Work for your community
Right now is the time to work. I have said it for the last month or two (well, for the last year or so) but, this time I mean it. I always meant it.
Steem is going to get continually harder to get as we move forward as price goes up and many more people arrive onto the platform. This will increase interest and therefore demand and competition on the platform. With the bidbots holding so much sway, that makes gathering Steem difficult but, that is not the reason to work. Not directly at least.
Right now the posting behavior is down, people are posting less and what they are posting is of lower quality. Much of my feed which was filled with relatively high quality posts each day is, decidedly less so. There is more irrelevant and shallow than previously. This is understandable behavior but, there is a future.. I hope. And, this is the time to build it.
People often wait until the price is up before they are in the mood' to do the work and as important as the feelings may be for some people, if one can't push through because they don't feel like it, they aren't likely to have the groundwork done for when things really take off.
There are things that people don't seem to understand about community and that is that when people work very had for what they have, they are more likely to share it with other people who they think work hard also. It is personally hard to support people who have been silent for months but as soon as price is up they return with the 'been busy' posts. I have talked about cutting the dead wood before.
But, the other thing that some people don't seem to realize here is that when things are quiet, that means there is a lot more opportunity to learn, explore, meet people and build relationships. If you are interested in building a future on Steem, relationships are very important, quality content alone is not going to be enough.
As more competition comes in and mainstreaming happens, so will the likelihood that high quality content producers arrive to compete in the marketplace. Some of them will bring support with them, some will build from the ground up.
Our key competitive advantages for being here earlier than them is that we already have some Steem Power behind us but more importantly than that, we already have an audience, a community to back us and support us. Friends and peers who we have supported and who have supported us through good and bad times.
It will be these relationships that will prove vital for our future as users, and the platform itself. The platform will excel with a strong community in time but, can any individual user survive without the community?
Even if you are banking on bidbots, at some point, they will change form and the way you benefit from them now may no longer be accessible. Have you built a community around you to support all of those eyes you have bought? If you have, well done as that is the best case scenario but, if you haven't and you have just been milking the opportunity, you are likely in for a nasty shock at some point.
Community is the real value here and it will be the driver of the platform's economic systems and push the demand on steem into the sky and prop it up when markets turn. But, community is also the thing that helps raise users and, reduce users if the need arises. Community is the driver of all behaviours on the platform but, not all are long-term communities.
Some of the groups here are good timers that will fail under slight pressures like price or code change, others are those that will work together through any times or any code change. Which are you part of? Who do you spend your efforts engaging with and supporting? Who are you looking for support from?
Are they good timers or long termers?
If you are looking to go into the future, who you travel with is going to matter greatly as you are unlikely to be able to support yourself if not already with high SP and, if who you surround yourself wit now disappears rapidly, you are likely to be left in the lurch.
The platform needs people who not only take but distribute, people who are not islands but nodes as it will be these kinds of people who will be able to support a wide section of the community and also niche communities within. This is why distribution is important and why who it gets distributed to is vital also.
Distribution to a wide assortment of engaged and community spirited people means that a much wider spread of content and services can also be supported and helped to grow. This benefits everyone who holds Steem as it mainstreams even further but, if one isn't willing to be a true part of the community, one will continually be pushed towards the fringes and find it increasingly hard to connect, no matter how long one has been on the platform.
Right now is the time to work for your community. You might collect a few Steem along the way too which amplifies the reason but, you will build a social network that can journey far into the future.
At least, while it is all quiet on the content front, dig into the platform and find out just where you want to be and whether what you are doing is going to get you there. Or, are you relying on the community to do it all for you? Your community, or mine?
Taraz
[ a Steemit original ]
This is an important observation. It is most interesting to see who is doing what at this time. I've noticed that the number of my followers and weekly upsteemers have been increasing steadily. I've been posting 2-3 times a day since late November and will continue to do so. I don't care so much about the weekly rewards right now. I'm trying to grow my readership with the goal of having 10-20 times more followers and upsteemers than now a few years down the road.
I'm excited about Hivemind. I've only got about 1500 SP of my own and about 1000 SP delegated to me. Better content discovery might allow for a community of go players to be established with games and analyses shown on DLive and DTube. There could be up to 900,000 users on Steem but I know only two active users in addition to myself who are go players. That is completely pathetic. But it could change in the future. With steady accumulation of SP, I hope to be able to become one of the leading figures of a community of go players on Steem. One of the other go players has 20-30 times the SP I have but I'm a much stronger player. There is no reason to go and crawl under a rock now that the price has undergone a severe correction since the peak in January.
Just think, you may be able to have that without ever really needing to have the people engaging directly with Steemit and seeing all of the nonsense that goes on. It could be directly through the apps instead and whole specialised communities can develop independently but still interacting on the steem blockchain.
Exactly!
They'd have to make a Steem account, though. But it could be a streamlined process done with one of the apps with no need to go through Steemit.
Agree with you on this. It is getting harder and harder to find good quality posts and also harder to get rewarded for your efforts. With so much of the SP tied up in bots that which is left isn't enough to go around for properly rewarding quality content at current steem prices.
But if you can look at things differently the rewards are there. Personally I have no intentions short of an emergency to take 1 dollar out of my steemit account. So what...how does this matter?
Well my reply was getting so long I decided to just create a post about my thoughts on my daily rewards...right or wrong it's how I view my rewards. Hope you don't mind the link, you spurred an entire post...lol.
I don' mind links when they are connected to the topic i some way. I actually read it before reading this comment anyway and as I commented there, you are right. There is a long way hopefully to go and if people are looking long, price now doesn't matter. However, community does.
Good to know and I wouldn't ever link off topic, it's only when it makes sense. Not looking to turn into a spammer...lol.
I would much rather think about long term goals as they are easier to navigate towards. There is room for errors and corrections when looking down the road that just aren't available when you are focused on the next few days all the time. Short term thinkers are doomed to feel like they fail or are always putting out fires all the time as one little thing will mess up your short term plans. It's a very high stress way to live.
nice chat you're guys having here :)
I look forward to that time when you reap what you deserve. Really hope it does change and everyone can grow and help each other.
I think a couple of years will be the minimum for large gains for people. Large is relative of course considering the size of accounts here now but, there may be a time where a dolphin is 1000 SP, not 10,000 and a whale is 10k.
We all need to grow quickly now then. When I say that you are fairly large already but whoever is still new needs to grow before a huge influx comes in.
Funny, I was just talking about this with a friend last night, and we agreed that lack of quality content is due to price of STEEM decline lately. Sadly, most people are motivated to write only by $ (including Shakespeare and many other great writers), so I'm curious to see what happens to this community as price of crypto remains low.
Writing for money isn't the problem but, writing for 'immediate' return is. People think that if a post doesn't earn well it wasn't worth it but, that shows their lack of understanding (and likely care) about the community aspect. In my view as someone who does want the community to work, each post is my part in building it. Perhaps in time, more value than the initial payout will arrive but I don't expect that to happen if the community is weak. Short-term views are a weak position for a startup environment in my opinion.
Posting and interacting keeps the platform alive. It is a sign of trust in the viability of the steem blockchain.
Despite the drop in steem price, my posting rate still remains the same. I am not getting awesome upvotes but I have an opportunity to express my concept of art without restrictions and am utilizing.
Soon there will be a new set of whales, orcas, dolphins, minnows, redfishes. One's contribution will determine one's reward when the floodgates open.
If you believe in the steemit vision, prices will not affect your posting or interaction on the platform.
I think this platform is viable to an extreme. I wouldn't be surprised if steem and sbd have a combined market cap of $1 trillion in 10 years.
Agreed. This just shows who true STEEMians are, and I hope some of us will make a note of that. It's easy to beat the drum of success when crypto prices are flying high, and hard to do so when they are low. Only truly dedicated folks will remain and I strongly believe will win in the end. We have to prevail and we will. Mark my words.
Soon there will be a new set of whales, orcas, dolphins, minnows, redfishes.
It is going to mix things up a lot in the coming months and year or so and hopefully the ones that come in or get 'made' will be distributors. It is always a challenge for me personally as even though this is the time to work, I am trying to balance my distribution so I have a future where I can help more too.
Yes one has to be prepared for eventuality. Support is not a crutch that one can lean on. One has to build something that when that time comes, there will be enough to share and enough to eat and drink.
These are the dreams that propel my every tap on my keypad, my every post, every comment, every upvote.
It might seem a struggle. There are days when I wake up with no idea of what I was about to do before I passed out. I am even lucky, I am single. I have no excuse not to give this my all.
Let's assume the following:
How does one grow? By scarcely upvoting anyone, including one's own supporters? By never delegating Steem Power to anyone?
No, that's not how winning is done on Steem. Not upvoting your supporters is stupid as they are the people who upvote you. If everybody sees you upvoting only yourself, they will stop upvoting you because they see you're giving nothing back. You want them to be as loaded with SP as possible. You delegate some of your SP to them. They can not only upvote your posts but your comments, too, which you will not do yourself. They win by growing faster because they attract other users by having higher SP. As they grow, so does their SP (which in turn benefits you) and their network giving them strength to withstand adversity.
Building the network healthily (my opinion is to create nodes at various levels.
Whales that support a few dolphins, dolphins who support minnows etc... (and of course random mixing too). If who gets supported is chosen well, they will spread also in the future and widen the net of fish caught.
Obviously, it makes more sense to support those who are growing their stake than those who never power up.
I think on some level you just need to be able to enjoy it. Enjoy writing, sharing, commenting and curating. That gets you through the tough times.
This is why I sucked at school. Other than the social aspects in the later years ;)
i sucked at school AND the social aspects in the later years.
Most of my socialising was away from high school, and was very much a work in progress.
I'm a reformed introvert.
Its as if you read my mind.
When I first came to Steemit (granted, that was just barely 2 weeks ago), outside the possibility of earning a few dollars, I saw an opportunity to plant my flag. Like you said, the big content producers are not here yet. Maybe they're waiting to see how the platform evolves or they're not yet convinced that its a platform worth investing in. Regardless, my take is that while they ponder their next move, I already have a head start here, building a platform for the type of content I will publish.
That is also the reason why I'm not so bothered by all the posts I've seen complaining about the quality of the content in trending and the use or misuse of bidbots. From where I'm sitting, these things tend to self-correct in the long run. Think Google and SEO, a few years back you could easily rank on top of Google's results by spamming keywords and using all sorts of blackhat techniques. You could outperform the big websites by just implementing good (sometimes downright devious) SEO techniques. But Google got smart. Now the kind of webpages that make it to the top are either those published on big sites (Forbes, wikipedia, etc.) or those that really have high-quality content.
On the community front, I'll add a cliche to your island and nodes metaphor. How about, "United we stand, divided we fall." The only way we can flourish is if we grow and work together as a community. And I don't just mean that in a sense of togetherness kind of way. There are lots of work to be done and people from every segment in the platform need to find where they fit in the community--content producers, curators, app developers, rule makers, rule enforcers. There are a lot of jobs in a decentralized society and the lack of a leader means community members will have to figure out how to divide the work and get the job done themselves. So, it's our task to figure out what job we can do to help the larger community and band together with similar individuals who can do this job. At least, that's how I interpreted your mention of "niche communities".
So, like you said, while it is all quiet on the content front, I'll be here figuring out what should be my role in the larger community, looking for a niche community to help me in this role, all while growing my content, and contributing as much as I can, in preparation for the arrival of the mainstream audience and the return of the inactive users. Hopefully by then I'll have grown enough and surrounded myself with the right people to be a valuable asset so I can withstand what's coming and help others to success.
I use All for one, one for all when it comes to steem and call it the musketeer coin as individual success is based on distribution and community success in the long term. :)
Yes, now we are in the forming stages so niche content is difficult to get support for but that will come when, producer communities start doing what they need to do to develop various frameworks.
Sounds like you have the right attitude at least. welcome.
Thanks for the welcome. It's still early days, but I'm enjoying my time so far.
When activity is low, the reward pool stays the same! So you could get a bigger piece of it!
To give myself some motivation to try to post everyday, I did buy some steembasicincome shares. At the moment based on my shares they reward every post with an upvote around 0,05!
So every day not posting would be a loss! Maybe this would also be a good investment for you.
You did get a mention today in my post! Keep it going, aways look forward to your postings!
I should look into enrolling some people perhaps :)
Certainly for you it could worth the effort! Did you read my post about you. Okay not completely about you, but a least a fourth of it 😂
I could sponsor you a share of SBI if you want! No strings attached!
Been busy all day, just getting into it now. after 10pm.
It is okay. I know about the SBI already :)
No prob!
Things are quiet. Maybe it' the quiet before the storm, maybe it is just quiet before more quiet. As you wrote above once the prices go back up, people wold be coming back with been busy posts and it would be hard for the regular steemians to give them a second chance at a time when even the first chance is becoming increasingly rare.
I'm pretty sure crypto prices falling are impacting troops morale ;)
When prices are going up I always see an up trend in post quantity ( though quality is unrelated)
I do think it had less to do with the value of the posting but more with the fact that people only want to share their wins and profit and don’t want to share their losses!
Yes. Either way it's all related to crypto stats
It for sure it! And it will be for some time!
Well this morning's pretty good for Steem:)
It indeed is. Let it rise from the ashes!