HF20 - What is Enough?
View this post on Hive: HF20 - What is Enough?
6 years ago in #steemit by indigoocean (67)
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I remember reading a post of yours from several days ago concerning how you went about creating a following. I went back to find post and it was from six days ago.
The Problem with the HF is What's Intended, Not the Missteps.
In this post I was truely amazed at the number of comments you had made compared to the number of posts. 30 comments to every 1 post.
The time and energy that must have taken is remarkable, but that is what it took.
Two days ago I read a post by @lordgod. The name of the post was HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT STEEM NOW. THE ONE LINE IN THIS POST WAS "SINCE THINGS ARE GETTING BACK TO NORMAL." When I read some of the comments that were left by others I was somewhat dismayed by their answers. All comments were pretty positive. They centered around how this new system would cut down on spam and most everyone felt that things were great once again. Rembering the post I had read of yours I didn't feel the same way. Here was my reply to that post.
Too early to tell. I want to believe that everything is going to be alright, but in the past week I have read many articles that say otherwise. I tend to side with the people that believe pay to play will drive many people away from the platform. One article that was very interesting was about a person that opened up an account and all she did in the beginning was comment on other people's posts. She did this for quite a while before ever making a single post. This was done in an effort to gain a following before posting. With very little capital invested she has become very successful. It doesn't sound like this will be an option anymore as commenting will be very limited unless you PAY TO PLAY.
Lordgod is a big time player and it seems to me that he is not too concerned with the people just getting started and is in this for monetary gain only. I was fortunate enough to have a couple of extra bucks to get started. If I was not, With the new rules I don't think I would ever have gotten involved with Steemit or if I did I would have become very frustrated and left the platform before long.
I agree with your take on this issue but I feel that we may be in the minority.
Have a great day!
Thank you for such a thorough and insightful comment. Yes, I fear that we are in a minority in that 1) we see that there are still problems that need to get addressed now and not just wait for them to grow to the point that they harm the platform's forward trajectory; and 2) even seeing this we can engage in rational conversation and try to persuade the "powers that be" of what we see as best helping this place. We aren't just ranting and venting. We're working constructively for what we see the place needing to thrive.
I've posted this because I am in communication with a number of witnesses and we are still dialoging on this. They have the power to press for changes, but we have to first be clear about exactly what we're asking for.
That said, so far while they've been willing to keep chatting, they are still mostly on the side of letting things settle while hoping for the best right now. Waiting to make further changes until the data shows they need to.
... oh one correction to your comment on the other post... I invested little early on, but then once I was about 5 months in I could see that I could actually support myself fully with this someday. So then I invested a lot. I would say I had modest success with a very limited investment that was made, and mostly I got enough traction to even be willing to invest anything just by commenting. But the levels I earn now only came after I really invested like I was starting a business.
I definitely couldn't have done it the way it is now @indigoocean.
I earned my first 1000 Steem Power and it took me 8 months to do so. I was posting 4 times a day and commenting like a demon.
I've been in the top 20 of Asher's Engagement league every since I joined it which was probably 8 months ago.
I've found it hard going keeping going with the reduced levels of engagement. Without a lot of engagement when I first joined I would have walked away pretty quickly I think.
Heres's a post my @nathen007 you should take a look at. Particularly read the comments and see how our beloved Asher sees things. He offers to help delegate to anyone in the engagement leagues who needs it, but you'd have to already be fairly connected around here to even find those leagues IMHO. In general, a lot of how pro-low-RCs folks seem to think the answer is basically for all of us to work harder to help new people succeed. The new person has to somehow find discord, witnesses, people willing to sell/share RCs, etc. and add learning all of that to the considerable learning curve for the tech that is already asked of them. Meanwhile, those of us who care about this place continuing to grow, we have to work harder to seek out the newbies and teach them the above. What do we get? Well really, just increasing the likelihood that this place we value doesn't fall apart and our investments go to zero. That's what we get. And only if all of that turns out to actually be enough, which it might not.
And get this! I just read in another thread where some folks were talking about how the 10x that was recently applied to get us to where we currently are is going to have to eventually be reduced/removed!
Thanks for the post link @indigoocean. Sadly, I think the idea of encouraging people voa the "introduceme" tag is too small a drop in the ocean.
I just can't see why anyone would join Steemit, as it is now, and persevere when it is such hard (perhaps impossible) work.
What HF20 has highlighted again for me is that the people with the power have no idea what it's like to be joining Steemit now and probably don't care.
I think the view that Steemit was always a test case for the block chain is the one that makes the most sense of what has happened here. The tackling of spam is not to save Steemit in particular but to make use of the blockchain in general more attractive, ready for SMTs.
Steemit itself may well fall apart but I don't equate that with my investments going to zero. I think the future of Steem is still bright long term.
So as long as I'm enjoying the interaction it's worth being here to increase my Steem Power but I don't see it as a way to keep earning Steem long term.
I could be completely wrong of course. There are a number of people who are passionate about Steemit surviving and being improved and more of them are becoming witnesses. If enough of the money grabbers move on or become dormant the new breed of witness might have some impact.
Well said. Thanks for your perspective. I hope it does turn out that their decisions don't hurt STEEM's prospects. I must confess to having joined a couple other sites this past week though. I'm definitely hedging my bets at this point and not going all in on my "crypto for content" activity on solely this place. I don't like being captive to a monopoly, but it only isn't one when I choose to participate in multiple settings.
No where near enough. Look at the new user screenshot on my last post.
Look at her comments, short and simple to people who welcomed her. Her intro post was also very short but her 31Billion had gone.
Total non-sense.
I'm watching new users carefully to see what happens, it seems that this is common, and then first time they run out of RC they dont come back.
I am sure RC use depends on size of post and comment too (same thing to RC)
Yes, smooth said he used a short to medium length comments was his sample situation. If you write long posts or long comments, you may get out just a couple per day.
I need to start paying more attention to the introduce yourself tag and see what's going on with the newbies I have no connection to.
There does seem to be significant hostility towards noobs from the powers that be.
I think certain cliques view all noobs as spammers. I actually saw one who said that noobs tended to comment because they were "beggars" hoping for an upvote!
Which is such a horrible thing to say. Most noobs would like to write a great lengthy post and get votes for that - but if you get a two cents for a long post and two cents for a short comment, you might as well go for the comment.
Also - some witnesses are heavily involved in fighting spam and I wonder if that has coloured their thinking. A bit like how people who work in vice departments of the police tend to view humanity through a very dark lens, even though the majority are decent and not involved in vice. I think a mindset has taken hold that all noobs are spammers and must be stamped out.
Yes, I think there is a distorted perception that comes from fighting spam so much. I never had a problem with spam. I might get one or two spam comments per post, and just ignored them usually, or occasionally would flag. I see newbies through the lens of who I was just 7 months ago! But a lot of witnesses and old-timers spend a lot of time fighting spam and all they see is that they didn't used to have to. So to them it is new people causing the spam.
I learned today that Ned (CEO of STINC) is developing a new company that will create a new frontend UI for STEEM that will be more user friendly. He actually says it as being for "normies." I think that's you and me, non-techies.
Whether it will be able to get past the restrictions of RCs is another matter, because it still will rely on the underlying platform rules. But at least it shows there is some commitment from the company to try to be newbie friendly.
I personally could have survived here under the current system. I started out only doing one post a day and mostly just commenting on people that commented on my posts. I eventually learned that getting out and interacting was a much better play, but my first post made about $8(everyone's a bit nicer on those introduce yourself posts), but over about the next week I would have earned enough to increase my activity.
Even if I hadn't though and I were new coming in now, the price of Steem is only .89. I don't really see $20 as an investment. I can see that as the price of entertainment. I'd pay that to see a movie, or do some other thing that's not going to earn me anything, but provide me with something I value.
I think the way this is balancing out is fair, and I think if I just started today and I wanted to do more, I'd just buy a bit of Steem. You don't need $100 worth or anything. As you mentioned $25 would do for a new user.
Now I know this is a global system, and $25 might me tough for some, but I think we can't build the system around that. Shoot for something middle of the road, and I think that's what we have.
That's really helpful. I appreciate hearing from someone who took a different path. All my friends seem to have started by commenting a lot.
I hope it does turn out that enough people will have a good enough experience off their introduce yourself post to be willing to put in that $25 within their first couple months, so that they can start to really grow and thrive on here.
Makes me think I'll start spending more time going through those intro posts to give folks some nice upvotes. At this point I mostly read the people I already follow and occasionally find new people to follow in comments and resteems of my friend's feeds. But it may be time to go back to seeking out new people to follow again.
Yea, we all should probably make that a priority. It's one of those things anyone can do and yea, like you I pretty much stay in my circles and just branch out when my current circle overlaps someone new. (Pretty sure that's how I found you, haha)
based on the structure and interface i think 30 comments per 5 days minus posts and upvotes are just a few and therefore cannot help any new member keep staying.
The new members need to do a lot of work or better, research in order to find communities and later on start their first comments and posting. To do this you need a lot of time and probably it's boring for anyone that gets here as they gonna probably wanna make a post and check a few others.
When i first came in here there were only a few people and only a few spammers so it wasn't that hard to find quality people and interact. Here is the key though.Interaction is the number one thing to survive in here except if you have a lot of money so for months i made over 15-20 comments per day and read over 20 posts. So a person that can only do 1/3 of what i did i think he/she needs to be damn lucky to stay and survive!
Your experience matches my thoughts too.
I think it is a big step for a user to join, firstly the platform itself may be confusing and then the sign up process is... let's be honest not good. Then to top it all off new users are significantly limited in their ability to interact via comments/posts.
Just my thoughts, let's see how it plays out.
Yes, one thing I think doesn't get discussed enough is the learning curve that's asked of newbies. It's discussed as if it's no more investment of time than learning Facebook, but really it's much more, and also far more complicated. So that's one investment asked for in addition that they also buy some STEEM to do well. If there is already one obstacle, may be best to avoid putting up a second.
I appreciate the explanation, although I am not sure I feel much clearer than before I started. Maybe I misunderstood, but I thought the entire point here was to improve scalability, which would require doing away with the 15SP initial delegation as it created some very finite growth limits.
A lot of things on Steemit seem deliberately vague and unanswerable.
I am not sure why they don't have a somewhat more direct "freemium" model here. Sure, you can make a free account with nothing, or you can pay (with your debit card, on the spot) $25 or $50 for a lifetime "premium" account which sets you up with whatever SP $25 or $50 will buy you, at going rates, less transaction fees. Not many people will take it, but some will... and it would be a quick and direct way to get lots of small investors in Steem. Where does the fiat go? It becomes SBD to whomever member offers up some Steem to the "premium account pool."
I think an upfront price tier model may someday get implemented, if not on the main steemit dapp put out by STINC then certainly on some of the SMTs. They would make things much more clear.
The reason the SP usage is confusing is probably because of how they talk about delegation and "granting RCs as if." It was always the case that they delegated SP and did not give SP. If you signed up at any point, you got a certain amount of delegated SP (with the amount varying over time) and that amount was reduced as you earned your own SP from participating on the platform.
So it seems they haven't changed that, but now that the RC system restricts access so much more than the old bandwidth system used to at the same SP levels, they've added an extra 3SPs worth of RC power for those accounts. They are always taking the actual delegated SP (currently 15) out of STINC's stash. But again, it's just a loan, so they don't really run out. I think there is some maximum time period a person can have the delegation if they stop participating on the platform completely. That's why some people who joined, then left it unused for many months, then started using it again will say they started with less than 15SP. Really they didn't, they just lost some of their free delegation.
They probably are giving the extra 3SP of power directly as RCs, not as additional SP delegation, because they don't have to use any of their SP stash to do that. It's just some code. So this is where we have an opening. We, the community, can pressure them to increase that 3SP and I think they are really listening to us on this. So if we clarify how much really is enough, we're on the same page, and we present that to the witnesses/STINC en masse, we may be able to get that number changed. It's just a code change and they already set their system up so that they can do those sorts of changes without needing a fork or even witness consensus.
On a much larger scale, the whole cryptosphere and blockchain space reminds me somewhat of the introduction of the Internet, itself.
There was a phase we had to go through where the task was to "de-complexify" the thing, and there was a large segment of the original "nerds" who were the early adapters who were kind of resentful of making their "toy" something "Mrs. E.B. Smith, a housewife from Lawrence, Kansas" would be comfortable using. Back then, AOL became the category killer because they threw out all the techno-speak and made usability and an easy interface the front and center of how to get millions of people involved. In due course, more "technical" competitors CompuServe and Prodigy pretty much became "ghosts."
Right now understanding how Steemit works is out of reach of 98% of web/social media users. People just want to make an account and start posting, with a minimal learning curve. And when they have questions, there needs to be simple and easy "tell me like I'm an 8-year old" answers.
How much is "enough?" My non-profit makes 1-2 tweets a day, maybe one post on FB and the rest is responses. Sometimes 5, sometimes 20 a day. If someone comes here with the objective that they want Steemit to become their primary income stream... then they either have to be really patient, OR they have to "pay to play." I'm OK with that. That's how most "Freemium" models work. If you want all the bells and whistles up front, you have to PAY. If you're willing to earn your chops slowly, that's an option too... but you have to do the work.
It's the combination of your first and second point that are the problem for Steemit. When people decide to "pay to play" there's a certain level of service they expect with that. Meanwhile, STINC practically has everyone back at DOS.
There is a staggering learning curve to succeed on here even if you do buy STEEM, unless all you do is upvote yourself. And if you do that, expect to get downvoted and ridiculed by the longterm big money players, who believe in the "purity" of voting mostly for others.
Of course, they do it in a great big circle jerk between other big accounts like theirs, but they still stand in judgment and even penalize the self-voter who simply made a big investment and doesn't know how else to profit from it.
Thanks for getting that clarificataion from the witnessess whcih makes it clearer for me. I've been ssporadic for a few days so I was a little confused as to what it would mean for new users.
No way could I have survived off that amount of comments. They tell you from the start that you should network if you want to succeed, now the message is teh same except you dont have the ability to network in the way it takes to be noticed. I do think they need to increase the support for little ones. However, one post a day is enough really - if you are posting more than that you probably are spamming or need to spend more time creating a quality post worth reading. There's pressure to produce every day which is kinda less valuable than the conversations and interactions.
One thing I'm a bit unsure about is the fact we're all going to have to jump up and support plankton by delegating and doing things to help new users get a leg up, which isn't entirely fair. Communities certainly need to help each other out and I'm absolutely up for helping the new users, but isnt' this what Stinc should be doing? It's kinda like throwing the kids into the jungle and saying 'fend for yourselves, and oh, dont forget to give all your food to the babies as they'll die too, which means your future will be fucked as well'. Excuse my french.
I'm kinda caught between "i'm' sure it's for the best, there's good things about this new version' and 'what they hell are they really, and it's all broke'. I dont know enough to really get how it's all going to play out.
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I think you summed that up quite well! Yep, they are putting it on us to make this a success now. They feel they've done their duty to fight the spammers and now we have to make sure the newbie can get through that filter by finding them one by one and pulling them through. Great plan!
I'm trying to be positive about it, because I am grateful for so much they do and have done, but come on. How did this become our job?
Thanks for clearing up the answers to those questions and for sharing your thoughts about it.
The first part especially was a really good clear explanation of everything!
You're quite welcome. It's good to be able to focus the conversation based on clear info.