CURIOSITY: Why is the number one person in terms of followers someone who appears to only resteem? Digital archaeology/anthropology
I was taking a look at steemwhales.com today as it's been awhile since I looked. When I sorted by followers there was someone I hadn't actually heard of that sorted to the top. @joanaltres
12,724 followers. That's some impressive stuff. How did I miss this person?
I scroll down to look at her posts...
I keep scrolling...
and scrolling...
Lot's of resteems... I'm still looking for something original.
What am I missing? Why are people following this user in such large numbers?
It is clear I missed something, yet for the life of me I cannot see what it is?
This is not me bashing or attacking someone. I am truly curious as I do not see why there is so much interest here?
Oh and they are following an insane amount of people, so is it just a case of YOU FOLLOW ME, and I'LL FOLLOW you?
I spent quite some time scrolling... I found an original post from 8 months ago. I may have missed some, she is very active in resteeming.
So I continued my journey. Consider this a bit of that digital archaeology I mentioned in my most recent post besides this one.
And then I made it to the initial introduction post... so unless I missed some I see 3 original posts in 9 months. A ton of resteems, which could be good. This is kind of like the "Joan of Alt" channel. Tune in to see what she likes. This might be brilliant.
So as of today this is the account with the most followers on the entire steem blockchain.
Steemwhales lists the account as valued at $139 and the wallet looks like this:
So what does this tell me? If money is your goal then simply resteeming is not very profitable. If you want lots of followers whatever she has done is genius, but it doesn't appear to have translated to much of a gain for this account.
In looking at the transactions she does get a lot of donations for resteeming and other things, so in reality this account has done a lot more than the $139 you would think this account has. That simply shows that in terms of steem power there is not much in the way of investment. The money that does come into this account is occasionally sent out.
She could be sitting on it, or she could be surviving on it. That's good. This is a pretty mysterious account as it has an insane number of follows, it receives a lot of donations and payments for resteeming, and yet very little of that actually stays on this account.
Let's dig deeper... I haven't looked at comments yet, perhaps she is really active there.
That is the KEY... here is a big answer. She is very active in comments, and she offers positive encouragement and helps people out that way. This is beginning to make sense.
She is a good example of how engaging in conversations can make a big difference. I believe the primary reason her account is not worth an insane amount is that she is almost completely funded from tips and donations. When we post and are paid 50/50 steem power/steem dollars then half is going into steem power. Unless she is rewarded from comments (which she is some) then her steem power wouldn't climb a lot.
This account is pretty unique, and appears legit and different. She is showing a VERY different way to use steemit and it appears it is likely working for her.
It gave me a mystery and a journey today. I did not mean any of this as an attack on her, I was just truly curious and this dovetailed nicely with my reference to digital archaeology and anthropology.
I think there may be a little bit of genius here in her approach... It is not something I myself can really tap into though. It is pretty alien to how my mind works.
EDIT: I missed @stellabelle's interview of @joanaltres. She did a good job if you want to know more check out her posts Interview With @joanaltres Who is Ranked #1 With The Most Followers, 10,000+ on Steemit
I was very curious about this account too, but she has such a huge following. I view her as an aggregator. She finds good content, and resteems it to her followers that upvote other peoples great content. It's quite brilliant and beautiful. She's helping everyone blow up by being a curator 😎
You know... THANK YOU for doing that bit of "digital forensics" there. I've had a comment or two from her and wondered how the HECK did anyone end up with such a number of followers... and following so many. And almost NO original content... I'd thought maybe she was some YouTuber or twitterer with two million followers who'd set up a little camp here... but evidently not.
She does list herself as a marketer. In that respect she might be a genius. She is building up an ever growing list of followers she can blast out resteems to. I've seen people send her money to resteem their post. So in that sense she is really intelligent. She has the biggest follower train on the platform and it is only getting bigger. She may have found the new way for advertisers on this blockchain. I'm actually kind of impressed.
Thanks for investigating me. Lol. :) I'm not a genius, just stumbled upon this as a way to help others. I believe in the overall vision of what Steem and Steemit can become. Most of the donations came about from the @stellabelle interview, which was unexpected. She asked me to answer some questions and I did, but I thought I was just helping her out with an interesting post. I didn't expect anything from it. Much to my surprise, several people sent me donations to help me pay some of my debts.
My marketing acumen is limited. I mostly sell software and promote info products as an affiliate. I've been making a full time income from it for about 8 years now. Had a rough time earlier this year, however, but things are starting to pick up for me again.
Resteeming to this many followers doesn't always result in a big gain in earnings for the posts - but now and then, yes. It mostly helps people gain new followers and engagement on their posts. Recently, I've been wondering if it's really worth doing to be honest.
Thanks, and I'll resteem this for you to 12,000+ followers so you can see what I mean (plus you did a great job too, so it deserves a resteem!) :)
giving you a follow because you have some decent posts on your list :) also you don't seem to be going overboard with "marketing" meaning spamming the crap :D .. Welcome :) nice to have you on here. I hope you don't grow insane with 50k posts on your feed :D other than that we should be having a "meritocracy" so having less but loyal followers is always great.
Anyways the system is flawed :D I hope you have fun, ask away if you need help with something, or some info on the goings on here.
Thank you for clarifying! This was a great article and I am beyond impressed by your accomplishments!
I understand your time is limited and I hope the situation with your mother has improved. Have you considered posting something maybe once a week of your own. Just share your thoughts and what is going on, and whatever you want to say? I believe that would benefit you as it gives us something of yours other than comments to up vote. That will boost your reputation, and I am certain you'd earn some things.
It could be even you giving a recap of your steemit week or something like that. As far as marketing. Having this many followers and the fact they are growing fast will have value, I just don't see you being able to gain much personally from it. If you posted maybe one post a week though that might change. You could do more than that too, I was just brainstorming based upon your limited time.
Thanks. She is doing better, but the stroke was crippling to some degree, plus she has diabetes on top of that. Not the best situation, but we're hanging in there. :)
@stellabelle suggested I do that also. I probably will at some point. Thanks for the suggestion.
Not to get off topic, but I've been a little concerned about what has happened to @stellabelle. Neither she nor her mother has posted or commented in about 9 days, and she had a contest running when she suddenly became completely inactive. Maybe she took a long break, I don't know. Just seems kind of unusual.
I haven't heard of any problems with @stellabelle. I hope she is okay. She's been an active and vibrant part of steemit since the day I arrived here. She and I like some things equally (both huge Nikola Tesla fans) and we have some things we don't agree on. I consider that a good thing. Variety is the spice of life.
I hope she is okay and if I hear or find out anything I'll let you know.
Great explanation to his questions. keep up the good work on steemit!
@joanaltres Honest comment. I like it.
@joanaltres I run a publishing company and am looking for freelance marketer, such as an affiliate to help me market. I'm offering 50/50 split on a subscription service. Meaning you bring customer once, I service, and every month they pay, you get half. I have some people with me now for 5 years (when I started). So it could create income for a long time. If interested, is there a way to PM you? Or you could go to my website and use the contact link to reach me. Thanks for reading.
I like your explanation too
I wish she'd give me a RS with that many followers!!! WOW! Also a reputation of only 59?
You gain reputation by people with higher reputation up voting your posts. Since she doesn't post things to be up voted her reputation will go up slower. That reputation is likely all from comment up votes.
Thanks for answering that mystery - I've been wondering for months why people with less posts, less time here, and less wallet content have higher reps than me. Turns out it's because I barely have anyone with a higher rep following or voting for me! So that's why I've been stuck on 62 for at least five years :)
OK, now I'm about to get all freaky stalker on you...
I have been following you for at least 10 years and often find your posts interesting. Sometimes I have commented on them and we have had agreeable interactions.
Recently I noticed you unfollowed me, and for the first time ever I was really curious. Most people who unfollow me are vegans.
The usual explanations don't fit - you are following 775 people, so it's not a random clear out (I unfollow people all the time, mostly for resteeming), and you say you value disagreement of opinion, so it's probably not because you are a vegan.
My best guess is that it's for a technical reason such as my thing of always including an image and a 10% self upvote on my comments to make them stand out like dog's balls (some people freak out about that, while others have started doing it too)
I know this is damn strange, and I fully understand if you ignore this question, but I'm only asking because like an itch I have to scratch, I'm very curious. I hope someone asks me the same question one day, I'll have a good laugh :)
So why did you unfollow me?
Oh I can tell you why I stopped following you. I posted about what I was going to do before I did it. I indicated I was not going to be following people who up vote their own comments. You see I'm pretty good about up voting almost all comments people give me. Yet with the recent draining of pool by people voting their own comments I indicated I would not be following people who up vote their own comments. I started looking and I started doing that. If you don't vote your own comments I'll gladly follow you and if your comment is more than "nice post" you'll likely get an up vote from me on all of your comments. Right now I'm doing that at 1% which is actually about $0.03 due to steem price falling as opposed to your $0.05 there, but I may increase my percentage to 2% or even 3% as I was considering doing that. I like to encourage discussion, so I will support that.
That's the only reason I unfollowed you I also wrote a couple of posts indicating I likely would do that when the commenting self was encountered frequently.
Fair enough - my guess was good then!
I'm following you and still see and read your posts.
As far as not upvoting my own comments go, I'm happy to not upvote them on your posts but will continue to upvote them on other posts.
It's not about paying myself or draining the pool, it's to bring my comments up to the top of the comment feed. I upvote every comment I reply to, every comment that replies to my comment, and every one of my own comments at 10%. These votes are all worth about 5 cents depending on the price of Steem.
But I fully get what you mean about draining the pool - in fact I just said this to a commenter on my most recent post:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@sift666/a-censorship-threat-to-steemit
"I think it sucks that you just upvoted your own comment to the tune of $25 when to get it to the top all you had to do was upvote it by about $2, but that is another issue. I like to upvote my own comments too, but that is just to bring them up the feed - what you are doing is blatantly giving yourself big payouts"
Well if you don't up vote them on my post then I am in a catch-22. I would like to follow you as I do enjoy some of your stuff. So let's try it see how it goes. You shouldn't have to worry about visibility on mine. I look at all replies to me. :) My litmus test of "If everyone did this what would it do to steemit stands here"... It'd not be a pretty sight. If everyone was up voting their posts for visibility it'd quickly get pretty ugly.
Thanks, much appreciated, you are actually the highest rep person who was following me, so now that I know why I'm stuck on 62 I'm all the more keen.
Just don't look at my comment tab or it might push you over the edge! :)
The only disadvantage will be that I up vote comments I see elsewhere too if I'm cruising around and see one I like. I don't do it if they are self up voted. :)
It also was not personal. I just figured I should do what I was saying people should do if they were not happy with the comment self-up voting. Had I not is would make me a hypocrite.
How you can follow 775 people is beyond me - I'm always aiming to get my list down closer to 100 so there is a chance of me actually reading some of them.
I also didn't make it through my entire list of followers to do this. So I am sure there are still people I am following that are doing this. It is something I'll do as I notice it. If you are fine with not up voting your own comments then let me know and I'll gladly give you a follow and at least when dealing with me I'll likely give you what you were giving yourself or more. I've decided I'll switch from 1% to 2% to see how that impacts my pool. If it is not much of a drain I may then switch to 3%. I up vote a lot of comments...
Whoops, so many replies I'm getting them mixed up...
It is proving to be a struggle. I miss a lot of really good stuff, but I am trying to help out as many people as I can. I did drop down to about 300 for awhile because of the struggle but I found steemit becoming kind of an echo chamber for me and I was missing some cool new people. So now I figure I'll follow a lot of people and just a few times a year try to go through them and prune the ones that are not active, etc.
It's still very much a work in progress. I'm trying. I'm sure I'll have to change some things. With the limit to votes requiring a control my %s far more than before it is still a struggle to learn how I can best influence the platform the way I want to. I don't actually curate based on earning potential at all. I curate based upon supporting content I enjoy and I also believe up voting comments is a big part of that.
Neither a vegan nor a hypocrite :)
I love eating meat. I've looked at animals before and thought "I wonder what that tastes like?" but I was raised in a pretty rural environment with a lot of wild life and my favorite meat is actually Elk which we only got really during hunting season. I haven't had elk in a few years.
I have no idea what elk even is - like venison?
Bigger and not as gamey. It is between a Deer (Venison) and a Moose in size. They can get quite big. They taste distinctly different from Venison though. It's actually one of my favorite meats. It's also usually very lean.
I see... so the higher you go, the more difficult it becomes to get up higher. That explains why I was at 67.9 forever!
Yep, I got to 72 pretty quickly but I've mostly been extremely slow getting higher as the only time my reputation actually goes up is when someone with higher reputation than me up votes me.
I never really paid any attention for quite a while after coming on here. It took about 2-3 months to hit 66... that's the first time I even noticed it. In the grand scheme of things, I'm not sure it matters all that much... except it is useful when I look at the comments I get begging for follows and upvotes.
I think I've been on 62 for six months - but I just realised you are a 68 - if you upvote all my posts I could go up to great heights too :)
@dwinblood I just heard about @joanaltres today, but yesterday I wrote a post exactly on how anyone can duplicate what she is doing. I guess I should have wrote the post about her like you did. Good job.
Interesting info and something to keep in mind I suppose. I'm fairly new and mostly comment but have resteemed a few times but only for things I've found to be really beneficial. I've seen her around and admire what she does. Keep it comin'. Always enjoy your stuff!
Some folks motivation is above earning money, her state of mind probably transcend most people motives here
Yeah, it is hard to say. She does earn pretty well if you look at her wallet history it just comes in the form of donations, tips, etc. :) It seems like it is working for her. Definitely a very different approach.
It also be noted she describes herself as a marketer. She is building up quite a big list of people she can blast information to. From a marketing perspective that's pretty genius.
We have quite a few marketing genius on the platform, I am slowly learning from these folks and trying to apply them here... I realize it's not really about quality here, just how well you market the content you share here... I would like to share base on my background but I won't get far here... probably the bigger question would this platform truly achieve its objective, we can really get absorb into our earnings and forget those around us, I realize as the value of Steem drop and we almost getting back to pre-hf19 earnings the Rat Race has gotten worse...so we see how it unfolds here, I do try to upvote and share content but I realize this approach won't get me far here, strangely enough I am slipping back unto Twitter as I crave content related to stuff I enjoy
I never did twitter. I am too wordy. I can't really do the short bursts. :)
I'm surprised she got so many followers but not surprised the account hasn't eaned much. Very curious account.
It hasn't earned much because you need to post your own posts rather than resteeming. She comments. I recommended to her that maybe she should at least do her own post once a week. I guess @stellabelle suggested the same thing. @joanaltres is a pretty cool person.
If one builds that kind of following and it is a genuine following, even if through strictly resteems and comments - once that account does start authoring posts, imagine the response they would get....
Yep, like I said. There may be some genius here. In her interview with @stellabelle she seems pretty humble, and it doesn't sound like she really planned this.
Thanks for a very interesting article.
There seem to be quite a few mysterious accounts on Steemit. I suspect that some of the accounts I'm most curious about are "early investors" or friends of the founders or founders themselves.
I hope you'll pick another one or two accounts to do some "forensic database studies" on - I'd love to read more!
I also think that we definitely need a wider variety of users here on Steemit. Most particularly, some "faithful fan readers," people who find those of us who are serious and consistent content creators and who read and up-vote our work regularly, and who will leave encouraging comments at least once in a while to help keep us going!
Great post, Thanks!
:\ - Sorry, I don't trade votes and follows. I vote for what I like, and follow what interests me, and I would encourage you to be a "Good Steemit Citizen" and do the same.
I like that @joanaltres proves there's a lot of different ways to do steemit well. Her resteems seem to be worth the vote of a much bigger account because of how many upvotes they lead to.