...
totally. Not to kiss your ass now but I do find your writing clear, concise and to the point. It's relaxing to read. What i'm saying is not that the people trending are not delivering good content, is that it kind of presents an united front of "established" people making the most bank.
Clearly, the way we will curate, the way whales will curate in the future will change and evolve.
It's exciting to be here and see it all!
Well said! (No ass kissing intended here either.)
Quoting myself from elsewhere in these comments.
Good points. I don't think it's just creating "good content". The key to making money with content creation here is that the content has to be Noticed and upvoted by people with significant steem power like Whales. If content is noticed and upvoted by a lot of minnows, it doesn't seem to get traction. But if a Whale jumps on a post, it will make money. And the Whale(s) will follow and upvote other posts by the same writers because they make curation money on each successful post. I'm most definitely not complaining. I'm working on some content to publish and enjoy the people I've chatted with so far.
@razvanelulmarin. Your comment gives me hope. I'd be so much happier if I opened Steemit directly to "new" or really any page but the trending page. Without anybody saying so, it seems to represent the cream of the crop with the implication that when one's own posts are as well-researched, relevant and valuable to a wide audience that they will reach the same level of reward. Since, as you point out, that isn't yet true, the trending page can be a bitter pill. I'd love to open directly to my feed or, better yet, to "new."