A lack of Steem

How long is long? How fast is fast? How high is high? The problem with these questions is that they are subjective and there is no clear answer but, there is a mental idea of an answer.

How much effort is enough? This is also a subjective question which has no clear answer and the psychological view of effort is one that is severely skewed by a whole range of expectation, assumption and experience.

Pay me for their hard work

I have been spending time in steemit.chat lately and have watched the general section get bombarded with questions on how to get more upvotes or attract whale votes specifically. I have tried to make a habit of visiting the blog of those who ask and see if I can lend a hand. Not because I am doing well here myself, but relatively well in comparison to someone asking for votes from strangers in a general chat.

What I find is that nearly all need more effort spent on creating content. I see videos posted from Youtube, images taken from popular sites and even recipes cut and paste from cooking blogs with not even a change of title. And the poster has the gall to ask for votes? This is a pay for content site and even though it happens, there should never be a payout on non-original content cut and pasted as is. Never.

Low skill, High expectation

The problem is that it requires skill and time to build a decent blog for most people and both of these are also relatively subjective in most cases. Everyone thinks that they put the effort into their content but what happens when they look at other users with higher reward? Do they compare?

Easy for one is difficult for another and this comparison is quite useless however, skill of content is somewhat comparable. For many of these posters who are stealing the skilled work of others, they should try learning something for themselves. Find some talent they have and work extremely hard at developing it and building a niche in which they can attract an engaged audience.

But, this takes investment. Many seem to believe that because in the early days this site was easy money, it still is. It is not. The further it goes, the more skilled one must be to attract and develop an engaged audience. And skills take time and practice to grow and cannot grow through the theft of words, pictures and videos of others.

Birds of a feather

Time is also a factor as many are relatively new to the platform and have spent their time here gathering followers without actually offering content. They have accumulated a large collection of follow for follow people within their ranks and think that this magically turns into income. It is the wrong indicator of a successful strategy.

What would be an interesting metric to have available is the accumulated SP of followers (Possible?) as it is their SP combined with their willingness to upvote content that is an indicator of income. The people that are f4f types are generally not the ones with high SP as the higher SP people do not generally require the support of follow for follow people.

In time however, from this large pool of followers, some are likely to grow their SP and have real voting power. But, then there is the problem of a lack of original content worthy of their vote. Why would someone vote on stolen content spammed for reward? Would you if you had significant voting power? Not many whales (past their haywire bots) ever vote on such content other than downwards.

Depth of field

Now, all of this is of course my subjective view yet, I am relatively objective of myself by nature. I mentally track quite precisely where my time goes and what it is spent on each hour of each day. The reason I do this is partly because of my own psychological structure and interests and partly because I am a consultant who helps personnel within companies both improve their work quality and output as well as achieve the results they are looking for in their personal lives.

It is from my experience I write and it is an experience that each day I go out and try to improve within. My writing itself I have spent countless years working with and still try to develop it and I spend time experimenting with various styles and formatting. I am not the best at this by far but, I am improving in my opinion. This process currently takes 6-10 hours a day to achieve which I generally do after my work, 7 days a week.

I posted, where's my money?

The return on time and effort investment is very low but, I have a long-term view of life and a dollar earned today is an unknown amount in the future. I am investing myself heavily because I am gambling on that unknown being significantly higher than its current value.

This is like any investment, which brings us back to return on effort and time. What many seem to think of as long term investment is what a real investor would consider relatively short. Imagine if one starts a medical degree to become a specialist doctor and after two month invested into university, expects to be earning the same as a professional surgeon with a private practice. Is that an intelligent expectation to hold?

I enjoy going through the process of self-improvement and this has a certain amount of value and interest for me also. But for those that are only looking for financial gain, take a step back and objectively look at what you are really doing with your blog, be very, very hard on yourself and consider if the effort invested is combined with technical skill and originality and whether the content itself is the kind that is likely to attract the income you desire from the people who have it.

I would suggest for a great deal of people begging for votes, the subjective reality of the self and the effort applied is vastly different to the objective one. But, this is only my view of these things and should be treated as such.

Taraz
[ a Steemit original ]