First rant - Photography on Steemit - Photos are meant to be looked at!
Photos should be looked at !
Hi all
In my 'about' I said that I do the occasional rant. Well here's my first one.
I'm now 3 days on Steemit. Not very long I know, just enough to have a bit of a lookaround, post a few comments on peoples stuff and make a couple of blog post on my own.
My main interest in photography. I just love to watch amazing pictures made by people, daily I browse through many platforms just looking, and being amazed. I take some pictures myself because I enjoy doing it, not because I'm very good at it :). I posted some here too.
So here I was browsing the 'hot' section of photography, and then the 'trending' section of photography, and I was amazed, not amazed by the sheer beauty of all the pictures, but amazed at the utter crap I was seeing. Don't get me wrong there is the occasional brilliant picture, but my god, If I have to look at one more tilted horizon I'm going to break my computer. :)
But in the 'new' section there's much more quality, but they disappear into oblivion in a matter of minutes. Strange I thought, but ok, this is a new platform it needs to mature (keep in mind, I'm talking about the photography section, and don't know if what I'm saying is true for other content).
But this morning I noticed that you can see how many views a post has, which is nice ... but ... all the top posts have much more votes than views.
Again: more votes than views
More votes than views, who cares, I hear you say. Well every photographer should care. It's photography ... VIEWING ... is the key to everything, it's the basis of photography, photography is the art of viewing.
So it dawned on me ... I'm participating in the biggest photo circlejerk currently on the internet. At this moment this site does not promote good content, it only promotes backscratching. And there is some very good content too be found, but you have to dig hard and far.
post a comment if you actually read this post ... I'd like to know.
I don't know how this will evolve ... but I hope one day I'll see posts with a 1000 views and 1 vote, that would be a sign top content is going to the top.
So ... end of rant ... hope I didn't offend anyone .... but I'm sure many people see the potential of this medium, and those people also do not want to see this thing go down.
bonus blue picture because it is friday
View counts and votes don't necessarily line up. Someone already explained about the views not being counted from some of the other platforms. And there are voting streams and bots. Some of them exist for good reasons. People can't use up all their voting power every day, so some assign a portion of their vote capacity to vote trails with groups that they trust to upvote onl good content, or to support specific people that they follow. Other vote bots are trying to create artificial intelligence that can discern good posts from bad posts. It may seem like they are gaming the system, but thinking at large scales, they are trying to develop tools that can make the system better over the long run. I hope that helps. It's best to focus on developing relationships and posting about what you like to write about or photograph. If you find stolen content, you can report it in the #steemcleaners section of steemit.chat. Hope that helps!
if only the site can make user to view the post first before making the upvote. then it would happen. other wise it will just the same i guess.
at the moment i am struggling a bit on this platform, but i am trying hard to have a good connection to those i connect with, so that we can really understand what they are trying to say.
Exactly. Found a picture with 150 votes and 8 views. 8! That makes no sense at all. That's the whole problem with a reward system that is essentially based on followers. Well, we'll see what this becomes :)
i hardly look at the views and like, i just open the post so i can see the clear image the owner is really submit, then hit the upvote button.
hope for the best from the site.
i think the view counter doesn't track views from places outside steemit.com, such as chainbb, busy.org, esteem etc.
Ah ... didn't know that. I'll look into it. But still, something is very off with the way this voting thing goes. Thanks for replying.
Yup, I read it :)
I agree that Trending and Hot is not the best place to look at good photos. They are just... popular or sponsored I guess. And popular doesn't mean the best.
But I have a though about the "1000 view and 1 vote" part. Lets say I had a post like that. It would make me think that it is simply not good enough for people to vote for . So many of them saw and no one appreciate it enough to "like" it? The hell?
It's the same thing with original content, crappy, ordinary articles get big upvotes, based on "who" notices, it's very confusing to new people joining Steem, that they have to jump through a series of hoops or kiss whale-ass.. and yes your photograph is very good so if you get 10 upvotes it's because we actually looked at the color and composition you aimed for.
Thnx for the reply. It was just a rant .... something that annoyed me ... I'll learn to live with it :)