More Tests of the Promoted Posts Feature

As I've already said the Promoted page is not working well apparently, based on my tests so far it seems that it is not working as intended as not a lot of people other than maybe some whales and users that also promote their posts check it let alone visit posts and vote or comment for them. I had my concerns initially, but my tests so far have confirmed that it is not helping much new authors to find more readers and to make their good content more discoverable... you can pretty much just score a Whale vote and that is what you will get.

I'm already starting to see that the amounts of SBD spent to promote Posts has dropped significantly as people see that even spending a lot does not work much. So at the moment you can get in the top 20 page of promoted posts with as much as just $10 SBD, but the more important question is if it is worth doing it... maybe if you are looking to increase your post reward you can try it. Remember that your posts still needs to be a good quality one or at least you need to be lucky to score a vote thanks to a clever title, interesting photo etc.

I wasn't planning to do more Promotion post test, but yesterday I have decided to give it one last try for now at least when one of my posts was selected by the @robinhoodwhale initiative, the posts in question is this one 5 Weeks on Steemit, Some Stats and Random Thoughts. This has quickly raised the reward of the post to about $10 SBD, but the more important thing was that there were instantly like about 100 more new votes. Some votes were from people like @charlieshrem or @dollarvigilante, yet there were no new comments and that left the idea that these people that voted did it just to support the RHW initiative and not because they actually read the post and maybe wanted to join the discussion. I have shared some thoughts about the RHW in the post's comments, so I'm not going to be repeating myself again here.

Getting so many new votes, total of 142 and the post having already 15 comments published I have decided to give one more try and Promote the post to see if that alone will be enough to attract more readers that may be interested in joining the conversation (I was talking about the Promoted feature in that post as well). I have spent a bit over $20 SBD for the promotion even though the post was just at less than $10 SBD reward as I wanted it to be in the first 20 Promoted posts in general in order for more people to see it. So now, already 18 hours later after Promoting the post there is not much of a difference, it is a 150 votes and 17 comments, but pretty much nothing new going on for almost a day already. The only notable difference is that the post is at close to $60 SBD reward now thanks to a vote from @dantheman himself... my first vote from him, though he has dropped a comment or two under some of my earlier posts already.

So yes, the Promoted page might be helpful to whales to discover and vote for promising good content that they may have missed otherwise, but it is not helping the authors with more than just increasing the reward of the post... as I have already mentioned most authors that are not here for the rewards will not be that happy with the fact that they don't get more user attention and interaction from that feature. It is up to you if you want to decide to use it, but as I've said not much point for people that don't write here for the money or because of the money... It is good that at least the prices are starting to get to a more normal level (that was probably one of the issues preventing the Promoted page from being useful), so in a while I may give it yet another try, but for now I'll probably just focus on writing good and interesting posts.

More About the New Voting Slider

Yesterday was a day with a lot of discussions regarding the new features to be brought to Steem and the announcement of the new Steem 0.14.0 Release Candidate scheduled to be available in a week. There are some new interesting features getting introduced, as well as what sparkled a bit of controversy - a change in how the voting works. This change could affect the more active curators as well as the people that like to vote for good comments as well as posts and can result in people generally voting for even less posts per day with new and not yet established users that make good and interesting content highly likely to suffer more from that change. It is apparently intended to discourage automated voting from bots that are being used just to game the system and earn curation rewards, but bots can also be useful and good if properly written to help (I'm already trying to do something for that with a bot I'm working on). What I know is that a person that goes through a lot of posts every day and votes for many will most certainly be discouraged by the new voting "limits".

While the new Steem 0.14.0 RC is not yet available and the changes and new things it will bring are not yet available, yesterday some new changes and features were introduced on Steemit.com. One of them being the Feed tab that is now moved to the Home link and also being the page you get when you open Steemit if you are logged in. Nice thing to do instead of seeing the trending page, but a bit confusing for people that were not sure what is going on initially until they figured things out. More importantly if you do not Follow anyone yet your home page being an empty one is probably not the best thing to have, so something probably needs to be done for that.

The other interesting addition, available to some users only, was the release of the Voting Power slider for people with over 310 SP (1M Vests)... this should be what previously only Whales had available. Normal users with less SP still have the same old voting button only. This new feature has probably been introduced to regular users with more Steem Power in preparation for the upcoming voting changes with the Steem 0.14.0 RC. The problem I have discovered however is that apparently the Slider does not work properly under IE11 essentially making users of that browser unable to vote at the moment (if they see the slider). When you click the regular vote button you see the slider, can change the percentage, but when you click to vote nothing actually happens. This is some sort of functionality bug under IE11 and it not the first issue I'm seeing that Steemit has with that browser.

Now, before you say who is still using IE11... well there are quite a lot of people actually, like maybe 5-6% of the total user base for most sites is probably on IE11. So a website such as Steemit that is targeting a very wide audience should not be releasing new features that are not properly tested and confirmed to be functional that instead are breaking one fo the most important functions - the voting. Sure, I can use another browser as I'm already using Chrome and FireFox for other things, but IE11 has been dedicated only for Steemit.com for me. I seriously doubt that a lot of regular users that have been used to working with IE11 for example would be willing to just switch their browser and what they are familiar with to another one just because they cannot use Steemit properly... I expect that many are more likely to actually stop using the service than to change their habits and try to learn a new browser. So please fix the voting problem under IE11 and please do test new features for proper operation under IE11 as well!

If you have a question or want to add something, then please leave a comment below.

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