Steemit is an ecosystem where everyone is necessary - Suggestions to improve it
Steemit can be compared to a marine ecosystem where minnows, whales, plankton and vegetation are all required and necessary.
Minnows without whales would not get the chance to be noticed and take some heavy votes, while whales without minnows would not have enough content and interaction to create a lively community.
image from tripadvisor.com
What is an ecosystem? (definition)
An ecosystem includes different living organisms (Steemit users) interacting each other, together with their non-living environments (the blockchain, bots and external applications).
Every organism has its own niche and plays a fundamental role
image from sciencelearn.org.nz
Is Steemit an open or closed ecosystem?
As long as users can buy or sell Steem Power, Steemit can be considered an open ecosystem.
In fact external resources may be brought inside and outside the system.
Why the Bots are not necessarily an evil
Bots are non-human contributors to the system.
image from mytotalretail.com
Until they develope advanced Artificial Intelligence using Quantum Computing, they will be not fully able to really understand the contents of the posts and effective quality of them.
- They are just trying to guess if a post (given external factors) will be successful or not.
- They can't substitute human content creation and interaction
- They risk to be unprofitable of unefficient just as human users may be
- They can be downvoted or muted or just ignored
- They are fighting and competing each other, just like human users do
Bots can be useful to help automatic upvoting and curation, specially for whales that can't check every single published post in realtime.
Please take note that bots operate according to their creator's advice, not randomly!
Improving Steemit from a Minnow standpoint
image from wikipedia.org
- avoid upvoting posts in the trending section and only upvote posts from the new section
- use the posts in the trending section only to comment, if you have useful ideas and remarks
- don't check trending posts' rewards or you will be frustrated, they are still a mirage to you!
- don't swap votes blindly, only vote when you think a post deserves it!
- carefully choose who you follow and build a great feed
- don't give up!
Improving Steemit from a Whale standpoint
image from feelgrafix.com
I imagine being a whale may be a great responsibility but also give a sense of power.
I am not a whale (just a humble minnow) but I would like to give some suggestions to them:
- decide your personal (voting) ethic and stick with it
- diversify your vote logic (don't create votes expectation)
- use some smart bots to help you with the curation work (but don't stop manual curation)
- don't try to make everyone happy (it will never be possible to do it)
What happens if one organism is removed from Steemit ecosystem?
The system will still work, but I think it would lose some efficiency!
- if you remove minnows, fresh new contents and interactions will disappear
- if you remove whales, will be much harder to have high earning posts
- if you remove bots, only manual curation will remain and more contents will pass unnoticed
- if you remove the blockchain it would be possible to delete posts but hacking votes would be easier
Conclusions
Steemit is not perfect and we know it.
Some great contents still get few or no rewards, while average contents sometimes get big rewards.
For sure it's not still a perfect community, but remember that it's still Beta!
To improve it, each one of us must give his/her contribution!
Injustice and inequality rule our society worldwide, and it's not Beta, it's Release version since some centuries!
Be the change you want to see in Steemit
(loosely based on Gandhi's quote)
image from history.co.uk
Please leave your feedback and follow me @andrew0
Cheers!
I vote on posts I like. Period. I don't care who else has voted for them or what it means to my voting power. Trying to attract whales and post at just the right time and all that other stuff makes it way too complicated for what my life can handle right now. The issues with visibility are the same as you would have if you were an Internet marketer in the real world--getting people to notice my content is always going to be a challenge. On Steemit, that challenge is somewhat exacerbated by the fact that not all eyeballs are equal--here we're really trying to get eyeballs with high amounts of Steem Power to notice our content.
It seems to me that whales could maybe put out greater effort to notice and upvote content from new people or quality content that is unnoticed, but it may be that they are doing that and simply for the most part haven't come across mine yet. I've also seen articles by whales where from their perspective there is simply so much new content that it's too much for them to try to keep up with it.
If I could make one major change to Steemit, it would be that new writers are vetted in some way--their writing is checked for basics like originality, decent grammar and command of English language, and overall quality. Once they pass, they are allowed publishing priviledges. When they publish, their posts would earn a certain base amount--not huge, but a little something, some fraction of the overall Steem being created in a given time period in which they posted divided by all the posts. Then the rest of their pay would be commission and based on upvotes and who upvotes, like it is now. The downside to this is that you have to go heavier on the human action and so you'd also have to pay people to process new writer applications. And once a writer got accepted, someone would have to periodically check up on them to make sure they weren't abusing the base rate earnings priviledge. I have for the past few years written for the Devtome, which essentially guaranteed payment for your content, and I can assure you it took a large army of admins to curtail abuse. I like that Steemit doesn't require so much human involvement on the curating end. But it does mean that essentially, the payment system is 100% commission based, meaning it's not enough to simply write great content. It also has to be seen and liked by the right sets of eyeballs.
People who are looking to improve Steemit's writer compensation system should take a look at how the Devcoin Devtome project was handled. You can check it out by visiting this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=233997.0 The Devtome had various issues and was not a perfect system, but I think it has some lessons that could be helpful here. Mainly it's been a journey of discovery as to how you can fairly compensate writers and other open source creators for their efforts, automate it as much as possible, and stay on top of fraud. Not an easy task. Steemit has a different approach.
I've noticed writing on the Internet is either completely compensated by some kind of commission, or it's paid for up front and someone else benefits from the marketing. I think a truly breakthrough system would be one in which content creators can earn both a base pay AND a commission. In this way, everyone is compensated, but those whose writing is especially popular benefit even more.
I see I've written you a novel LOL. Maybe I should write this up as a post.
Good novel indeed :)
This may be a good idea but would require major human work as the community expands, additionally vetting may need to choose who would be entitled to do it.
I will check bitcointalk link for more ideas, thank you so much for your kind and synthetic feedback :D
May be a good idea to write a post about that!
Exactly and that is a big problem with a lot of potential improvements that could be made - they require human input. Hopefully one day we will have sufficiently advanced AIs to do those things.
don't forget about me :D LOL
hey, this is too sexy :D
I know LOL
Good points. Help the new content get recognized. The high trending content with $500, $1000, $8000 already has tons of votes LOL. Help the small content creators more. Peace.
Thank you krnel.
I tried to gather some suggestions after one month being here, hope someone will use them :)
Some great advice. I think people need to understand that voting on a high earning post after the whales have already voted will not give you any significant curation reward. Voting for them is fine as long as you understand that.
Exactly.
Additionally, you lose voting power to vote a post that is already earning a lot.
https://steemit.com/steem/@dave-hughes/steem-trending-the-trend
Thabk you for sharing your post, which I already voted and read. Interesting TA, simple and effective!
Very nicely explained. The whole theory of the Ecosystem type Community we have gives a great explanation of how the higher powers work on here and Yes Bots can be Necessary, look at @cheetah, a major factor in fighting spam and plagiarism. I have wrote an article explaining a similar theory, but more aimed towards the Decentralized factor of Steemit.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@ltndd1/decentralized-steemit-and-why-it-works
Great Post.
Thank you for your ferdback and for sharing toyr post!
Very good post and interesting comments!
Thank you so much
Hi Andrew, how can i do to turn a whale? Do you know?
If I knew, I would already do it :)
But if you put your own money in Steem Power, it will help