More on Steemit Inequality - Who is Your Audience?
I keep thinking about this post from @quantalysus:
And I got to thinking about the rewards pool. The steem-o-sphere is abuzz with the flame war between @berniesanders and @haejin along with @ned's comments about maybe changing the voting system. And it all comes down to the same thing: the promise of steemit is that you can earn while you do your regular blogging or social media.
But earn what, exactly? I don't mean SBD vs. SP, I mean earn what in comparison to the rest of your life?
The distribution of SP in the survey conducted by @quantalysus reveals the game.
Let's look at a little math.
It takes 4300 SP to create a post reward of 1 STU, which as of this moment consists of 0.5 SBD and 0.15 SP, worth about 1.88 USD.
Of all 961,875 users in the blockchain survey, 6006 of them had SP greater than 1,000. So 0.62% of users have the potential ability to upvote your post and give you 1 STU. And a lot of those are bots, witnesses, or other special accounts that don't do much voting.
OK, you might make a long-tail argument that while individually most users don't have much SP but in aggregate your post could go viral and make some nice money. Let's look at that. The bulk of the users, 85.80% of them, have between 10 and 100 SP. Let's be generous and say they are all at 100 SP. That makes for a combined SP of 82,565,800. Not too shabby.
That means that all these users combined have the potential to upvote a post with 19,201 STUs or 36,098 USD.
That looks OK until you remember that only 6% of users actually log in every day. And the chances of a post getting more than 1000 upvotes is pretty much zero, so you can forget about hundreds of thousands of upvotes.
So if that's the case, who are you writing for?
If you just want to do your usual social media bit and maybe make enough to buy a cup of coffee, then you're fine doing whatever you're doing.
But if you actually want to make some decent cash, support the world of crypto, and de-fiat yourself, then you're left with the bots unless you have a whale of a friend. It's no wonder they have come to dominate the high-ranking posts.
So where does that leave us?
If we want "quality content" then the bot owners would have to be the ones to enforce it. I know MinnowBooster tries to do this, but I don't know much about other upvoting bots' terms and conditions. And then they have to be sold on the argument that the long term health of the blockchain is worth giving up some short term profits.
The bots aren't going away. So how do we get them to implement higher standards? What should those standards be?
Let's hear your thoughts.
My thoughts exactly.I wish I'd written what you have. I like the analogy with a country because I think similar.
My thoughts were a country with a corrupt system,but perhaps corrupt is too strong a word at this early stage of Steemit's life.
I thought the purpose of the platform was as a superior Facebook that rewarded contributors for providing content.
It appears to me that the original reason for existence is being swamped by the obsession with Bots and voting strategies.
Your statistic that only 6% of Steemians login every day is a shock too.Perhaps a warning shot across the bows.
Interest soon wanes if the content is dominated by inward looking navel gazing.
That is how it appears to me
I've quickly come to the realization, that you've got to pay to play if you want to earn any real money with Steemit.
You got it
To listen to the audio version of this article click on the play image.
Brought to you by @tts. If you find it useful please consider upvote this reply.
I appreciate that whoever designed this bot is trying to provide a service, but it's a perfect case of what I'm saying.
The @tts account has practically nothing in its wallet. It's hard to believe the AWS bills aren't more than the earnings.