I See The Writing on the Wall, This Will Be Steemit's Downfall
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Okay guys, I know I've been a bit negative lately, I'm not just trying to shit talk, I'm trying to point out problems and issues so we can address them.
So it's no secret Steemit is kind of in a slump right now for lack of a better word. Many of our more active users, and even more successful users have taken a step back and quit posting altogether or aren't posting nearly as much. I'm seeing a lot more memes and shorter format content, because why put a ton of effort in to earn 0.50 cents, I totally get it.
Bitcoin is up big today as well as many other coins, I do think a rise in crypto prices would "save" Steemit, it would get people interested again, it would bring on new users and it would get people back active and engaged. That said I don't think we can count on price or should be reliant on crypto prices to save this platform as that is outside of our control.
This Will Be Steemit's Downfall
So I'm hearing many people, myself included saying things like "I'm just gonna post some memes and more short easy fun stuff" as opposed to making real content.
Again, not knocking anyone, I'm in kind of the same mindset, but that said that is going to make the already questionable quality of content on this platform even more lower value stuff which in turn makes this platform even less of an attractive place to come consume content and its a downward spiral. The worse the content gets the less engaged people on here are, the less people come here, the less everyone makes, which in turn makes people continue putting less effort into their content and continue to do more short form content.
Now there are a few people here who are still doing the same great stuff they always are, however as a whole were all doing a lot more lazy content.
There are so many issues here from the uneven distribution from the start to low crypto prices to the voting bot issues. I honestly don't have a solution, but I do see a dangerous trend which is the already spotty quality of content on this platform getting spottier and I see this downward trend happening.
Anyone have any solutions?
It is certainly an issue for sure. I feel like my best contribution to the platform is actually information regarding crypto currencies but in a lot of ways I don't feel like I can focus on that for YouTube or Steemit because YouTube keeps dragging their feet and won't monetize me and with Steemit it is only 10% about content so if I put a ton of time into a video about how to do something it is unlikely to get a big payout.
I think in general a person has to be already set financially to play a real long term game with producing content about crypto currencies and have several ways to attempt to monetize that situation.
As far as other content on here besides crypto stuff I often say, "Oh that's cool." But most of it doesn't teach me anything. For instance if a person was going to put different car repair related videos on DTube for the most part there wouldn't be an audience and even if someone tripped across it at a later date the person likely wouldn't get paid because there is only 7 days to get paid.
So I think the issue is two fold. The true power on here is held by a handful of crypto nerds and secondly we can't only be paid on content for 7 days and really it is pretty much to its max after a day or two.
My solution is this.
The search function on here has to work way better so people can search content. More people are tripping across this stuff through Google than searching on Steemit as an actual search engine.
I'm not opposed to having a partial ad revenue model that is non intrusive that rewards creators into eternity for their efforts. This could at least partially help with people wanting to create more detail how to type content that could pay a person out longer than 7 days. Otherwise unless a person is Bitty Rich and powers up insane amounts or has some other type of support the person is always on a hamster wheel trying to at least get something.
I equate it to a person who is broke and can only afford the smallest containers of laundry detergent and other household items. If they had a little more money they could buy it it a little more bulk and not pay as much.
Minds.com is doing some intriguing stuff because they are going crypto and they have other means of monetization as well including pay walled stuff. So a person could potentially pay a little bit for a course or something of that nature or a newsletter situation from a trusted blogger.
I'm not a huge fan of pay walls but if a person had a very large following and the barrier was pretty low to get through then it could possibly work.
This is more controversial because they tried something sort of similar to this at one point but to have large amounts of delegated power given to currators who reward "good" content. The issue is that it is obviously subjective what good content is and people get upset. Then it becomes like YouTube deciding who to monetize and who to demonetize.
Also another thing I thought up is that if after a certain amount of time if a post is getting a large amount of organic traffic from Google there would be a reserve and that person could get liquid rewards sent to their wallet as a "dividend" or something. the issue with that is that some of these scammers could try to game that system and send garbage posts tons of fake traffic.
You bring up a lot of interesting points. Regarding the 7 day payout I remember when I first got on Steemit I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. Then I found out about the 7 day payout thing and I was like this site fucking sucks lol, I'm all about passive income and seperating my time and effort from my money and this payout system means your always on the hamster wheel you can never stop.
I actually made a post about this very thing and oddly enough to date its my highest earning post of all time and it was nothing more than a question, I found that very funny.
Anyhow, after thinking about it more I can sorta see why this is the case, it forces people to be engaged and stay part of the community as opposed to just using this as a content dump, but at the same time without ongoing payouts there is never goign to be incentive to create longer form content on here.
I think the 7 day payout also keeps people away since most people who are into online marketing and hustlign are all about passive income and Steemit with this rule is not passive.
As far as pay walls go, I get the idea behind it and I suppose more ways to monetize can't hurt, however in the grand scheme of things most people are not willing to open up their wallets and pay a bunch of different creators. I compare it to netflix where we all lose our shit when they raise the price from $7 to $9 even though we are getting a shitload of content, now if Netflix is barely worth $9 with thousands and thousands of movie and show titles how can someone justify paying 9 creators $1 per piece for a couple blog posts. I feel like advertising is the only real way to bring in big money as in Youtube creator type money.
Well the way a person could orchestrate the paywall is that if a certain amount of people vote for it and the payout reaches a certain threshold then it is unlocked to the whole community. That way it will make those who are able to push it over the top could be thanked......etc. It is a thought but I don't know how it would work.
Also about the passive income part. It honestly is already in play with the curation rewards and all that. When someone reaches whale status they don't really have to do much of anything but put people on autovoters and earn a full time income passively that keeps compounding which is pretty amazing. With the Paid upvote bot situation that has taken over the same can be said for that as well. It all goes back to the unfair distribution though. I hate to keep saying it because I have said it 8000 times but it was so skewed and then in a lot of ways got worse because of the way things were setup initially. People just felt like they were a court jester trying to impress a king which was total bullshit because it was just people who got here 2 weeks before me.
Another thing I thought about as far as valued content. For the most part with Instagram no one is learning much. It is like visual entertainment. Memes, Hot girls doing squats, I watch guys jump snowmobiles, guys dunking ......... And once and awhile I post there just to sort of show off or funnel people back to Youtube or Steemit....... but there are a lot of people constantly posting on there and trying to gain a big following and when I look for product placement or some sort of affiliate links I'm not seeing it on a lot of accounts. And I always think...... is this chick trying to monetize this or is it just to feel good from all the likes?
I think it is a reason the younger crowd (Under 25) isn't as attracted to this platform. Oftentimes I'm seeing people be supported by their parents or whatever just being man babies and so this would be far too frustrating to keep trying to hustle.
Because let's be honest. It gets aggravating being this early to something and trying to hustle all the time to keep squeezing money out of it.....etc.
With EOS I feel good because it is a fair distribution and I feel like I was able to commit what I could to the project so far and that I had my shot. Will there be whales buying millions worth? Yeah but i'm fine with that..... i had my chance to put in what I could. With STEEM that wasn't really the case. And trying to play "catch up" is a very daunting task because the whales were here from the beginning and they are flying forward at light speed. I hate to keep harping on that but that is how I have always felt with it and many other people feel the same way. This is actually the most legit platform / system in the crypto ecosystem and would be at least top 10 if it had a fair distribution from the beginning. But it isn't.....It's down in 29th position. That being said I really want to make this platform work for us and want this to be a solid piece of my portfolio going forward. I could see this potential form day 1 and we keep seeing glimpses of greatness with stuff like DTube. I know it is just around the corner when one day we realized that it arrived. There have been some moments where I'm seeing these large groups from around the world getting together talking about STEEM. Like in india, Philippians, Nigeria, Venezuela......etc. A chick from Venezuela told me in a comment yesterday that finding out about Steemit was like a miracle. I can imagine it would be like that in some countries.
The whole distribution thing while I know were beating a dead horse is an interesting point. I know Jackson Palmer recently has been big on talking about centralization and how if the distribution isn't done right or if too many people hold too much it makes it a centralized currency. I forget the list of the most centralized vs least centralized but off the top of my head I believe Ripple was one of the worst with the top whatever percent of accounts holding about 95% of all ripple where as something like Bitcoin while people claim a small amount of people hold a lot of power is actually one of the more less centralized ones. I think NEO was also very centralized.
I thought your comment at the end was interesting. I hear about and have seen some documentaries about how difficult life is in Venezuela and how messed up some things are, I actually purposely kind of go out of my way to support people I see in Venezuela because I realize my miniscule 100% upvote potentially could actually be pretty meaningful to someone there.
I have seen this comment echoed a few times by various people, basically if I lived in a third world country without all the opportunities available to me Steemit would be pretty attractive, however with so many opportunities available to me its kind of peanuts. I regularly get contacted by people through my Youtube channel who are from Venezuela or really all over the world but many people don't have access to paypal or stripe or can't join various affiliate programs simply because the country the are in or they have to jump through hoops setting up workarounds for a VBA or virttual bank account to be able to accept paypal or payoneer or whatever else so we as Americans definitely are kind of whiny when we talk about how hard it is to make money because in many ways we have way less challenges than people elsewhere.
I agree I think Steemit should be a top 5 crypto if for no other reason than there's actually something here. So many projects aren't even live but have all this hype. Other projects are very robust but not really used I mean Ethereum is great and all but aside from cryptokitties which imho is dumb as hell your average person isn't doing anything with it, like you say most of this stuff is only used by cryptonerds not your average person where as steemit while needs work is very easy to use and normal everyday people are using it
Yeah Ripple is terrible from so many angles. I held my nose and purchased some of that garbage and then peaced out on most of it. You just have to use it and lose it. STEEM has pretty bad distribution when it boils down to it. The STEEMIT account has so much and then there are like 10 or 20 whales that really have a very large percentage of the pie. All the initial STEEM was basically mined for around $5000 worth of electricity. So just imagine someone spending $500 or $1000 and mining an unfair distribution and ending up with accounts worth millions and then being a god king on here and being able to pay themselves and earning more and more. That is why in 2016 a lot of people who got on here just rolled their eyes and peaced out.
Oddly enough some of these Bitcoin forks end up with a really solid distribution because it leverages the distribution of Bitcoin plus the Satoshi coins are unlikely to move much and it is unclear if some of the other big accounts are still able to control their funds and recover the forks in the future as well.
I get what you are saying about some of these countries being rough to really make a go at things. I think our biggest disadvantage here is how everything is pretty expensive. Same with a lot of European countries. So much tax and insurance and so on and so forth so a person has to overcome that.
From everything I have read and seen it almost seems like if you go to some of these places like Thailand, Costa Rica, Mexico, Argentina......etc with our knowledge and some money a person could really live a lot better than you could here because you can be comparatively rich compared to a large portion of the population.
Another thing besides the distribution issue that STEEM suffers from is that it is easy for Investors to be getting "dumped on" by all the people trying to earn extra income off this platform. So it can create an imbalance of people cashing out. But it is an attractive investment in other ways because of the potential to earn. So hopefully that can balance itself out in the end.
I hate to say it but automated upvote bots actually are an enticing thing for investors with bigger pockets. If a person can earn 20% return / year off of it and they see long term potential in the ecosystem as a whole they could take a chance on it for sure.
I can see this clear vision for STEEM where in one platform such as STEEMIT or BUSY a person will be able to do all the live streaming , post videos, post pictures and video from a mobile app. Like everything will be on one platform.
I'm actually surprised someone with deeper pockets hasn't gotten funding to really take everything that is here already and make one new platform that will do it all based on this tech. I know there is going to be Appics which is supposed to be built on a SMT but that isn't out yet and the issues with anything built on a SMT is that it also suffers from the poor distribution of STEEM because a person has to buy STEEM to have power in a SMT application.
Over all we need to do what we can to really create a better more consistent payout and then when these other platforms come online we take the alliance over there as well and move as a crew onto every platform like that.
Yeah, the kinda "problem" with Steemit is unfair distribution. But does it really hurt a lot of people? I would not say that. Still you can earn decent money from the platform, especially if you invested a couple hundred bucks in it. Many people post garbage, but that's why you can raise almost easily.
The unfair distribution hurts the different times when we have been dumped on. Steem went from $4 to $0.07 in 2016. The peaks and valleys have been pretty severe but that all being said There are a lot of things that are happening that are positive here. Like I just livestreamed from my Android device yesterday to DLive. That was pretty cool!
Man, can't imagine what blow it was for people posting on Steemit. Like almost 7x decrease in price. I maybe even would give up if I were there.
What happens when the price jumps up again, as it's currently doing?
More posts, but then our feeds are full; who do we unfollow?
Those who've been spamming low value crap.
This will correct itself with volume.
There's an insane amount of rubbish on youtube, but the best 0.1% is pretty fantastic, and enough to keep you amused forever.
Visionaries will keep the quality high while the price is low; and pick up followers who they'll never lose.
You actually bring up a good point. I normally don't unfollow people, however the people who I want to reward are the people who have stuck it out and didn't disappear when thigns got bad and then came back when things are good.
I'm actually very surprised by this. There's a few people on here who actually do very well like $7 to $30 per post who havn't been on here that long and I saw many of them disappear during this downturn, I'm like shit I've been on here since last June making $0.70 cents per post and I'm still chuggin along, hard to feel sorry for somene who goes from $15 to $7, still about 7x more than I make.
Fortunately for me I'm creating for other platforms so while I do remain active on here this isn't the only place I'm posting.
"getting paid to post" is the blessing and the curse of Steemit. My first couple of posts did well but ever since then I barely make anything when I post so it is hard to justify carving out time to post here when I have other activities that earn more and other places I can post that would get more eyeballs.
I have fun writing my Armchair CEO posts so I plan to test those on Medium soon, and my long planned curated newsletter may finally come together soon but I don't know if I will be sending people here like I planned.
Steemit needs a major UI update and a clear direction (I have argued it should be competing with Medium, not Reddit). Without those I think it will struggle and maybe die :-(
Thanks @rulesforrebels for your insight to this, I think what you say is definitely valid.
Although I know since I aligned myself with a writing group ( the Alliance) , I have seen countless Steemians in the group continue to product high quality Content.
Hopefully, we get some of those Steemians who are MIA back here posting when prices stabilize with Steem.
But I still think we have a lot of excellent Content Producers churning out the good stuff everyday :)
Ohhh !!
Scared news for all steemians ......
That's true. I am also following this bad trend. But no solution...