RE: 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
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]:
The Steem community provides the following services to its members:
- A source of curated news and commentary.
- A means to get high quality answers to personalized questions.
- A stable cryptocurrency pegged to the U.S. dollar.
- Free payments.
- Jobs providing above services to other members.
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? ;)