RE: A Crossroads for The Mesopotamians
Ultimately, the decision must be yours Tim. I can see where you're coming from. Things did seem to be getting a bit better a couple of weeks after HF20, but now we seem to be heading back to how things were as people get back to milking the system.
Having said that, I got a comment on my contest post (the really long one from @eoj) which made me realise just how much projects like yours are keeping user retention up. If these projects drop out I do believe Steemit will see a slow decline in users.
In a way there is potential in the 50% curation if it can encourage people back to voting for curation instead of delegating to bid bots. The consumer base on the internet is bigger than the producer base, so if the consumer base can be enticed onto here it will benefit authors as well. At the moment the only real way to earn with a small account is through posting and those who struggle to provide decent content resort to spam in order to make anything. If they could be rewarded better for being consumers, they would benefit as well as benefiting content producers.
Now I've laid all my thoughts out, I'll just say whatever you choose to do, you have my blessing and respect. I can't thank you enough for all you've done through The Mesopotamians.
Posted using Partiko Android
You could put a decent advertising package behind the idea that you can put $100 here, use it to pay for content, and end up with more than when you started. Could probably even paywall content to people willing to vote on it, since their vote "doesn't cost them anything."
But nobody's interested in doing that because it would mean going out and getting users, and we're supposed to wait around for the next price pump to bring them in droves.
As someone who has been a professional writer for much of my adult life, one way or another, even when I wasn't pursuing it as a career, I feel comfortable in saying this without question:
When someone can pay me a predictable amount that I can count on in a reasonable manner, I write and deliver for them.
It is theoretically possible that you could drop $100 on five articles from decent writers that you found on the steem blockchain and maybe, if you got particularly lucky, turn it around and earn more than $100 in vote value. Maybe. Possibly. In a very narrow slice of possible content.
And that, really, is the problem.
I recognize that as a creator I could probably sink more time into this platform and make a few extra bucks – but I would have to write about cryptocurrency or, better, the steem blockchain itself, it couldn't be critical, and if I really wanted the big bucks I'd have to promise the moon and keep promising it every day.
You know what? I'm not interested in doing that. Very few writers or creators are interested in doing that.
And that's the problem, really. The social network aspect of the steem blockchain is monocultural; it cultivates one social niche, the crypto-cultist. Good luck trying to find and establish another community, another group, another topicality of larger than three or four other people, and none of those people are are going to be whales.
That's a problem. That is a serious problem. Once a creator comes to that conclusion, they recognize that they might as well just post their content someplace that supports the creation of that content, whether it be with a very pleasant editor and reading environment (Medium), or a site under their control where they direct traffic via popular social media platform (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram).
For creators, it's about content. Unfortunately, for the majority of people involved with the steem blockchain, content is a tertiary concern it most.
What do you write, and can I hire you?
Sorry, the old editor brain kicked in for a minute there. I don't actually have a publication at the moment.
Yep, and this pretty much kicks those of us who want it to be something else in the balls. Though, if there's anybody in these comments you don't already know, you might want to follow them. They're all people who are way more interesting than talk about crypto. (Or than I am lately. I kind of want to go back to being more interesting than that.)
I really like this idea of advertising content. As I said in my comment, those are things that can be implemented on Whaleshares. Especially because you have to share a post to reward it.
If things go smoothly on Whaleshares with some mechanism that can function like the one you just described Steem will have little options if it wants to keep the head position.
I still wonder if that's a path they may need to take.