RE: Steemit Strategy - Your "Quality" Content Isn't Valuable
Seems to me that it could be a general Human Truism that everything revolves around the lowest common Denominator. There's a good reason why Sports Illustrated has 10x more subscribers than a "quality content" magazine like Atlantic Monthly.
It's a pretty good rant, and pretty on the money. Maybe it's a misnomer altogether to even call Steemit a "social content site." Maybe it's just a "money making circle jerk." Which is OK — but let's have some truth in advertising.
Oh wait, nobody wants "truth."
Truth is that most humans behave like jackholes as soon as there's money involved. And in bizarre ways... like they start to behave badly over five cents, which would make zero material difference in their lives.
Biggest and most relevant truth in this rant: #7 — pick something and be the best at it. I say that because it's also misinformation to think that you need "thousands of followers" to do well. No you don't. You just need a couple of hundred who think you're all that and a bag of chips in your niche.
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First, let me say that YOU are all that and a bag of chips. Thanks for reading and commenting.
This phrase has been getting more and more use lately and much of it is true, but that is also the case in business, friendships, etc. My friend has a nice jazz restaurant. There are many of these places in St. Petersburg, but if we go out to listen to jazz we go to her restaurant. Why, because we support our friend and not necessarily because her's is the best place. If I need a carpenter, I hire my friend, Victor, because he always needs the work and I trust him. The key to the "circle jerk" is expanding your circle to the point where your accumulated value to the circle exceeds the value that you expend on the circle. Steemit is no different in this sense, but the "game" of it can appear very stacked against the average Steemian because we look at $ in other people's accounts instead of growth of our own.
You point about SI is so spot on. Love it. Also, spot on is the behaving badly over .05 STU. It drives me crazy when people ignore real value. (had someone irritated with me because I upvoted them less than someone else - .02 difference) I think I wrote this post about 30 minutes after that happened. lol
Thanks again for the thoughtful response. I hope to see more of you.
Well, I totally agree that we help our friends; and presumably we have something in common with our friends or they wouldn't be our friends. I'm likely to upvote my friends on Steemit, and have hopes they might return the favor. In a sense, that's the core of the being social part.
Part of the circle-jerkiness here — as best I can interpret it — is that a bunch of the participants don't actually care about each other's stuff, they are just trading favors. My guess is that you would probably NOT hire your friend Victor if you needed fine cabinetmaking, and he was a shit framing carpenter. At some point reality has to kick in.
The biggest challenge we seem to face around here is — to paraphrase you a bit — that we "we look at $ in other people's accounts instead of growth of our own" to which I say YES, and people get wrapped up in short term gains rather than long term growth. Which is a variation on people choosing two "full buckets" TODAY, rather than the value of a steady flow into their bucket for the rest of their life.
Maybe those $200 worth of paid upvotes from bots look really good right now, but if the consequence is that in a year from now Steemit has a global reputation as a "spammy joke" and the Steem token ends up at $0.05... just how clever is that, really?
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I would say there is less risk of Steemit becoming a spammy joke due to the people paying for upvotes than those that are posting someone else's pictures 10 times a day, creating 10 dummy accounts and then upvoting each other. While the posts on the trending page aren't always "quality", most of them aren't spammy. The community does a fairly good job of maintaining some standards as opposed to other social media.