Is there any room for short form content?
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I've read quite a few opinionated Steemians on this subject, some believe that short form content is OK, but only if the content makes a small payout. I don't know what to say about that honestly. I can understand effort, I can understand merit, but I'm also aware of something called talent or skill, and that makes all those definitions a bit blurry.
As a musician, I tend to think that skill and talent are much more important that bulk effort. Basically, if someone has spent most of their lives becoming a skillful player, singer or writer, it's not too relevant if their post took them five minutes to make. The post cannot effectively show the trajectory taken to achieve that level of efficiency.
I know professional musicians that take hours to record a song, as well as some (the ones I prefer) that can do it in one or two takes. The final results are arguably the same, but the recording itself does not present evidence of the time spent on the tracks. This is why this question is so interesting to me.
Mind you, I'm fully aware that Steemit as a platform is nothing but an application built on top of Steem and that other applications are sure to come and take over niches. Dtube, Dsound are some great examples of applications built on Steem, but they are still not catering to absolutely everyone.
Mass adoption, maybe we are not ready
Might not be possible with the current Dapps built on top of Steem. Maybe this realization of mine will be perceived as a negative statement, but I'm trying to be objective about it. If Steemit (not steem) is so quick to reject short form content, flag it without discrimination, regardless of payout amount (I've seen this myself). I can't help but to imagine would be Steemians give up lost in confusion.
I certainly learned early on not to even consider posting short content, as I got criticized heavily for it. However, nothing of the sort was ever explained on anything we could even consider as "rules".
I'm posing this question today, simply because I'm curious as to how everyone else feels about this big challenge, this negative stigma Steemit users seem to have towards short content.
I doubt I'm alone on this perception and experience...
Hope everyone is having a beautiful weekend
Aside from the upvote bots, Steemit is essentially a massive popularity contest. The only articles that are organically upvoted with any regularity are by people who have been around for years and networked with high SP accounts.
Not hating on them. I wish I had that. But the point is that short or long form, it doesn't matter because people will upvote each other based on whether or not that person is their friend.
In fact, I think writing long form content actually hurts your chances of getting a powerful upvote. People generally skim articles and race to the bottom so they can leave a comment. Short articles have the chance to be read fully before this happens. Longer articles do not.
I personally like writing longer articles because I see the value of Steemit not in actually getting organic upvotes from people, but from being able to boost my posts to the top of the Trending page and get guaranteed exposure for what I write. And when I refer people to my page to read my articles who aren't motivated to skim posts and leave worthless comments, they see that I have dozens of long, unique, interesting articles full of original and intelligent thoughts.
But I realize most people aren't motivated by that. They want their $0.10 upvote and don't think of anything beyond the immediate future. That's how most people in the world are though, not just the ones who use this website.
This post has received a 10.73 % upvote from @boomerang.
Thanks for the thorough comment. This itself added value to the original post.
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I would love content on steem to take a form like Medium
So long format is the one you prefer then. Nothing wrong with that, but it kind of makes my point for me. then this is not meant to go main stream, or at least not yet.
@askanything will upvote questions, one question per week, per person. If students are paid to ask questions, it will fasten mass adoption of Steemit.
Creo que este tema es relativo: Hay personas que comenzaron escribiendo muy mal y se les ha observado el avance al revisar su blog. Otros lo hicieron de una vez con el manejo correcto de la escritura. Si el contenido es de calidad, pienso que los dos están en el derecho de ser bien valorados.
Hay contenido corto que necesita una preparación previa que toma tiempo y dedicación, por ejemplo: un aforismo, un haiku, también son valiosos. Ahora una línea sin sentido no debería ser asumida como algo importante.
Saludos.
yo en lo personal disfruto de contenido corto tambien, y no soy enemigo de la poesia. Pero he visto personas llevar flags por poner poesia y promover con bots su poesia, siendo esta original.
Quizá porque se nos vendió la idea de que la red era para escribir contenido de calidad y hacerlo requiere un trabajo, mientras que escribir cualquier cosa y postearla con un meme, por ejemplo, no es nada complicado ni interesante y sin embargo esas personas obtienen altas recompensas, sin haber hecho un esfuerzo productivo en algo que aunque corto requirió de concentración. Es allí donde está el detalle. Pienso que el que aplica la bandera podría tomar en consideración eso. Dónde hubo trabajo intelectual y dónde no. Saludos.
SteemIt has the structure of a social media site.
My observation is that people are earning steem for their social media skills.
The structure seems to favor short-format content.
IMHO, the best path for a person interested in creating long format content (a book, a movie, detailed art work, podcast, etc) is to build a web site to contain the finished work. The author would drop multiple posts about the project while creating the long format project.
Good thinking!
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This is really a good article with an interesting point of view.
Regarding to the structure of payouts in steemit it looks like that short content is preferred.
What makes me think like that?
The only way out for steemians who provide large high-quality content might be a direct donation via the donators wallet with the quantity the donator means to be fair for the authors work.
For sure there might be another option, but I believe this will not be realistic but should work fine too: only the wales will vote on large high-quality content, because they have enough power to vote with amounts over 1,000 SBD up to hundreds of SBD what should be fair for some of this category of content.
Maybe another tool on top of Steemit for this large and high-quality content will solve this issue in a form like you mentioned in your article (Dtube, Dsound).
Anyway, I believe there has to be some changes in the future to get a bit more fairness into the Steemit-universe.
with sunny greetings from Andalusia
Don Thomas
Payouts directly from a wallet would be extremely hard to sell to anyone. That being said, I think I get your point on this matter. You are simply stating that statistically speaking short form content is more prevalent, however how much of it is actually valuable, that is another question.
Thank you for your input...
It is the business model of Patreon, Kickstarter, GoFundMe, IndieGoGo and a dozen other organizations in the same space. A direct payment from SteemIt would be an easier sale than these organization since Steem has a lower transaction cost.
Great post @chbartist. Can you explain what happened when you posted short content and were 'criticized heavily for it'? Did the criticism come in the comments or via flagging of the post? Really interested to hear as I'm a visual artist used to the Instragram model of small amounts of content regularly.
The thing is, if the payouts are small, probably nothing will happen, but if say you post a picture and a short poem or something of the sort, and 1 whale decides to upvote it heavily. You might have people flag it because they believe the rewards don't merit it..
I got not only flags, also people being disrespectful, but all that is in the past. I think by now I've shown my intentions long enough.
Very good discussion point.
I think that the articles should be able to show two types of content: comprehensive and detail one. For those who are on-the-go, the comprehensive one is better.
Thanks for sharing. Great insight and perspective on a topic I've been curious about. I'm still new to the platform and trying to learn the best approach for growing a healthy community. I've seen some users who post 5-10 photos a day with nealry no text, and others who post much less frequently but in much more depth (paragraphs, formating, images etc). Both parties seem to be finding success.
I'm still trying to figure out the method that best suits my efforts. Thanks again for sharing your thoughts, I look forward to following more of your content.
I doubt there is a set formula, but one thing that does make a difference is to engage with your readers. I see many whales and dolphins who don't they post and make themselves unavailable ... i think that works heavily against them building an audience.
Thanks for the reply. I agree, I don't think there's a 'one size fits all' system that works for everyone. I'll keep experimenting to find the best 'bang for my buck' in terms of how much time and effort to put into Steemit. One thing I don't want to get into is bots and buying upvotes (although I have seen lots of posts suggesting how important it is), I'd prefer to grow organically. I think posting consistently with good quality content as well as (as you mentioned) engaging what the community and responding to comments, organic success can be achieved. All the best!
Good points, hopefully steemit will evolve to balance these issues.