RE: There's more in life to talk about on Steemit than Steemit
I’m glad to see you’ve managed to do all right by doing things your way and I hope it’s inspirational to others.
I think you’re absolutely right about people mainly chasing the stories they think will be popular. I’ve experimented with it myself to see if I could increase my SP that way, but it’s a bad feeling. The “Popular” tab is a good idea, but most of those are whale-voted posts, and, minnows’ upvotes count for so little anyway that it’s not really possible to make a significant amount of money even with lots of love from minnows. What I hope is that if enough of us minnows bond together, a few will get noticed by whales and then get more voting power and be able to start pulling the others up with them.
I also think it's a bad thing that posts can't earn money after four weeks, because it will take a lot longer than that for communities to come together who appreciate each other's work and have gathered enough SP to make a difference.
I’ve tried to take creative approaches to opinion pieces, and to highlight interesting findings like the effects of green tea on the brain, the endless battle over the story of Captain Cook, and stories about how the future could look. I’ve gotten very little traction. Here are a couple of examples.
https://steemit.com/philosophy/@goose/descartes-mistake
https://steemit.com/philosophy/@goose/suicide-food
You're absolutely right that this is a "whale problem": unless you have a whale vote for your post or it's INSANELY popular, you'll get almost nothing. A whale vote = $200+ whereas most minnows it's worth less than a penny. If you get enough votes, there is a quadratic algorithm in play that will start amplifying them. My STRONG opinion is that they need to make this less extreme and reward the top ones less and the medium ones more.
Still, if you want a lot of votes you need something that appeals to the masses. Right now the masses are geeky.