RE: Why Steemit needs to evolve as soon as possible
Thanks for writing this. Tunnel vision in the Steemit project isn't something users like myself enjoy having. It's difficult to avoid at times. For me the "join for the money, stay for the community" bit is true. I already have higher quality content from those that I follow than I had on Facebook. You know how when they monetized YouTube how the content improved? Eventually you ended up with daily and weekly highly entertaining channels because these people were making a living doing it. The same may happen with Steemit. @PapaPepper is one example of someone who's working to produce quality content . @inber is a fun artist who uploads her work a couple of times a day. For me the experience is better than I get anywhere else, but I'm also an investor and phycologically I can't say how much that biases me. Eventually adding filters and ways to organize your content on your page will be nice. Also ways to easily find and follow the top Steemit artists for example..that would be nice . It's still in beta and is an amazing experiment. Projects like Steem Park and the yearly Steem Fest are fun. There are also a lot of Steemit meetups sprouting up which you don't often find in Social Media. You have a lot of valid points. I think eventually, the $$ needs to no longer be the main selling point.
Well the thing with YouTube monetization is that the path was always quite clear - the better the content, the more chances you'll have in succeeding. Steemit to a new user looks either random or rigged and that's a turn off. There simply isn't a straightforward way to understand why seemingly similar content has such wildly different valuation. Not without spending a considerable amount of time in trying to understand how the ecosystem works.
And once users do understand, well that's even worse. They quit, start sucking up, begging, finding ways to play the system, create scores of bots that are either trying to maximize profits for themselves, stabilize the system, go on righteous crusades. And of course some also just go about creating/consuming content they want, without bothering about the details behind it all :)
I mean let's see if all of this combined somehow leads to an end result where quality prevails, but I personally don't see the set up automatically pointing to it.
I do completely agree with you that the platform already created proponents that no other social media has ever seen. I mean come on, who ever went to the streets handing out flyers about how awesome Facebook or Twitter is. That's some serious enthusiasm there :).
It would be interesting to conduct a study on the effect of early success or failure in earning on Steemit, to see what effect it has on retention of users. One for the bots interested in long term flourishing of the platform ;)
Haha true. Part of the hope is that virtually no censorship (only through down-voting) and more individual power will be seen as sexy. In the beginning only the whales had real power. That slowly shifted (in large part) to people who continued blogging even when the market tanked. They are Steemit famous now. Some should be and some I'm embarrassed about lol. It's really a wait and see game for me. Again, thanks for the post.