RE: What Should Be Trending At Steemit? + Jerry Controversy Of The Day (Bonus)
There's certainly not a parade of posts that a non-Steemit user would find interesting on the Trending page.
I don't find them interesting as a Steemit user either. The trending page is the absolute worst place to find good content that's worth sharing anywhere. And the use of vote-selling bots has only made this worse.
It has been said many times before that the trending page should probably highlight a different collection of posts from a variety of categories and not just the highest payouts. It should also probably not be THE page to highlight on the Steemit.com landing page. It's an absolutely terrible first impression and representation of the community.
Actually...it currently represents the community rather well, which is unfortunate. Still, it needs a lot of reworking to make it relevant or to actually improve the quality of what ought to be "showcased" from the community as a whole. As it stands right now - and has stood for a long time - it's just downright embarrassing. But I'm just going to assume that nothing will change, as usual. So what can we do about it?
I agree with your somewhat nihilistic viewpoint. I guess all we can do is ironically post about it on the very platform we are complaining about, since as previously covered, Stinc's focus is not on Steemit.
I hope they are right about SMTs.
I wouldn't say it's nihilistic. It's just reality. The trending page has been the target of much criticism (and mostly valid) since the summer of 2016. Many ideas have been suggested on how it can be improved. The only change that we've seen has been the consequence of content being opened to a 7-day voting period. That's it. STINC is obviously not interested in addressing the concerns or improving it in any way...kind of like the rest of the site.
As far as SMTs go - I don't care much for the idea. I don't think it'll add much value and will in fact add a lot of bloat to a blockchain that is already struggling with memory/storage requirements from those trying to keep it online/functional. Steem has a lot of room to scale and we're operating at a rather low capacity right now, but I'm not seeing many proposals for how scaling will actually occur once the user base exponentially expands and/or an exchange is brought online with potentially millions of daily transactions in addition to the regular social media use.
Unless the scaling and node issues can be addressed first, there's really no point in pushing through the SMT project. RPC nodes are already near or exceeding the 256GB capacity and witness nodes are moving to 32GB+ with less than 100K active users and ~1 million daily transactions. The rate at which upgrades will be necessary will continue to increase.
And with ICOs still under scrutiny and undecided by federal agencies like the SEC, I'm not sure that SMTs are the right kind of attention that we need around here. Why SMTs and ICOs is something that has taken precedence is beyond me. Basic infrastructure and functionality/features for the flagship site is needed more than anything else. That should be STINC's main concern, in my opinion.
But as usual, nobody wants to consider what little ol' me has to say...until 6-12 months later when my critiques finally become the trend du jour and what I've said happens to be pretty much spot-on. What else is new though, amirite?
"But as usual, nobody wants to consider what little ol' me has to say...until 6-12 months later when my critiques finally become the trend du jour and what I've said happens to be pretty much spot-on. What else is new though, amirite?"
Boy, do I know how this goes.
I don't think Stinc considers Steemit the "flagship" around here, anymore.
This is an incredible conversation. I haven't been here for all the convo on this from back then that you reference, but it has been my recent thought too. The problem is the metric that makes something worth promoting by the platform. It reflects the community, but chicken or egg?
Is not the community shaping itself around the values the platform promotes for what deserves prominent display? If that metric is how much a post is earning, well then you have everyone focused on getting their posts to earn more than others and quickly. That's the value system of the platform in terms of what it does, not what it says its values are. There are other wonderful values on here, like an economy of kindness and generosity. But we can know the dominant values by what is being highlighted.
As for SMTs, in my limited understanding of them I have mixed feelings. I'm excited about their potential to create mini-steemits that give people interested in a certain topic (or organization/business) a way of doing what we do here on steemit without these issues around having quality content be seen. It won't be decentralized, so probably they will boot any spammers. Or they'll use an algorithm for promoting posts that is something other than trending.
But the technological issues you list make it sound unworkable, at least without jeopardizing what's already going on here. Which points me back to the idea that they are prioritizing what they value. So maybe the values running things around here are more about some objective that has nothing to do with the strength of Steemit in the long run.