How I figured out, why SteemSports is better than I thought, but still, why it will continue to harm Steemit if few things won't be changed
Since the beginning of SteemSports I didn't like this idea. Design of whole game is very cleaver, but imagination just told me, that this might be a beginning of new, very dangerous trend.
SteemSport is voluntary game on open blockchain - Steem
If you have SteemPower, you have every right to decide what you can do with your voting power. If you prefer to buy more Steem, to vote for something what in others opinion will not benefit whole platform, you can literately do that. That is your right, because this is an open platform.
Steemit is a company, which needs to follow certain rules
When Steemit was hacked, @ned needed to make one very important phone call and report what happen to proper authorities - FBI. Why is that? Because right now Steemit has a headquarter in USA, so they need to follow the rules of this country.
There are other rules which Steemit has to follow, like... they need to pay their employees, and to do so, they actually need to think about their business. As a company, they should have a clear goal and vision, what Steemit actually is, and how it will grow.
What is the vision for Steemit?
There is no possibility of creating ideal product. You cannot fulfill all needs of your customer. If you want to have successful business, you need to focus on your goal. So I am asking... what is a goal for Steemit?
Do you think Steemit suppose to have goal to become best blogging and discussion platform? Or maybe you think, that Steemit suppose to best generic browser of any content saved in Steem blockchain? The problem with this question is... that there is not god or bad answer. But this is the a question which has to be answered, and the answer has to be acknowledged by community, if we want to turn STEEM into world-wide success.
Steemit as a generic browser of any content saved in Steem blockchain
Probably, if answer would like this... then there is a planty space for anything (what is legal) on Steemit. Then Steemit can be like blockchain.info for bitcoin network, very helpful tool which can show you everything without hiding anything.
If that would happen, bloggers like me probably would like to find place, which would be focused on delivering best user experience for bloggers and readers. Maybe another project build on top of STEEM, like Busy, or maybe yet another service which do not exist yet.
Steemit as best blogging and discussion platform
But if answer would be, that Steemit suppose to the best platform for blogging and discussion, then we should focus only on that.
As @donkeypong wrote in this article, we should introduce content-type, and in my opinion, then we should move certain things which are not directly related with blogging, to different section or different website, like SteemSports.com or maybe more generic one - steemgames.com.
This doesn't mean, that we do not want to support different platforms like steemsports suggested:
This just mean, that the only reasonable way to support other platform is to not undermine own platform in the first place!
Clear VISION, metrics and data
Google has many services. Without clear focus, after they bought YouTube, their Gmail could look like this:
Do you think that would be the smart move? To be honest, without proper data you would never know.
I really recommend you this lecture from Stanford made by people from Y-combinator, from 21m11s you can here about metrics:
IMO, out North Star, our key metric should be how much time people spent on Steemit. Do you think thanks to SteemSports on trending page, this value actually increasing or decreasing? WE SHOULD MEASURE THAT!, without that it is just guessing whether they are good or bad for platform.
Voting was invented to maximize happiness of voters
Our voting system is far from perfect
As I mentioned in video at the begging of this article (which you should watch, if you haven't), I would like to recommend you videos made by CGP Gray about different voting systems. Creating a perfect voting system is really difficult (from social and technical perspective). But right now 75% of people on steemit do not vote for SteemSports even knowing that they would be paid for that. I think most of that people are not happy with current situation.
With system like ours, where users are discouraged to flag/downvote posts, which they think are not good for platform, we will never have true consensus about what is bad for platform. In my opinion, we should think about introducing downvoting as normal way of saying "this is not good for Steemit".
"Rewards for voting" should be revisited
A lot of problems on the platform we have, because a lot of people came to conclusion, that it is better to vote for anything rather than not vote at all. They are casting their votes with different scripts and services, just to make a profit, because they know, that some people are already very popular on the platform and they for sure will gather big amount of votes.
If you found good post, then in most cases you upvote it as soon as possible without thinking whether this is profitable for you or not. You are just happy, that you found something what has GREAT VALUE for you, because you have learnt something new or maybe you have been inspired and now you have an idea which is worth much more than few cents.
Good curation do not require incentives, because people which programming passion are looking every day on #programming tags just because they love to do that. This same is happening with every other tag.
Without a need to spend money on voters, there will be resources which could be spend on rewarding comments. Every author will be very happy, that people which are giving him feedback (what is not as easy as voting) can be rewarded even more.
Problems can be born only among people which care about something
So... even if you do not agree with everything what I wrote and said, I really appreciate that you actually spent time reading/watching my thoughts. Steem and Steemit is very young, and I believe, that there is great future ahead of us.
Always PowerUping,
@noisy
If you are interested in programming, startups or maybe entrepreneurship, you might want to follow my account. I do not post very often, but when I do... usually they say result is not bad :P
By many different accounts, including several Steemit users, Medium provides a much better user experience for bloggers and readers. It is designed to do that, and it does so (I can only say this "apparently", since I am a medium user only to the minimal extent that I occasionally follow links and read posts there).
Steem/it is fundamentally a decentralized blockchain project/product/platform which means it will always be different from a centralized dedicated blogging platform. That has both advantages and disadvantages. While it does include an element of blogging, it will likely never be as good a blogging platform from the perspective of user experience as something like Medium that is focused entirely on doing that.
Different products and technologies have to find their successful niches where their own distinctive advantages deliver the most value to users, and their distinctive disadvantages create the least problems. This is not always an easy or direct path (nor is it guaranteed there is any such niche at all).
I do believe that additional features could be added to steemit.com to allow users more control over how they view and interact with the blockchain, which parts they may see or not see, etc. I don't know where the developers of steemit.com plan to take things, nor how nor when).
yeah.. of course I can go and I can use Medium, but as a STEEM holder I would prefer to use any service build on top of steem.
Is it? Steemit cannot exist as decentralized platform. Steemit belongs to a company, which has own database (with users emails/links to facebook accounts/phone numbers/etc).
Every businessman know that we should focus on advantages which this gives us, and try to avoid limitation.
I do not see any reason why Steemit could not be better than Medium
I believe, that as times goes, technology will allow to do even more in decentralize way. Maybe at some point even DNSes will be totally decentralized. But this not mean, that we have to wait for that moment.
And this is a problem. We as a shareholders of Steem, we should be aware what is a vision for Steemit, which is right now biggest application build on top of Steem blockchain.
Just to butt in here, pessimistic as it may sound, I think the vision for Steemit (the centralized service, not the blockchain - I believe the distinction is clear to you all) is advertising. From the FAQ section "How does Steemit, Inc. earn money?":
Also read the Privacy Policy in detail if you haven't already. It's pretty standard stuff, but in the context of this platform that is disappointing.
in my opinion, after last hardfork, pressure for adding to STEEM additional source of revenue is not so strong anymore. If steemit would go into direction of substeems, then maybe promoting post would be even more profitable.
You made a point what I am thinking. The oritinal design for "gamable curation for better contents" became "profitable curation with lazy and collusive upvotes".
IMO, curation should not give financial profits. Without this, people (not bots!) still can gain psychological satisfactions, which will actually lead us to better society.
I guess initial idea for rewards for voting was introduced because of two reasons:
But Steem is different than Bitshares and IMO, it will never have problems like bitshares have... mostly because decision that those money for post will be spent, that decision was already made. You can only influence, how those funds will be distributed.
In Bitshares everyone wonder whether it is good idea to spent money in the first place.
Good points.
All interesting proposals. Thank you for writing this. The TIME SPENT and the ATTENTION PAID, is the KEY indeed! This is our currency in life, the real basic economy of human living, before there was even money. Our time, and what we pay attention to, is at the base of our whole lives.
What's more accurate measure of someone's valuation is there than the amount of time and attention they are willing invest in content. If you're willing to spend your valuable, previous, limited time on something for longer a duration than something else, it means you must value it more.
I upvoted your post because I understand your concern but honestly I like @steemsports and would like it if they posted 10 times / day.
As I said, I am not saying, that there is no place for SteemSport. It always depend on answer... what steemit really suppose to be: blogging and discussion platform or generic browser of steem blockchain?
Could you explain what is in your opinion the best thing in steemsports?
What a great post, Noisy! I'm deeper getting into it right now.
Thanks for sharing :)
Upvoted & Followed.
Really great post and very important questions. It is clear that steemsports seems to be a different use than blogging. @steemsports post original content in one view, by their commentaries, but they are more brazenly a money making venture for the sake of it than bloggers are presumed to be. Maybe this exposes a contradiction in the blogger's image.
I think this is a great moment of challenge for the platform and I welcome the serious and balanced way you've thought about it. Many seem to view steemsports as a use which is against the "ethos" of the platform, if one can be said to coherently exist. For example, the founding document of Steemit, the white paper, lists the following [from pg 5]:
Because steamsports they are quite popular, it's hard to argue with that on a platform on which the power of voting is a sacred pillar. But I wonder if it's a snowball effect of popularity as opposed to genuine interest in the games. The real question is, is there a difference?
Most of Steemit users came from crypto-community, which has much higher tolerance for risk. Without being not afraid of risk it is really hard to stick with bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. This is obvious that among such group of people any kind of betting is more popular than among group of average Joes.
Because of auto-upvotes there is big problem with "snowball effect", because people can leave the platform, but their votes will go for those betting games for ever. Because of that it is very difficult to measure what is real current interest of whole community. And because of auto-upvotes we will have really big problem with promoting new good authors on the platform... because they will not have chance to be more popular that someone who is auto-upvoted by people which are no longer on the platform.
I guess we should should down vote the posts of bots which do that in that case, as @dantheman seems to suggest here. In particular
I'll get my pitchfork! But really, it does seem in the hands of us all individually do this ad hoc, if we think the popularity by auto-upvote bot is a problem. I do, as an aspiring "new good author" 😁
As soon as the market realizes that auto-voting for the top grossing authors fails out BIG TIME in profits to voting on the "less competitive", "niche" type content creators, whom churn out posts that get between $4 and $10 (vs. the $40-$100 that most of the auto-votes seemed to be geared towards), the distribution of Steem will take a healthy turn and so will the profits for the "little guy".
It's kind of funny, and I only just figured out the "real game" to voting just recently (I scored fifth highest curation ranking, out of thousands of active voting accounts, over the last week @ steemwhales.com) - the real way to make money curating is to do about the opposite of what most other voters are doing -
STAY AWAY FROM THE HIGHLY COMPETITIVE CONTENT!!!
Seriously, I can't emphasize this enough. I went from making 3 ~ 6 SP per week by curating mostly "popular" authors to 60 ~90 by going "down a tier", or two, by focusing my votes on more "niche" type authors.
It makes sense, if you think about it. It's like the business of trying to blog on keywords that achieve a good search engine rank (SEO, or "search engine optimization"). Most of the "easy money" that's made in that avenue is done so by focusing on the "niche markets" - the less competitive keywords. Only the people who're willing to work overtime on getting an edge over their competitors can make it within the war-zone of high competition keywords.
Curation here on Steemit is no different, only most of the market hasn't figured that out yet. For once, I'm ahead of the curve!
Oh, and can you keep this little conversation a secret between you and me? ;)
Great post man. I only now just inished reading it from when you linked me earlier and I cannot disagree really. You're onto something here.
Thank you for the support and also showing me I'm not alone in my train of thought in regards to these guys.
Oh Puhlease! peeps like steemsports and it's innocent fun. Some people want to rub all the gilt off the gingerbread. If you're worried about a business stop the porn LOL!!
I already unapproved witnesses, which are supporting porn. Personally I can understand, that some people want to watch that stuff, but I think this is not the best business idea, that this kind of content should be supported by wintesses.
With porn situation is slightly different. Porn by default is hidden, unless you change your settings about #nsfw tag. So, new users are not directly affected by that.
Yup, I knew I liked you. I have not once voted on a post because I thought it would make money. I vote on what I like, period. It would seem that the huge reduction in curation rewards after the hardfork would have encouraged more people to do the same but it almost seems to have had the opposite effect. Because people are getting less they are targeting what will potentially give them more. Unfortunate.
:blushing:
Thank you :)
To be honest, I didn't notice that. In my case it is quite opposite (I am not sure why). I remember, that at the beginning I voted pretty rarely, because I treat my vote as something very pressies:
And I feel, like now I am more like:
:D :)
Haha!!
I'm following you now, you'll have to post more ;) Especially since I'm liberal with my votes but I've become stingier with my follows LOL
Kidding about the having to post more, (sometimes the problem with the written word is that you never know if you're giving the right inflection) I am stingier with my follows but when I find someone genuine they're stuck with me ;)
But you are right. I could right a little bit more. Maybe not a post a week (that was my original plan), but at least once a 2 week would be not bad ;)
I enjoyed reading your perspective and actually agree with most of this post and video. However we need to take a look at "flagging" vs "downvoting".
As long as there are rules for flagging, it is not the same as a simple downvote.