Steemit Content Consumption [A fallacy in the attention Economy]
One of the biggest problems I can see on Steemit right now is a low level of consumption to supply ratio. In laymans terms, too much content is being posted than content being read/consumed. There seems to be a load of content being pushed out, which is great! But how much of these are really being read and considered? I'm sure you have a post, or, several which never truly got the attention and recognition it truly deserved.
What is the Attention Economics?
An approach for the management of information, it essentially treats a human attention as a scarce commodity.
We know that in general oversupply leads to a reduction in demand. And despite attention being a focused mental engagement on something, it is also the most limiting factor on the consumption of information.
We are pretty much limited beings, we filter out the mass amount of information there is in the world so that the "most important" information is retained. Now note that it is in inverted commmas. This is because what is most important is a rather personalized opinion. It is relative from person to person due to their own accumulated tastes, knowledge and interests. Some things may be more alluring for one than for another.
But what is the cause for the reduced content consumption?
What I believe to be the leading factor to posts not getting the attention they deserve is due the the mass diversification of posts that a user has to absorb when logged onto Steemit. In general one is able to filter through this by finding the related tags, though, when it comes to just loading the Home or New tab, we come into some issues.
As you can see, we have a variety of mixed posts and some can be irrelevant to a user browsing on the site. The excessive flow of content can make it challenging for one to find a valuable post. Though one can argue that the articles you find will be diverse in content, it can be a little messy for some. Though as mentioned, we will only be attracted by articles that fall into our category of interests, so how does steemit solve this?
Hashtags
A great way to browse the news you want to go through. So be it Crypto, Blockchain, Life, and more; tags are handy for one to find what they need.
But it still poses an issue. I believe that it can be a little tedious to search up the hashtags you want, when one should be provided with filtered search automatically! This is where I would like to propose a solution to the matter.
Hashtag Columns
Wouldn’t it be much more comprehensive if tabs are provided for one to filter themselves?
Consider if you wish to create a single tab which consisted of articles on Life. Or how’s about Crypto? Or even Both. This can further be grinded down to new, trending and hot content. This could possibly improve the content consumption level to solve the oversupply!
This is a win-win situation for active users who write and also consume. With all due respect to the current system. Though the beauty about Steemit is that such an interface could be created since anyone can access the Steem Bockchain to create their own platform.
Ingenuine Comments
Another way I’ve noticed that there is less genuine interaction at times is the application of Bots. It’s not illegal, and can be downright useful! but you always see them on new posts such as introduceyourself.
Furthermore this topic can be expanded towards people who simply comment something simple and may be overly supportive of the author's narrative. Simply on the intent to fish for more upvotes. Sure it can be simple and does add a comment, but we’ve all come across sugarcoated responses which sometimes challenge the authenticity of the comment.
Nonetheless this is the nature of the internet and forums and social sites alike; with the incentives at hand, sometimes the easy route can yield something!
Regardless, Steemit is Awesome
Steemit is an amazing platform utilizing blockchain and with premium reward mechanisms. It really is one of the first of its kind that is so successful. This post is in no way bashing what we have, merely room for more improvement. The amount of users joining is only increasing and sometimes we all want to see minnows and the other critters succeed in the Steemit chain!
We all have a voice, an idea, a claim. And we all want it to be heard, this is just my two cents on a small way we can help improve getting your voices heard, and to direct undervalued posts to those who find value in it.
Awesome Post. I agree that one of steemit´s biggest issues is the huge supply side of posts vs. few demand to actually read them.
I have not come up with a solution to this. Eager to read about ideas.
Have you tried to engage with the content on here?
The majority is self-obsessed steem posts, followed by throw away bubblegum posts, and then whatever else the whales have decided to bring to the trending page.
Steemit incentives don't really encourage good content. They encourage you to play the steemit game, or at list get good using the vote bots.
Great point of view. My question would be then, Where the best profits are? Within the steemit game, within creating new whales or voting bots?
I think it is important to take the most out this. I've used to think about "I will post great content in order to get upvoted by big whales". Now I see it differently. I can see I can post about anything (following the rules), promote my own posts (which would be the whales game I think) and repeat the process as long as I need.
My guess is in building a vote bot. In creating a daily/weekly contest that asks for votes and resteems in order to participate. Probably creating
I doubt any new whales have been 'created'. Most either were early investors or bought there way in now as late investors,
I've been hoping to build a healthy, interested and active audience and forget the whales entirely. But, this system doesn't reward content, or content liked by just a few whales. The Trending pages of individual topics are even locked down by whales. One minnow vote just doesn't matter enough as a curation, or minnows don't vote at all.
Either way, I'm still going to play the long game because it keeps blogging interesting, but I'm less and less enthralled over time.
Oh my goodness this post is amazing, i so totally am for your writing!
... Haha teasing, but i do have to agree on the ambiguity on how much people really do read through articles and siding with the author entirely for an upvote. But regardless this isn't so much of a matter because I love going through the diverse content that's out there. Some things that I can't find on my regular news go-to's. Cheers @steemitguide
i think this was one of my first posts about the filtering and frontend. it's called 'condenser' and i believe it's being worked on, i can see a new release coming out soon, if i was to guess, maybe steemfest 2 for a launch of it ;) -- i agree about who is consuming it but also remember that if steemit.com is moving up the website rankings globally or at least for the US then also the posts if good hashtags, seo words then it's going to get found in google search too.
Those are my thoughts too. Traffic from outside is a good thing. People are eventually curious enough to sign up.
get paid to develop content.. that's the slogan..
that's why everyone wants to get that pay
Change that slogan to get paid to read/view content and wallah!
We already have that. It's called view bots. They generate -ahaha - "eyeballs" for the ads displayed on websites.
I've previously made the case for going back to 50/50 Author/curators reward split, as it was a year ago.
I believe this would reduce self and group upvoting, and elicit more upvotes for high quality content, again, as originally intended.
Sometimes, the self-upvote is all a beginner gets, so I don't believe that is the issue. It's peanuts in currency.
Did you read my article? I don't want to punish self upvoters, I want to give them a more rewarding way to spend their voting power.
I did read your article. I'm not saying you want to punish self upvoters. I did not mean to offend you.
We're cool, mate. Have a great day.
There are 2 critical and valid issues raised. Supply and demand. Over supply of content - perhaps a better reward system for comments would work i.e. higher rewards for comments and votes on minnows posts. This will also boost the lower end. I did a more detailed post on that previously. The other - Content - Well, you explained the issue well enough in the post and here too I mentioned that problem. I guess we'll have to wait and see how Steemit developes and what changes it might bring. Thanks for the post:):)
I agree that it would be cool have the possibility to " tailor " steemit posts and use, senabling us to see more of the style and criteria of posts that interest us personally !! upvoted and resteemed @steemitguide!
Regarding tags, I actually created an app/website where you could filter each pages results by multiple tags at once and also allow custom tags. The app is working, but the UI is only in development stage. Once I heard that a new UI for steemit which will encompass some of my improvements was close to being released, I moved onto another project. But that was a month and half ago, and there's been no update to Steemit. If it can be confirmed that the new steemit UI is still months away, I could update my app for release if there was genuine interest for it.
Why don't we make it a knowledge source on internet like quora, wikipedia???
Give incentive on per view basis along with the other ways.
Remove the 7 day limit, steemians will earn on their post even after 7 days. In such ways we can make steem the knowledge hub....