Taking a break from resteeming

joshpeterson (58)in #steemit • 7 years ago (edited)

Word Count: 702 | Est. Reading Time: 2:33 min | Readability Rating: A

Hey everyone,

After getting to know the platform a bit better, I've decided that I am going to take a break from resteeming people's posts. I was actually going to write this post last night, but decided to spend some time in Steemit.chat, instead. Time well spent, I might add. The Steemit community is amazing.

Thought process

Writing my post, "Lessons from 37 days on Steemit," got me to reflect on the kind of content that I want to contribute to the community going forward. And reviewing my own analytics, thanks to recently downloading @armandocat's excellent browser extension, confirms what I've started to suspect about my own patterns - that I don't post as consistently as I'd like, and the majority of my content on my blog are resteems.

Given my post yesterday inquiring about running multiple accounts, I have to admit that I was likely getting a bit ahead of myself. @lexiconical's post today criticising how people use the resteem function confirmed my own self-criticism, and I commented as such.

Image Credit: Pexels/Startup Stock Photos | License: CCO

Why Resteem at all?

My initial thinking behind resteeming had to do with several things:

1. On Twitter, for example, I use retweets both as a way to share information with followers and to bookmark a tweet. They also have a "like" function that acts as a similar bookmarking tool, but it's a mess. Given the habits I've developed on the legacy social networks, resteeming as both an information sharing and bookmarking technique made sense.

2. In the first several days of being on Steemit, I was exploring ways to better contribute to the community. I think it was actually a post by Dan Larimer that first convinced me to invest more energy into resteems. Keeping an eye on the "new" feed to promote interesting content can work well if you're focusing on the curation game, which @calamus056 excellently describes in their post from a few months ago. @thecryptofiend describes in their own post on the importance of good curation. If you've ever perused through the "new" feed, there's a lot to sift through.

Resteeming critques

One of my biggest problems with resteems, however, is that it clutters your own blog. @alexpmorris' "Hide Resteems" script and @itchykitten's Extreemit Chrome plugin are helpful for fellow Steemians (shout out to @alexpmorris for blogging about these tools), but they don't help the non-Steemian browsing through content.

ChainBB (h/t @lexiconical) and Busy (h/t @taskmanager) provide alternative ways to view Steemit content, but again, explaining to non-users that they can use other sites to view the content can be pretty confusing and counterproductive to attracting new users to the platform.

My other issue with resteems is the lack of an ability to unresteem, which I've explained ad nauseum, concluding with this post.

Going forward

So going forward, if I want to bookmark a post, I'll just comment on it, or I'll share it externally to one of my other social media profiles. And if I want to share the content with my own Steemit followers, I will do so in an original post commenting on/reacting to the material that interested me. That's blogging 101 anyway.

Much of my original content involves me writing about testing out the platform. I'm looking for decentralized blockchain-based solutions for the future of media. Thankfully, as I continue down the blockchain rabbit hole, I am finding more and more companies are working on this problem, meaning I have plenty of content to blog about.

Mahalo,

Josh

P.S. h/t to @mindover for this post on finding high quality legal images to use in our pieces. Is there a Steemit equivalent to this? There are a lot of great photographers on here, and it'd be nice to feature their work in our posts.