Can Steemit Become a Viable Content Platform?
I don't have an answer here, it's an honest question. I'm new on Steemit, but the quality of posts is overall pretty terrible. 90% of what I see is porn, a single photograph stolen from somewhere where else (uncredited), a link to a single YouTube video without context, or unintelligible meta-rants about Steem.
It reminds me a bit of the early days of Twitter, where the only things people posted about was porn, how to get followers, and how to use Twitter. :-/
Steem as a cryptocurrency is one thing, but Steemit itself as a content platform seems lost. Other than directly linking to specific stories, it's unimaginable that anyone would ever find anything I've written, and the general content quality is so painfully low, I don't really want to spend much time looking for other people's content. 90% of the comments I get are people asking me to follow them back. (Wow, it really does remind me of the early days of Twitter!)
There's so much potential here, but they'll need a massive overhaul of the UX/content discoverability/quality filters for this to really ever catch on, IMHO.
The premise is "Blog. Get paid.", but that only works when you have a platform where people can find valuable content easily. Otherwise we're all just upvoting each others' stolen porn in a ponzi wankfest.
Or maybe I'm just an idiot who doesn't get it.
Hi, @snipe I understand your point and it is legit but on the other hand, I also witness things happening around me as I take care the growth of the Thai community. I believe it is all about a community communicate about rules and do and don't. I take the example of the Myanmar, Indonesian, Philippine and other Asian community and you can see how the content has changed from what it was at first. The thing with English talking community is a huge community and because of the number of users, it is really hard to communicate properly. But as you say it looks like the early days of Twitter, so let see what's happening next. Thank you.
My concern has far less to do with people posting content in imperfect English. I've worked in tech for 20 years, so I can parse less-than-perfect English pretty easily (and frankly, I have tons of respect for folks who speak "broken" English, because that means they speak some English, and most Americans can't be bothered to learn more than one language.) It's more the spammy, pointless posts that are there just to get an upvote from their followers (because their followers know the poster will upvote their spammy, pointless bullshit in kind, hence the upvoting wankfest).
You do raise an interesting point though. I'm only able to read posts in English (and some German/Japanese/Spanish), so I can't speak to the quality of those posts. Perhaps because English is the predominant language I'm looking at, it's just English posts that are 90% trash.
Here too we have some pointless post but after talking to them giving them the rules about posting, cheetah and all other things they change for the good. When they start they don't even understand what Cheetah is and when they get caught they say thank you to Cheetah. May be the English part need a stronger team to put them on the rails. Anyway, from time to time we see the content quality here and around South East Asia getting better but yes it is a long work.
It just seems like the platform is currently designed to reward this bad behavior. Ultimately, a community of any kind is only as good as its members, but gaming the voting system seems trivial here, which only encourages more trash posts. Why bother create real content (which takes time and effort) when I can post boobs or a dumb inspirational quote or a video link and still get ahead?
I believe it is like Twitter time will clean the whole thing and get rid of bad users, spamming Steemit beggars. But for now, we have to deal with it. I just try to not think about them and make my way and pushing the Thais to a higher level.
This is absolutely a concern of mine, as well. Once you start associating compensation models based on content, you're going to run into:
That would've been my prediction - and voila, that is what we have here! Who woulda thunk it.
The thing is, cryptocurrencies are climbing so hard, so fast, without any apparent ceiling (oh, trust me, there's a ceiling...) that even something as not-completely-thought-out as this platform will still net its creators a ridiculous amount of money, and may even net content creators (like us!) some money in the process.
Doesn't mean I won't criticize it though.
LOL I always know when @lukestokes has upvoted me, because my posts go from $0.28 to $7 instantaneously.
Same. We basically work for @lukestokes now.
Like my posts, boss? I'm sorry I said bad things about
cryptocurrencyI mean "crypto"! I'll write nicer things in the future, I promise!They're good posts, Brondy.
BLOGS. Dammit, "They're good blogs, Brondy" would have worked better. /tinyfist
Hahah. Sorry, I don't read it all (though I try to), but I did add you both to my steemvoter account because I do think you both provide great value for this platform, and I want to reward that.
I get that, but really I'm trying to imagine long-term viability. The reality is that the porn upvoting wankfests are working right now so there's no reason for the platform to change.
I've been writing online for 20 years, and I love the idea of being paid based on the quality of my content (versus praying some poor fucker will accidentally click on a banner ad on my site and earn me $0.00057).
Anything I create here, I created because I think it's good content and I want it to exist in the world, and if this place burns down to the ground, I'll have to copy all of that stuff over to my regular blog - when ideally, I shouldn't need a regular blog anymore if this platform can show me it's really got legs (other than the ones attached to the vaginas in the porn posts, that is.)
LOL best post I read all day!
Hi, I'm new to Steemit and these are exactly the first thoughts that came into my mind. Do you find it is getting worse with time?
Here are some of my thoughts on where Steemit may head if the community doesn't come together to solve the problem. Ultimately, I do not believe the developers don't have the tools to control it.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@joannajablonka/steemit-is-in-danger-of-self-destruction-why-reddcoin-could-win
I don't know if it's getting worse - not enough data yet. That article you linked was really good (I resteemed it).
I think the issue might be more philosophical than technical. If people find value in the porn and context-free random links that get posted here, should those posts be considered SPAM?
They're not what I want to read, and I won't upvote them, but what I want isn't necessarily what others want. That's why I say the issue for me is content discoverability. I don't care that people post garbage, I just don't want to have to read it, similar to Twitter.
Using graph databases, they could build a recommendation engine that could surface writers that create content that is more compelling, without forcing us to wade through all of the garbage. The search tool is all but useless, which doesn't really help people find good content/writers either.
I dunno. I am skeptical, but I feel like if they can crack that nut, they might really have something here.