I Will Upvote Constructive Comments by 5-10 Cents - Let's Improve Content on Steemit Together
[I want to improve Steemit content by helping out users with an upvote and a follow and encouraging constructive comments]
Dear fellow Steemians,
One of my main goals of posting and being active on Steemit is to spread the word about blockchain technology and it's potential to make a huge positive impact on the world. To that effect I like reading and responding to helpful, constructive comments which provide opinions or facts accompanied by links to related sources. I also need to gain more followers if I want to improve my chances of reaching more people.
That's why I'm going to experiment with this campaign to upvote all constructive comments. Here are the rules:
- I will only upvote one comment per person per 24 hour period during the next 5 days
- Your comment must be at least 20 words long
- Your comment must provide VALUE - i.e. further the discussion or bring up related points. I will be the one to judge this.
- Preferably include a link to related content but it's not necessary
- Follow me @blockchainttmft
- Your comment must be on articles which I authored. I have posted about 10 articles - check out my blog page.
- Upvote this post
In return I will upvote every comment which fulfils the above criteria with 5-10 cents as well as follow the author of that comment. More constructive comments receive closer to 10 cents (or more) and less constructive comments receive closer to 5 cents (but not less). I will also upvote comments which help me improve the content/quality/formatting of my articles in any way.
I will not upvote comments which do not fulfil the above criteria.
The way I see it, this is a WIN-WIN-WIN. You win by having me upvote and follow you, I win by having great comments and more followers and above all Steemit wins by getting better content.
Comment and Steem away, good luck!
See you at the top,
@blockchainttmft
PS. I will stay followed to anyone who qualifies for this campaign for at least 30 days. I prefer users who post about cryptocurrency/blockchain technology/Steemit.
I spend all day reading and writing about cryptocurrency because it will change the world as we know it. Here are some of my most popular articles:
A Small Step for Bitcoin, A Big Step for Cryptocurrency
Why I am Powering UP Over 3000 USD worth of Steem
Top Long Term Value CryptoCurrencies To Invest In According To Experts
I’m not vying to be a winner in your promotional offer, although I do not intend that to be a derogatory stance towards it. I simply want to comment because I think it is important to make a point about it.
My thought is that comments are very important (perhaps the small text in that comment inspired you to write this blog?), but that we need them to occur organically and not driven by some monetary circle-jerk. I wrote about economics matters.
Specifically I think the 1-10% of society who are the productive leaders actually make the content and products which the other 90-99% use. (That is nature, not my preference). So my objective for an onboarding, token distribution, marketing, viral growth, and monetization design is to target those 1-10% who will thus bring in the other 90-99%. But do it in such a way that all 100% are involved and motivated to interact (e.g. make comments). The creators make sure they create apps and content that creates discussion, use, and uptake. They are marketing and developing and they are closer to and more knowledgeable about their target markets.
I will publish the details eventually (this year).
I second what @anonymint has to say. I don't comment by the rules ...making me count how many words I've written or whether I have provided a link or not. I don't want to feel stupid if I comment more than 20 words as all those extra words won't earn anything to me, it's a waste of all my efforts! And if you are decided that you won't upvote my comment twice in 24 hour period then you are actually discouraging me to comment more.
I read your terms as:
...And much more. I don't wanna keep on writing about that. But what I feel is that comments or for that matter any interaction should be spontaneous and appear natural. If everyone of your move is guided by some strict rules then you are not a human but some machine!
Sorry, I ain't sounding any pleasant here but I'm not here to earn 5 or 10 cents. At other places, my comments can earn several dollars. Why I'm wasting my time where the upper limit is only 10 cents! I'm really stupid, you know!
If our knowledge is astute, we can earn more trading in a group where they trade back valuable knowledge. Knowledge production is worth more than 10 cents. That is the Inverse Commons.
I don’t think you intended to be unpleasant. You’re just expressing yourself.
The OP was not intending to restrict degrees-of-freedom. You’re pointing out that he inadvertently did. There are tradeoffs. I hope we can find models that are not too one-dimensional.
Yes @anonymint, knowledge too is the Inverse Commons. My sincere thanks to you to link to that article. It was really an interesting read!
And yeah, I do feel that the author of this post is in quest to establish some ideal model for encouraging and adopting a right perspective towards content generation on this platform. I was just trying to post a critique of his model. (But it's also true, personally I didn't like his approach. But who cares ..."your blog your rules" 😉)
Voting incentives spammers such this one linked below:
https://steemit.com/@saqib/comments
I downvoted many of his comments, because he is just spamming the system hoping to get 5 and 10 cents here and there. Must be a bot or someone from a third world country. I suspect he is operating many sock puppets and replies to himself with them:
https://steemit.com/@saqib/recent-replies
It’s quite pointless for me to waste my time downvoting to try to lower his reputation. The downvoting design of Steem thus incentivizes pointless activity. My main motivation was to retaliate for him downvoting my recent blog about Marisa Mayer, so as to let him know that downvoting is highly discouraged on Steemit and should only be done to flag low quality, spam, fraud, or abusive content. To express disagreement, one should post a comment, not issue a downvote. Punishing quality content creation with downvotes (which impact the author’s reputation score) is the antithesis of incentivizing the growth of Steemit.
@xyzashu Your comment has provided me lots of value and things to think about, I appreciate that.
This campaign was an experiment designed to see what types of comments I could get considering I am fairly unknown on Steemit. I want to kickstart my blog by incentivizing people to follow, interact and provide value. So far the experiment has proven very successful and I am considering simply upvoting all constructive comments (not just for 5 days) in an effort to bring more people to blog and to get more people in the mindset of providing value.
I'm hoping that by offering this type of incentive, people will start commenting and thinking about the topics I write about regardless of whether or not they are compensated. Maybe I'm just being idealistic :)
Either way it's a work in progress and I'm going to adapt as I get more feedback like yours, thanks again!
Great that you found my comment of some value. It shows your positive approach to things.
But I'd add that whatever works for you is good if you are satisfied by it. Who am I? You can't please all!
And thanks, I loved the amendment you made by quashing the 5 day limit. 😊
All the best to you! Steem on! I'm following you now to see how you progress and would like to learn from your experiments too.
@anonymint, I liked your opinion. For Steemit to succeed, we need to treat is as a currency. Trading votes for donations is saying that you agree that this amount is equal to this amount of vote(s). For sometimes horrible but other times wonderful reasons, this is not true.
It’s distracting actually to have to remember to think about voting, because it is supposedly the obligatory mechanism for making the monetary incentives work around here.
Money is society’s information system for identifying and incentivizing the productive (notwithstanding problems of corruption of money systems which distort the information system and cause misallocation).
Voting as a monetary signaling system is not very effective nor efficient. Democracy has proved that. There’s nothing voting ever does efficiently. “Elephant: A mouse built to government specifications.”—Lazarus Long. Groupwise decision making doesn’t exist. A group can only disagree. Consensus is a way of not testing our disagreements to see which is the most productive. Consensus thus destroys production. Democracy basically exists as the alternative to civil war, but it only works for as long as we can fund it with debt.
P.S. I read your informational blog post about Portland. Never tasted MJ, never will. I don’t even drink alcohol any more. What is going on in the USA now is far from my experience there in the 1970s and 1980s. If you’re interested in exploring other cities, I was born here.
Hey @anonymint, you bring several good points to the table when describing money's function within a society. In that sense value is indeed arbitrary. (just don't prefer the idea of vote for vote or pay x amount SBD for upvotes)
I can agree that if everyone agreed on everything all the time, there would cease to be any growth within a society. Your reply interests me, as I'm currently taking World Civilization as my History requirement.
In terms of Steemit, all I am saying is that I don't think some people take it seriously enough and share regurgitated information to try to make a quick buck and are not seeing the whole picture of the long-term.
Oh! In the islands we have our own kinds of comfort foods as well, I always wanted to visit where you're from. Good guess! Unfortunately I am not Filipino c:
Cheers!
Indeed. That is why I proposed a different mechanism for incentivizing onboarding, which I posit will incentivize us to invest in the long-term growth of the paradigm.
You nailed it. Nature requires defection else there can’t be any change. Change is required for adaptation and resiliency. OTOH, society requires some mechanisms to prevent defection, to the extent that capital needs to be aggregated for some outcomes (e.g. putting a man on the moon or industrialization). A goal I see for decentralization and our lurch out of the industrial age is reducing the monolithic capital requirements.
I suggest Martin Armstrong for an alternative take on world history. Wikipedia will tell you a lie about him. Dig if you shall find.
As I remembered it, it was very informal, lack of pretension, and uninhibited, especially in the non-white venues. My mother put it best when she explained to me she was just standing along the road not intending to catch a bus, and the city bus stopped, door flung open, and the lady driver exclaimed, “girl you need to get on this bus” in an affectionate demeanor.
@anonymint Your comments impress me as always, upvoted! I also commented on that insightful comment you linked to in the comment above :)
It would be great to have all comments flow organically although I'd argue that the beauty of Steem is that we can offer authors such as myself an opportunity to create a community focused on giving and receiving through the medium of extra SP purchased. SP is what gives me the motivation to write a lot and to write well now because it offers me the option of encouraging constructive comments in a way that would not be possible without it. I wouldn't be spending all this time writing articles and comments if it were not for SP (or I might but I'd not go all-in from the very beginning as I have).
I want my readers to think, "I could comment on this FB post or reply to this tweet or I could give my feedback to this or that Steemit top author, but I won't get rewarded for my insight. But @blockchainttmft always rewards me for my insight and makes me feel appreciated, I think I'll go post my comment there".
Yes I can see that motivation but I’m contemplating if it is perhaps too one dimensional. People have a myriad of triggers on their priorities. For example, an addictive game might take precedence over earning SP from comments. So much so that the user might even be willing to pay more than just his time for playing the game. Or even a business app or access to a technical blog might provide more productivity utility than the earning SP from commenting. One might even comment for free on a technical blog because they get more value from it by doing so.
As for your case of wanting to earn more SP, I have a solution for that in my design also. The more you use the system, the more tokens you get just for using it (presuming you use it as advised) as well as driving the value of your tokens higher because the system gains more sticky use.
It is likely too one dimensional and I intend to rethink how to change it as time passes by. Maybe I'll only be so generous until a point where I have 1000 followers and show people that there is value to be had in reading my blogs. Until then I think an incentive such as the one I created makes sense.
A business with an incredible product and little to no marketing has little to no chance of succeeding and the opposite is true too. I am considering the most effective ways of marketing my blog and the value people can get from reading it and interacting in the comments.
You will not make anyone rich from upvoting comments. They are more likely to value you for attracting them to Steem, if your blog could actually reach people outside of Steem.
(And my Bitnet if I ever get it launched is going to be a much more ideal way of you achieving that)
I have serious reservations about both the product and marketing of Steem. But for the moment, it is probably the best we have available for blockchain onboarding and blogging.
Hey,
I noted that you don't really divide your articles up. It helps to not be a page of text by using headings and subheadings.
It's also great to get ideas from articles by answering the questions that people are asking, like when I wrote about the top 100's returns over a year, the strategies I use to manage my portfolio, and why I value my portfolio in BTC, each of these were questions that I got constantly.
Outside of formatting, steemit is about relationship building, there's a maxim in blogging and in social media marketing: curate resources and help people and you'll quickly succeed.
Curate in this case means bring in and promote quality content by resteeming, sharing outside links, and linking to other posts in your posts. Helping is answering questions, building relationships. Both of these things help steemians help each other.
Fantastic, thanks a lot.
I am learning about formatting and have several markdown editor guides bookmarked. I will definitely be thinking more about the formatting of my posts from now on.
You sound like you have experience in creating blogs, did you have one before/outside of Steemit?
I have blogged for a few different companies and am considering an offer to write for a mainstream finance publication's digital edition on cryptocurrency.
Why am I not surprised? :D
However that makes me curious, why work to make someone else rich when you have the skills and ability to build up a significant following on a platform like this?
I'm considering it because of the leeway offered as well as the audience and ability to put a link in the byline. I also am not in it for the money, I'm in it to help people get into crypto safely. If a mainstream publication is publishing information on crypto, then it will be a taken a lot more seriously. I'm only taken seriously by those already in crypto.
You got my attention with that astute insight.
Social media marketing could also include other strategies such as gamification (subset of psychological matching and manipulation).
I added a link to your blog post above in one my comments.
Note I stopped using the Steemit follow feature, because I need to have my head down in coding, and not reading others. (Head in the sand focus is essential for me to have any chance of achieving any of my goals) But most people are not going to have that problem. I will need to be pinged if someone has something they really think is important for me to read. I do understand the importance of reading others to pick up ideas I would not have thought of. It is a tradeoff. I’ve been very socially interaction on BCT for past few years and now is time for coding.
It is all about the size and demographics of the audiences. Which is why I am looking at a different model for onboarding than Steem’s. But I am not quite yet ready to publish that idea.
You’re confirming my Knowledge Age theory which I re-summarized in a recent comment.
@ashr upvoted for insight. Seems appealing to me because a big part of my motivation is also to teach people about crypto. However, I think I need to spend another few months writing and learning about crypto before I could be considered for paid content on crypto media websites.
If I get a few thousand followers and start earning anything reasonable on Steemit I will reinvest a lot of that for advertising my Steemit articles and content on other social media platforms.
Quite a long way from doing that considering I need to first finalize my ideas for my next 40 blog posts or so (have ideas for about 20 right now).
I have a list of about 50, with 15 already written. I'm just working on something else this week and am super swamped.
Hi @blockchainttmft, I like your intention here. I only joined yesterday(!) and I'm a total newbie with all this. But I have already noticed a whole bunch of comments where it's obvious the commenter hasn't even read the post!
Anyways, yes as I'm a newbie and still learning I don't have much value to add here I'm afraid! But I'm gradually compiling a list of people who's posts are clearly going to teach me what's going on, so thank you and I've followed you. :)
@johleen You bring up a good point about all the comments by people who have not even read the post, they are bad for the ecosystem.
Some time down the line I will write a post which will be like the ultimate Steemit guide of August 2018 which will include links and short descriptions of all the Steemit guide links that I have found. Just for your reference I will include a few here:
https://steemit.com/howto/@earncrypto/4-ways-to-earn-unlimited-steem-sbd
https://steemit.com/promotion/@ausbitbank/new-tool-how-much-should-i-promote-my-post-for-steemviz-com-promo
https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@teamsteem/make-more-steem-verify-your-introduction-posts
I always love to have feedback and comments from Steemians as new as yourself, check back to your comment on this thread to see the upvote I gave you. ;)
Awesome! Cheers @blockchainttmft and thanks for those links, I'm gonna read through those posts this evening. :)
No worries, I have about 10 more where they came from :)
This sound like a great initiative. It's been only 3 weeks in Steemit and I love this community but I have seen a lot of copy and paste comments adding nothing. I even get english comments in my Spanish posts lol.
I would recommend this post that I read in my first week: https://steemit.com/steemit/@shenanigator/updated-steemit-faq-section-voting
Thanks @arturomdg!
I checked out the post and it definitely provides value. It is however 5 months old and I heard that HF19 changed the voting power somehow, are you aware of this? Do you know what might be out of date on the link you provided?
Either way, upvoted your comment, you are the second person now to benefit from this campaign :)
Forging networks based on mutual interest and ethics is, what I think, Steem is all about. I am very new here but I already see the need for a concerted effort to incentivise quality content. Let's hope this has impact.
I would love to hear your thoughts on what I wrote about the true value of crypto;
https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@qholloi/the-easter-egg-in-bitcoin-preamble-to-the-hips-whitepaper
That is a fantastic post, I commented on it and am super curious to hear you expand on that idea with your white paper.
You most definitely qualified for my constructive comment campaign, followed and upvoted ;)
Nice
@born2win I'll give you another shot at earning 5-10 cents for your comment - read the article and try again ;)
Amazing to see people like you trying to do their best to improve steemit community, I am so tired from spammers and people that are commenting with empty comments, I just wrote a post about that trying to motivate people to write better comments : STEEMIT ADVICE
Perfect. Congratulations on being the first person to be upvoted ;)
I also read your article and will comment on it now, great content!
I think it's great that you hyperlink your article in the comment, it looks less spammy and makes your comment much cleaner.
Great idea and something I have been thinking of too, but you articulated and executed the ideas first and better! I will be resteeming this, anyway, but I'm glad I found you through the Slack group since i otherwise might have missed you/this!
I wrote about similar musings here: https://steemit.com/steemit/@ecoknowme/stop-treating-your-revolution-like-it-s-a-blog-ecoknowme-advice-to-the-steemit-community
I liked your post about Global world currency until I saw it was a resteem, but YOUR post on Crypto pickup lines: https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@blockchainttmft/the-10-best-cryptocurrency-pickup-lines-nsfw had me laughing though I must admit the applications of blockchain to the REAL world is what excites me the most,(like you, hence why I'm so pleased to make your acquaintance), But I am a total Nube to this world.... whilst I am still getting my head around the Cryptocurrency side of things. I also wrote a post speculating on how easily we could start DOING things on here, instead of just TALKING about it: https://steemit.com/steemit/@ecoknowme/instant-steemit-business-idea-from-ecoknowme-not-the-economy and lastly, I too, am trying to elevate the game here on STEEMIT and have been really pleased with the response from my latest outreach venture:
https://steemit.com/permaculture/@ecoknowme/one-week-left-two-steem-still-up-for-grabs-three-contestants-so-far-think-you-can-do-better
Great idea @blockchainttmft ! Look forward to seeing what we all come up with on here, together. Cheers @ecoknowme. ALSO if YOU would like to participate and share your ideas about how Blockchain might be just the thing we need.... You COULD earn 2 Steem for the post after the month finishes. One fellow just posted his entry today and has already earned over $40 just for writing something uplifting I coaxed out of him.... he saw my post and ignored it the first time. Glad he changed his mind!
Glad to see that someone was reading my post on Slack, the chat seemed pretty silent :D
Awesome that you linked to a bunch of posts, I read and commented on one of them ;)
Needless to say you qualified for my constructive comment campaign - I followed and upvoted your comment!
thanks man! I'll see you around/over there! Cheers
Even if you don't choose me I am putting together content that I think will help others whether it's about drawing or cryptocurrency as I have had adventures in both and when you share a story it might resonate with others and help them learn something. Often when I am reading something or watching a video a new lightbulb clicks and I say to myself "I just learned something" That's cool!
Recently just learned what could happen if I didn't take security for my cryptos seriously enough and it is an eye-opener.
https://steemit.com/money/@granblock/terrifying-little-fingers-of-a-toddler-a-horror-story
It was amusing to read your story and I especially like reading about women's experience with crypto since it's rare!
Congratulations, you also qualified for my constructive comment campaign, upvoted and followed!
Also it's a great reminder for people new to crypto - KEEP YOUR PRIVATE KEYS SAFE!
I like that you are pushing the community to generate quality content. It will do a lot of good to the steemit community because I have seen so many blogs that are just copied and pasted from other sites. I'll be trying my best as well to generate content on subjects that I feel are worth sharing.
Thanks I appreciate the encouragement, none of my blogs are copy-pasted from other sites, all my writing :)
Hey I just followed you @blockchainttmft , I will follow almost everyone who wants to help minnows like me. I am still learning on cryptos so I will be learning from all your posts.
One day I will help minnows just as what you did here. Steem on!
@cikxaijen what types of posts might you be interested in reading about cryptos?
Feel free to ask me any questions right now if you have any :)
I'm having hard time understanding about fork. I need it in layman's term
Usually the expectation with a hard fork is that one side of the split chain will become dominant and the other will die off or possibly live on as a cheap alt coin. The risk is this might end up in two incompatible currencies that both think they are the original coin. A hard fork requires all nodes to upgrade and agree on the new version while on the other hand a soft fork requires only a majority of the miners upgrading to enforce the new rules.