My First 47 days - Observations
Thank you everyone for your support, particularly @Steemstem and @teamaustralia can I share some observations for my first 47 days.
The Pros.
I was looking at a blogging platform and actually Steemit with markdown I feel is quite simple to use (I don't mind messing around with codes). I looked at Reddit, Medium as well as one of our biggest astronomy forums (www.cloudynights.com).
Reward system is great (and might come in handy for pocket money). To me this is a nice benefit even if the reward amounts were to become half or a third of what they currently are. Typically if I write an article for a magazine I might get $150 if I'm lucky and generally there is more work involved.
Sense of Community feels strong. Thanks to @teamaustralia and @steemstem. I see these guys organising events and so forth which no doubt means they sacrifice a lot of their own time. I also see them supporting members, even if they are feeling down. The job you guys are doing is admirable.
I really enjoy blogging, including doing the diagrams, etc. More than I thought actually!
The Cons.
Voting power is too leveraged to STEEM power. I know this is what makes Steemit work, but if you upset the wrong person here they can sink you.
There is not too much original content in my own field of astronomy, a lot of rated articles remind me of school assignments. What is the attraction of the Steemit platform if I can already get this information from wikipedia?
Related to the last point, if I make a post on my facebook and twitter feed, again in my astronomy circle, I'll often get responses from a lot of people and sometimes from people who I would consider experts in their field. Replies here are pretty sparce....even if the post has high ratings. Look at my last post on facebook and you will see what I mean.
Anyway, I am interested in comments/counter comments below.
Terry
Hey Terry! FWIW, I read all your posts with interest. However, I have (almost) stopped commenting or posting here because of the very cons that you mentioned. I had imagined a popular platform like Steemit would have its share of spam, but the magnitude of it is becoming clear to me now.
However, as a person that likes open and distributed collaboration, I don't want to go back to Facebook / Twitter / Google+.
I would rather wait for the next generation of SteemIt (my bets are on EOS) and tolerate the spam / misuse in the meanwhile.
clear skies, and hope to see you around here, or somewhere in the future open platforms!
Thank you @hrj ! I have a plan to stay here but with a little different tack. I will have to do some more reading on EOS :)
Good observations. Comments here on steemit are interesting in how different they are from other platforms. Facebook/Youtube have lots of comments but most of them are offtopic or toxic. Reddit seems to have everyone competing to have the wittiest comment or best joke, and I rarely see really good comments at the top with rare exceptions.
Since steemit literally rewards you with money for good comments, it's strange that there are less comments overall. Perhaps this is because people don't want to be seen as "begging" by posting a short comment. Then again, many posts I make get a lot of comments that are essentially "good job here follow me @randomuser22222" that are 100% self-promotional, so with that in mind it doesn't seem like people are shying away from promoting themselves (what kills me about these comments is sometimes they occur literally minutes after I publish a long article, so quickly that I know they couldn't possibly have read it all before making an unrelated comment and are just promoting themselves).
Flagging is also a problem I don't have an answer to. I haven't been the victim of any high-profile flags thankfully, but they do shut down some discussion. For example, about a month ago I noticed a highly rewarded, very long post on the dangers of fluoridated water. It was almost all pseudoscience, relying on blatantly wrong arguments to fearmonger. I angrily started writing up a response attempting to debunk most of the poor arguments (since this thing was in #science!), then noticed that the author had magnitudes more steem power than I did, and a higher reputation. Fearing a possible retaliation flag that could harm my account I just left it alone and didn't respond. On reddit, people often just brave the downvotes to call out popular arguments they feel are wrong, because in the end downvotes don't mean anything, whereas a steemit flag from a big user can be very bad.
I can't really think of a way to solve the flagging issue since flags are necessary - for example a few weeks ago I had to use most of my voting power to flag every post from a serial plagiarist who copied space articles from another website.
I really think the platform would improve if people commented with meaningful comments more often but I can't think of a way to do this without further encouraging people to just comment "Nice article follow me", etc. Maybe someone else here has some good ideas?
To be honest @Proteus-h, @intuitivelearner I feel like I'm turning up to room with just half a dozen people at most, do a presentation then leave (and pick up my steem a week later!). If you look at this post only 4 people here have responded, and most of the votes are delegated votes. Have a look at my post on facebook that a linked to above, over a 100 people responded to my last thread, some of the people there are well respected scientists (for example Elisabeth Warner worked for NASA Deep Impact mission and Ian Musgrave is a well respected science communicator here in Australia). My experience with facebook has been very different and I just block or unfriend people who are obnoxious. Btw @Proteus-h send me a fb friend request if your still on there!
The downvote issue is a real problem that will likely turnoff talented people as they need Curation power from the start. Nor will many people who have a lot knowledge in a subject tolerate being outvoted by cut and paste articles. That and general skeptism with crypto's will make it difficult IMO to see widespread adoption of Steemit. I am hopeful things will improve however, so I'm staying here, but maybe not posting as often.
Admittedly, as someone still pretty new here, this site feels a bit like someone said, "what would happen if we build an AnCap social media site?" Everything has a profit motive and money purely dictates power, consequently, much of the voting feels hollow. I will say that due to proactively finding the right users, I've had much better interactions overall than on facebook so far (I feel your mileage will vary over there due to your personal connections, much of my friends feed is the mundane mixed with the occasional conspiracy theorist, while the Ribbiting Science facebook page suddenly died off years ago when they really started pushing the algorithms hard).
I think the issue with the 'outvoted by copy/paste' is more of a universal issue of quality vs quantity. If you don't already have the power to boost yourself/having spent time networking, then it doesn't much matter what you post. I've seen simple 1 picture memes get 100 times the reward that a high effort essay I put up on here gets but that's also true of other sites as well. I feel you might be butting heads against the natural human inclination towards the minimization of effort on this one.
I'm too new to have experienced a downvote issue but it sounds like a surefire way to kill the platform in the long-run. Seems akin to handing out miscellaneous unbalanced weapon selections in a crowded theatre and mentioning that the first person to reach the ticket booth gets a massive payday - sets up a terrible incentive structure.
The crypt skepticism feels like something that will just have to be aged out of on a societal level, the current crypto landscape reminds me of the old period of 'Wildcat banking' in the US before there was a unified national currency system. The weak currencies will die out and eventually you'll see governments and societies adapt to wide-scale usage once scaling issues are solved. For Steemit itself, I think the biggest hurdle is overcoming the "I get paid to use social media? What kind of scam is this?" mentality rather than crypto skepticism specifically.
All very good points @ribbitingscience . Re downvoting there is some pretty bad stuff happening here. For example a the 2 founders fighting. One of them downvoted the other, left a negative comment then upvoted his own comment to the tune of $2500 USD! This is just one example I've seen.
Oh dear, that doesn't exactly inspire confidence. Hopefully, that's been sorted because there's nothing that'll sink a site faster than drama with the dev team.
Yes there is a flat earther in Steemit here that has a fair bit of Steempower that could flatten my posts. Given that I've been the target already of an "Electric Universe" person (possibly because of my profile in amateur astronomy) I worry a bit about that.
Ugh, while I've been fortunate enough to not run into any members of the flat earth cult, those electric universe people are insufferable (ran into them after posting a review of an Einstein documentary on another site). The only thing, that doesn't involve a complete overhaul of the voting system, I can think of would be to decrease the effect of an individual negative vote.
Encouragingly Ned pulled his vote, so all is not lost. The friction is over EOS being developed by Dan as a competitor to the STEEM/STEEMIT platform, so understandably tensions are high.
Ah, that's understandable then.
I had a think about what you and others have said, and comments seems to be a useful way to contribute. I already helped somebody out with formatting a post for instance, which in turn helped him promote his images. Since being on the platform I've built up a bit of steem power so I'm pretty happy to cruise steemit that way and gradually build my position.
I guess every website has it's downsides. I mean for example Facebook is (in my opinion) very toxic and same with YouTube as well. Steemit is alot better than those but yeah I do agree with the downsides. I guess the community is way smaller here that's why some topics might not get a lot of attention.
keep working to get the maximum result in friend steemit @terrylovejoy
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STOPReally a very nice post you distribute to us. Your research on the sky is really the one that I pray for you. This is how you distribute the experience of the sky and the underground thanks to giving you such a beautiful post.