RE: Adjust Your Expectations: Steemit Is Designed as a Lottery
I find Steemit a very nice blogging platform, and if it didn't pay at all, I might still have chosen it over blogspot or wordpress. The ease of commenting, and the community that steemit has is in alignment with my end goals.
I love the idea of getting paid. And I am working on getting enough steem to purchase a graphics tablet. (Probably be easier if I wrote more and drew less.)
However, I find the payouts to be really annoying. What the white paper stated was nice and desirable, what they have created is not that.
They have an algorithm that makes a hockey stick chart of who gets paid what. Unfortunately, they also made a hockey stick chart out of the vests. Then multiplied the two, making a very steep hockey stick.
Add in the 0.001 minimum, and you have a hockey stick with a sharp drop off.
Case in point. At 10 SP I would have to be very lucky in timing and finding a post to get that treasured 0.001 curation payout. But, when I got to 100 SP I can easily get between 0.001-0.008 curation payout just by voting on all the stuff that I like. So, in a very real sense, there is a minimum amount required to play the game. And this is not good for new people retainment.
I'd say there's a minimum amount required to play the curation game for sure. Expecting curation rewards without putting in your own investment of funds doesn't make sense to me. I only quote one part of the white paper, but other parts address what you mentioned as well. Have you read it? The income inequality concerns were known from the beginning. They talked openly about selling and distributing STEEM over time to deal with it. I'm not sure if it will work, and I've written my own posts questioning the underlying economics of the system. As we saw with last week's hard fork, they are making changes because enough people considered things broken. It's a beta experiment, and I'm curious to see where it will go in the future.
As to it being chosen over blogspot or wordpress... that's really cool to hear! Mostly I hear people complain about how terrible the interface is.
Either way, good luck with the lottery! :)
I have been a programmer, so I could have used this site even if it meant pushing the content to the steem-chain myself. I am pretty sure I know what is happening on the backend, and so am comfortable with the tools as they are. (Wish they were better. Wish someone would turn me onto who to talk to about pushing changes and testing.)
I understand the desire to reward those who put the effort into the platform. And that is a good; I want to keep that aspect. However, as a newb, I got about 0.001 curation reward per week, and that is because I read up on what to do, and found out who to vote for and when. An unskilled new user may think that the system is broken, that they are not doing something right, or luck is against them, or that they are just not wanted here. If the system doesn't throw them a bone once in a while, they are just gonna fade away. (if they don't post an "I've had it, I quit" post)
I believe this may be fixed by sorting payouts by newbs first. Make the cutoff much lower, say 0.0001, and all the newbs that are above that get 0.001. Then sort the rest and payout the remaining as usual.
Also, I have had many replies that have said $0.01 right up until the payout, and then gotten nothing. It may be that just sorting the payouts from the bottom up may make all the difference.
And yes, I read the white paper, and a lot of github, and...
It's a steep learning curve for sure. I've devoloped sotfware long enough to know programmers shouldn't be trusted to have good opinions about UI. We don't really care about UI. :)
A penny here or there for curation probably won't make or break if someone sticks around. Curation is for whales.
Agree
Blogspot and Wordpress can pay an author a residual income ... possibly forever. This is one wildcard that's not been discussed. if Steemit puts something like Adsense in place and splits the revenue with those that created the content, this could be crazy worth it.
Have you had much success with it? My understanding is unless you have an active blog with a lot of subscribers, there's not much money in ad revs for individual blog sites. Product placement and affiliate links can help, but still, it's going to be depend on your readership size and how engaged your mailing list is (and how willing they are to buy whatever it is you're selling).
5 years ago I had a hobby blog with Adsense and Amazon monetization. I sold the blog when I took a new job because I didn't have time to keep posting 2 to 3 products a day. Amazon made much more thank Adsense, but it all depends on traffic. Steemit should be able to manage that ok. They could test the waters with Adsense, but that means playing by Google's rules to some extent. They could do their own in-house ad network too, ala FB. If you're someone who already has 100's of posts that can attract evergreen traffic, then this could rekindle your old content if implemented.
I caught a little bit of Ned's discussion on TeamSpeak last night, and I think their primary focus right now is getting more active users. If that happens it opens up all kinds of interesting possibilities.
The interface IS very poor...others much better. Just one thing that's broken here IMHO. Lottery for sure! Good discussion guys