Steemit's curation blind-spots: Link shares, non-original posts, short-form posts. You know, the kind of stuff people share on social networks.
Sorry for the over-long title. But, yes, that's about it. Everything about this post is my personal observation - but the goal is to start a discussion. As a result, most of this discussion will be anecdotal rather than using actual numbers - there's no control anyway.
Long form blogging is a dying art practiced by fewer and fewer people. Wordpress is committed to focus on mobile and social, while Medium's revenue model has failed. Meanwhile, pretty much every successful social network on the planet - be it Facebook, Twitter, Sina Weibo or VK - is thriving on short-form micro-blogging content. Indeed, Reddit's "Hot" page is dominated by people sharing links, memes and short thoughts. This is what makes social platforms massive, for the very obvious reasons.
Obviously, Steemit is different. There's money involved. That has led the platform to focus far too heavily on original content of a certain quality. Curators and curation guilds today are doing a much better job in discovering and retaining new authors making original content than in July. (Obviously, user growth is not in curators' hand - retention is) However, for every original creator, there are a dozen non-original users who are being left behind. With no rewards or comments, these users either eventually leave the platform, or worse still are forced to begrudgingly make original content which simply doesn't end up well.
This is, of course, not a new problem. Steemians are well aware of this issue, and there have even been projects to remedy this in the past, but as a community we keep resorting to our obsession with original content.
We need to pay more attention to people sharing interesting content, sharing one-liners, memes, etc. This is the kind of stuff that will not only engage current users on Steemit but attract the masses to Steemit. This is a free market - not an library or a museum - we need to value posts that engage users and brings in more. Posts should be valued by the value they bring to the Steem network, and not their value in itself.
At the same time, let's continue valuing original content creators. I'm not worried about this as the community is doing a fine job curating original content. Nowadays, it is very rare to see a good content creator go unnoticed for long.
Needless to say, we shouldn't be voting on random shitposts or plagiarism. The risk is we'll see more of that, but there are community initiatives to combat abuse.
It doesn't need to be so extreme. Could the whales not spare some votes for non-original content? Here's my question to the Steem community - How can we fix this rather fundamental problem with Steemit?
My first thought would be to re-orient the Trending page purely by activity with much less of an emphasis on stake-weighting. Re-do the algorithm so posts with lots of comments and votes are at the top despite the SBD generated. There's a Reputation system. Flawed though it is, the chance of Rep 60+ accounts Sybil attacking are well worth the risk. Secondly, whales and curation guilds should be encouraged to vote on these posts. Not to mention, Reddit constantly deals with bots and sybil attacks, and yet never fails to expose popular content. Because they are usually ignored, there's greater curation rewards potential as well. There's much more to discuss - forming communities, comment curation etc.
The curation landscape has been changed completely once before - I believe as a community we could do it again.
You said it 😜
And the free-market (if you can call it that) is deciding to vote on posts with more substance. I guess if long form blogging is actually dying then it will be reflected here, when the time comes. I guess this post is urging for that, but perhaps steemit is more like a magazine or whatever at the moment.
I've had this discussion with several people now at this stage and the conflict here is whether it's an authors platform or not. You are arguing for it not being an authors platform. You're in good company as several influential witnesses and whales agree with you, for the same reasons, in the name of user retention. For them it's more a readers platform, and readers should be incentivised to stay.
My own interests are in reading long form articles about interesting topics. I'm really not interested in posts which are just reposting a video or other article link. My feeling is if you don't bother to write about it, even a paragraph or two, then I'm not interested.
In any case, I see most of what you're talking about as voluntary action by the whales and guilds, which I do support. I'm on the fence about the trending page adjustment.
As a counterpoint, I do think you have a point about forming communities, they will probably easilier form around shorter, quicker posts. With the removal of the posting limit in HF17 we might see more shorter posts.
Also, on memes, check this out! https://steemit.com/votu/@sirlunchthehost/meme-art-gallary-enjoy-mofo-s
Personally, I agree with you on most counts. Like you, I prefer reading long form articles, science news or opinionated rants (op-eds). I like video shares, but only up to the point the video is substantial. Of course, content of this type is extremely niche. We can look at the broader picture and realise that the vast majority of the internet population prefers instant gratification and witty engagement over what you or I want. We are the dinosaurs.
Keeping that in mind, the next question would be - is Steemit destined to be a niche platform that only deals in original content? Or could it evolve to be more like Reddit - the site it's most obviously modeled after. I'm making a case that if Steemit were to target the masses like Reddit, this change in voting behaviour needs to happen.
Whether that's the right choice, I don't know. There's a good argument to be made that Steemit goes back to original content organically for a reason (as you imply). The opposing argument, of course, is that reason is not working for the network as a whole and the community needs to try something different. The truth is in the middle, as always, and we have yet to see any marketing or outreach efforts at all to come to any conclusion about this platform whatsoever.
Of course, but hopefully discussions like this will catalyse the process of Steemit finding its identity.
Maybe it is destined to be niche. As a method to bootstrap STEEM the coin, that won't really help it long term so whales will probably recognize that at some stage if they haven't already.
That said if "good quality" is going to be niche, it could be, because a culture has certainly developed of that as desirable.
One of the biggest things that could shake the platform up is the inclusion of more third party systems and businesses, I think this might really take off and changes things, though I think it'll be a bump ride 😉 I'm not that into steemsports for example, but people really love it and it does well. I think we'll see more of that.
It's hard to not see this in the hands of the whales to be honest, or on minnows acting similarly. Again this is something I'm not really sure about, but that in itself might be the core problem. I wasn't really sure if you were alluding to it in your article but you might have been.
Small point is that though I think discussions about the platform on the platform are really interesting to me, I think they alienate noobs, especially when they trend on the front page. Like, are they all just really talking about themselves? 😅 So maybe we need to get on with it a bit more and let the system work its own way.
Yes, posts about Steemit are no good for the Trending page. When I first joined here, that's all there was. Thankfully, we have a pretty good community of content now. No, it's not the best material you'll find on the internet, but it's still valuable.
Given everything I have seen, it seems to me that Steemit, Inc. definitely don't think of Steem has a niche blogging platform. It does seem like a mass market attempt.
Interesting to note that my root comment on your post is valued high now (it's before payout) than my last blog post which was 4k words and took me days to research!
It looks like the platform is already as you describe you want it 😅 😭 Lol, or maybe my post wasn't that good, that's way of Steem.
Imagine if a twitter like website using steem were to launch tomorrow and was an instant success, millions of people using it,etc...
Now what is steemit going to do with all these meme and one liner coming from that site?
My point is that you can't really say this site is going to be like this, this one is going to be for this,etc.. because they will all use the underlying steem blockchain. These sites are going to be what the users want them to be, users will votes what they want on the site.
Thank you for posting @liberosist.
Appreciate you bringing your thoughts to the table.
If one may add to the dialogue....one could view Steemit as ones customized 'news-paper'.....personalizing ones feed for ones preferences...and much like a 'newspaper' it would stream current events, a sports section, culture, economics (cryptonews), fashion, comics and perhaps a word, principle, quote of the day...etc.
Steemit is a prototype of what will be not a copy of what is.
Thank you for the opportunity to think on these things.
What you have described sounds like Reddit to me. Steemit will become a bit more like it with the Communities feature.
Thank you for your reply @liberosist.
Yes.... you are right...bleujay should have added in the context of blockchain....Steemit is a prototype and should lead the way as Bitcoin is leading the way being the first cryptocurrency on the blockchain.
Is it possible that once blockchain is the norm...anything not on blockchain will fade out? It seems so very important for blockchain to be a part of the equation going forward.
Art in all forms is relative and subjective! Human beings are unique creatures. We perceive things differently. I continue my path spontaneously voting for posts I like and writing what I feel. If Steemit people enjoy it, I am happy as I am if they don't give me enough attention. I don't think that much what the feedback will be. Not sure what is that valuable for others. I realized that some of the most interesting posts don't get any feedback.
We need to increase traffic to our platform and make blogging easier for mainstream users. I still have difficulties with formatting my posts, especially adding images. One of the reasons why I still spend more time on facebook and other platforms.
I think that there is space for different types of content from memes to long form. There are markets for all of those of both producers and consumers.
Part of the problem is that the some of the more influential members lack respect for the content producers from what I've seen. Without the content producers, there is no consumers.
When I'm curating I do look at a variety of posts but find that those who are doing the more short form need to actually produce posts which attract attention and sharing. Just like the people doing long form posts.
A long form post doesn't get my attention because it is long form. It gets it because the writer is able to get and hold my attention down through the post. If my attention isn't there, neither is a share.
Putting a single picture or a video in a post and no commentary of why it should be of interest doesn't motivate me to share. I've shared comics I really enjoyed and ignored others.
Want to share a newslink or an article, tell me why you think it is of interest enough to motivate me to click on the link. If I'm not motivated to click that link or look at the video, I'm not sharing. That is not much different from what I do on FB or Twitter.
The Steemit Ramble is the result of what gets my attention and willingness to share.
Maybe to offset the lack of respect for different types of postings that the stronger Steem Power holders may have, the trending page could maybe reflect the number of votes as a standard for trending where each vote carries equal weight. OH, then we have to overcome the bot bias, so that creates a new set or problems.
"Needless to say, we shouldn't be voting on random shitposts"
I have to disagree with you here
OK - so you're saying we should vote on random shitposts too? Please elaborate.
yes
Random shitposts are the base of the internet....... A website will never become popular unless the memers claim it
I know people who will spend 1k+ just to upvote memes
money is no object when memes are involved
I can see where you're coming from. I don't disagree - a well made meme has great value on the internet. But then a well made meme is not what I'd consider "shitpost".
I wanted to take a more middle-ground approach in my rant above though :)
@liberosist word
I almost thought - memes are shitposts? some of them are really witty!
laughter is the best medicine that's value too
so what is shit post in general then if I may ask ?
The community will probably divide into groups. Many will be here only for the memes or the original content. We need the extreme ends of both to be rewarded equally.
Ironic Unironic Ironic shitposts are the best memes now and metameming is on its way in again
That's fine - Reddit is mostly shares, but a lot of subreddits also focus on original content. Once Steemit's Communities feature comes, this will be easier.
https://steemit.com/meme/@comedy-central/competition-and-training-for-the-dankest-of-memes-irony
Porn sells more than memes... Who will start posting?
I agree with a lot of this. However, would it be "easier" to instead create another social media platform on the steem blockchain that is geared towards this short-form and resteemed type content? Everything about Steemit.com currently is set up to support long form blogging... I feel like the entire site needs to be overhauled if we are to get it to really appeal to the masses like you are suggesting. Since that is the case, might the better option be to build another site?
I'd love to see a frontend geared towards short-form content too. I remember Ned brought up the idea of a separate reward pool for such content a few months back.
That said, there's no reason why a couple of simple tweaks can't make Steemit better suited towards short form content. Anything Reddit can do, so can Steemit.
Good point. I was just thinking that we could really build a front end that was twitter esq, just with money involved. We keep the blogging site (just turn it into the best damn blogging site on the planet), and then we have this twitter esq site as well that has millions of people all resteeming and posting links and short comments... the name "steemit" itself actually sounds like the perfect name for a site like that. "Check out that breaking news story out of Russia, go ahead and steem-it!" :)
Great insights. I think the tags are inadequate to delineate content between one category and another. The comment rewards will be useful in stimulating communities, but I'm not sure how effective it will be overall to really get other categories of content going. We either need to limit the # of tags people can use or we need the Communities/sub-Reddits style of content delineation. Until then, we're all stuck with the same feed and people have different ideas about what kinds of content are useful to reward there.
Downvoting tag abuse is something that hasn't been tried enough. When we tried creating a TIL section, people started sticking TIL into their tag list on posts that were completely outside of the short-form TIL style (it didn't help that the real TIL posts weren't really that either)
If it meant getting downvotes to stick TIL as your 3rd or 4th tag, people might stop, and the TIL tag would become useful as a section to browse. Then again this might not work, but we haven't tried either.
The only one I flag for is NFSW 😬 Because I might be at work
I actually agree with you about policing the tags. I don't like this, but I think it may be the only way to really get communities going within the confines of the system we'll have for these next few months.
My exact sentiments. Couldn't have put it better myself.
People naturally gravitate towards posts that are either informative or entertaining. I appreciate the time and effort content creators put in to publish original stories, its something I admittedly suck at and my respect to those who do publish original content.
I've said this before too but if the masses do not have a special preference for viewing original material over material that's engaging and fresh then the platform will fail because it has been artificially promoting original content over content that the masses rather see.
Going against the free market of ideas because you have the power to, is probably the surest way to prevent growth of this platform.
Most of what I post is primarily original content but I occasionally repost creative commons articles that I think warrant spreading. Sometimes with further comment, sometimes without. I don't find the one or more spam posts from bots letting me know that the content is found elsewhere (yeah, I know I already provided the link) or that it may be frowned upon by the community (apparently a self selected group calling themselves "the community"?) or that it may be plagiarism (bullshit) to be very helpful. If people don't like it then of course they don't have to pay any attention to it but I find the bots to be more condescending and vaguely threatening than helpful. The bots apparently have no way of knowing if content is reposted from my own blog elsewhere (which I do occasionally also but I've learned to post it here first), taken from a creative commons source or other freely distributable source or plagiarized.
If long form blog posts are what is perceived to be desired than we will soon have some bots telling us how our posts are too short.
Personally, I think stimulating a conversation is much more important than the length of the post. This can be done with a single sentence or a picture. If this is truly going to be a replacement for things like facebook then there is going to be a lot more variety than "long form" blog posts here. The readers can decide what they find valuable with their votes but people post without expecting financial compensation all the time.