The Steemit Community And Its Weird Traits – 3 Ideas

I’m a fairly new user on Steemit. I have not been there when it all began, I did not witness all the changes myself. You might say I’m not experienced enough to talk about this topic, or bring forward ideas to change or improve the platform. However, I spent quite some time selling stuff to people. I’ve sold inexpensive and expensive things. I’ve sold tangible and intangible products. I know what it means to present to someone a product, that is, by any objective measurement, better than the other crap he might consider buying. I’ve failed at first and I’ve succeeded at last. I have to admit, Steemit is quite addictive, but you can’t help but shake this feeling of, that something is not quite right. I see some things holding us back from mayor adoption. I want to toss out some thoughts, see where it brings us. Thanks to @donkeypong for this awesome post that helps you understand how Steemit works and why it’s such a beautiful ecosystem. You helped me out a lot with your post, yet, you won’t earn shit for it (I’ll get to that later)

1. Issue: Bots

I see bots as a mayor problem. Let’s make an analogy to understand what’s happening. Think about a small beautiful village somewhere, a village with a strong community. There’s a lot of businesses, lots of people are making money, everybody serves a purpose. Some people are robots though. Not the Arnold killer type, more like “I, Robot”. They help people, perform actions for them, they are generally increasing the output of humans by aiding where needed. Sometimes though, they get abused. Rich robot owners buy their own products with the robots, creating hype, which attracts more customers, even though the products by others might be better. The owners try to outbid each other further and further, till one day, the system collapses because everyone loses trust in the system.

Let me underline my point: When we allow anyone other than a human being to decide which content is the best, we allow people with big pockets to dominate the market. You might have to outbid someone with shitty content to even appear on peoples’ screens (there are more reasons for that, but we’ll get to that later). Let me be clear about one thing: I used bots to upvote my content, and I will do so on this one. I have to, if everyone else does. The “You don’t have to do it because someone else does it” social pressure thing doesn’t work here. MONEY IS INVOLVED. I will upvote my own content if I’m confident in it. People notice it all of a sudden, they upvote it, I made money. Someone who might not have the means will remain insignificant in this system. If no one can use bots to upvote him or herself, I am not forced to do so either. I would be happy to see voting bots gone. You can’t rely on Karma or people’s consciousness to regulate this, when it’s about (a lot of) money. Never forget that. Also: If we stop using upvoting bots, we’ll actually have to start building relationships to receive attention. That’s called a community 🙂

2. Issue: Visual presentation/ Design/ Usability

Not talking about the colors, not talking about the style in general. I am talking about marketing. When you sell a product, the way you present it is key. Our product is content. There’s a lot of it, but there's also a shit-ton of noise. Lets take an online shop as an example. I am selling chandeliers and lamps in my online shop. I am giving customers big buttons to click on and different ways to browse through. There’s more than 1000 products, if people had to scroll though endless lists with tiny pictures, I wouldn’t sell shit. They would give up the search quickly. Instead, I put it in various categories or collections. I enable my customers to set filters, which enables you to blind out all the noise. You need giant pictures, and you should make use of the full screen. Look how Instagram arranges its “posts”, we could easily fit more Steemit posts on one page too. We could categorize, displaying the popularity of the category right next to it. We could filter out languages that we do not understand, or filter exactly those in if we want to learn the language. We could set up a filter that displays only posts with a certain amount of payout pending, if we want to help out some smaller, or bigger fish. Theres a million different filters that could be easily implemented.

3. Issue: No money for old posts

There is a lot of gems hidden in this blockchain, but some will never get the payout they deserve. I understand, the blockchain goes on and on and on. But if we are constantly “forced” to create new content, the general quality might suffer, whereas if you were to get indefinite payout for great content, you’ll probably put way more effort into it. After all, if great content attracts more users, you should get paid for it, no matter when it happens, right? The person who got 0,02$ payout for the next Harry Potter - because he had no clue how the hell those bots worked – will not profit from it after one week. Yet, the value of Steem will go up if someone found his content, signed up, and bought Steem. Isn’t blockchain all about justice? If we found a way to make people profit from old posts, it could really change the quality of content.

Now, I might be totally wrong about all this. Feel free to correct me, write down your thoughts. Again, I’m new, and I might be naive, or I’m overlooking some important points. But you know and I know we gotta improve a few things here. I’m off upvoting the shit out of this post to outdo this post, not that I have anything against this guy. I actually have no idea what’s written there, and neither does my audience, but we are competing for the same space, even though that makes no sense. Right?

Shoutout to @berniesanders, I’d love to hear your take on this.

Yours sincerely,

Some of my other posts below. Thanks for reading!

How To Explain Bitcoin To A Child
How To Explain Bitcoin To Your Parents/Girlfriend/Friend
Useful Links For Bitcoin, Virtual Currencies, Finances and Trading
How To Apply For A Job - Body Language And First Impressions
Building A Career - How To Deal With People + Do's and Don'ts
Sales Sales Sales - Things I Learned At Tesla And Enterprise
Colorchallenge Friday Sky-Blue : The Sky Over Marina/Croatia
Colorchallenge - Iceland - Photography - Landscapes - Waterfalls - Polar Lights
Who Am I ???