Steemit: Whales, successful blogs and the 'Joshua Bell phenomenon'

Honestly: We blog because we want our blogs to be read.

There is nothing more frustrating than spending hours to bring your blog to perfection, then having it posted and not being clicked, not being voted or commented or anything at all. You spent a lot of time on how to pitch your idea and thoughts. You may have thought days about how to perfectly structure your post, how to reach and impress the community. Only to realize no one cares at all. All you hear is a lonely coyote howling from afar.

Your blog rather looks like:

Simply zero activity.

As a blogger, you want people to read your blog. You are constantly trying to acquire new readers. In the best case, your posts are not being consumed silently but people discuss the content by giving comments and by voting. That's the point a blog comes to live!

If we analyze statistics we see that the activity in our blog increases right after we release a post (30-90 min usually). So the solution is 'post, post, post' to constantly stay on the radar?

...No.

Why 'more posts' can not be a solution

(1) It costs too much time to write that many posts
(2) The quality of your posts will be low because you do not have fun writing them

In short terms: It is simply not scalable.

What is the key to a successful blog?

I personally always thought the whole thing is not about producing as much content as possible but to post something that 'people' are interested in.
Or wait, on steemit it is not about 'people' but whales who do the real curating? This is not meant to offend anyone. Let me briefly explain:
The real key performance indicator is activity per post. How do you get much activity on your posts? By posting the best content? I'd say no. It's more like you have a 30 min timeframe in which a whale upvotes you or you will be lost in the deep ocean of steemit. Possibly never seen again, or to be more realistic maybe 5 more people see it or click on it. It does not matter if the content is absolutely fabulous. You need a whale. A whale that induces activity on you post. A whale who promotes your post, makes it 'valuable' and people click on it because just because of the $$$ they see. They upvote and do the 'beauty contest' (to analyze it from a game theoretic approach).

Let my explain further: The Joshua Bell (social) experiment

My opinion is that there are some really good blogs that are simply being ignored. Because there is too less activity in their blog as a whole and no one even recognizes it. People have to look actively into archives to find content. That's bad. Let me compare it to the 'Josuha Bell' experiment:

See the video below:

Joshua Bell, one of the best concert violinist in the world played for free, for 45 minutes, on a violin worth 3.5 million dollars at a subway station. Over a thousand people passed by Bell, only seven stopped to listen him play, including a 3-year old boy, and only one person recognized him.

I wonder what would happen if a successful blogger from here would launch a post from a totally new account. Would it be rewarded the same way it is now? Apparently not, despite it is exactly the same person and post. That would be a quite interesting experiment though.

Wasted!
... and exactly this is happens to lots of quality content here.
At least some bloggers that release great content are not being recognized in any way yet. They suffer from the 'Joshua Bell' phenomenon and are not instantly upvoted like others who already have a good reputation (maybe they have not posted yet). Some people waste absolutely fantastic content because no one clicks on their blog. I think this does not lead to sustainability and it hurts to see them suffer. Whatever.

Let me give you just a single advice.
My opinion is that the small unrecognized posts can be much more interesting than 'whale posts' that are hyped anyway. Some totally unrecognized people put an enormous effort into their posts and they are great to read. So feel free to click on anything even if it has no readers yet. It could be a great story. Give new people a chance by not ignoring them. Reward good content.
Unfortunately I do not think that we will be able to maintain that amount of great content when it is not rewarded in any way. We cannot afford to simply waste good content in the way we are doing now. Let's change this.

Just my 2 cents. @crypt0mine

(Note: Yes, I'v already done a similar post. This is a modified version and also part of an experiment. The old post can be ignored.)