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RE: Steemit has too many articles on Crypto! Try something else, this niche is saturated.
Happy to hear this sir. But what content can you upvote on if you really like it. I hope to hear your view @techslut
Hmm... science, fiction, science fiction, feminism, technology, gaming, rpgs, tabletop, gender, sexuality, relationships and self publishing. That's the content I find interesting. To each their own. :)
I can say that over the last month or so, there has been a definite drop in the amount of content posted in the couple of topic clusters that I'm interested in, role-playing games and 3D printing.
Especially once you filter out the obvious content jacked from elsewhere on the web and start looking for actual personally engaged content.
Does it exist? Sure. Is it easy to find? The system doesn't help you.
I can tell you it seems even the fiction and poetry community I'm part of, and which you said you'll message me on Discord about joining, had seen a slump recently. I wonder if it's a combination of the flu, midterms, and real life all picking up at the same time, or burn-out. Probably some of each.
Don't forget the massive volatility of bitcoin, which reflects the massive volatility of cryptocurrency in general, having a bit of a terrifying drop recently. Or, at least, inconsistent gains.
It's probably not a coincidence that activity on Steemit seems to reflect the overall confidence in cryptocurrency. The majority appear to be here to get paid.
I'm not sure we've been a social networking platform long enough to really work out with the burnout curve is, but most creative sites see between three and six month peaks and valleys as people get into it and then go find other things to do. With an overall new user retention rate of under 8%, Steemit has some real problems when it comes to maintaining enough activity across the board for mainstream use.
I am talking less about onboarding new members, as much as a drop off on already "established" members (over 54 reputation), or at least their activity.
As for being a social network, well, it is one. Just a really bad one. And yes, it's very hard to measure burn-out metrics. Except to know that the growth in active users (as opposed to registered users) is very slow.
3-6 months is an interesting figure. And I guess it's even worse when you come to earn money and don't, and the site being so small means getting creative feedback or networking is also better had elsewhere. Hm.
I'm sure that the drop off an already established members is pretty ugly, too – especially at the three-month and six-month breakpoints. I expect our next major onboarding to be in the summer, when the kids get out of school and have more time to poke at systems – and then at the end of the summer we should see a pretty dramatic falloff in activity.
Yes, Steemit is a really terrible social network. It's bad at being social and it's bad at being a network. Honestly, if we stop thinking about it as a social network and start thinking about it as a blogging platform with a really good comment system, and leave the social networking to platforms that social network well, you can do fairly well in terms of getting views and getting people talking about your work.
If you're looking to court money, however – we know that there are some very narrow paths to that particular Hell, and the daily round up of up votes and rewards is the most clear and clarion expression of the truth when it comes to that question.
Dunno, in terms of page-views, a failure of a post of mine on Steemit does #10 trending pageviews here. My successful posts on reddit make in 24 hours more than the #2-3 trending posts do here in a week.
But yeah, I plan to write about all of this. In depth. Been promising it for a while, but was not in the mood, but it's happening.
People on social networks want things which are socially related to them. Things that they care about. Things that encourage them to go to a place and do a thing and read a thing and experience a thing that they couldn't before.
Steemit doesn't do that. So if we want people engaging with our material, we have to put it in front of people who are interested in that kind material.
In that sense, the migration off of steam.chat to Discord has been a godsend. A variety of communities who actually share common interests, all hanging out together in one place. If you share that common interest, you have a magnificent opportunity.
But all that functionality is unrelated to Steemit itself.
It's definitely worth an article or two talking about the dynamics of acquiring an audience. I've made at least one post of that nature myself. I'm not proud of it, but I've done it.