TIL: Today I learned It Doesn't Matter How Hard You Work On A Post

in #til9 years ago


*pixabay

People say It's the quality of the post that users vote on. What users are voting? Bots. It's all in perspective but the motivation to spend hours to make a nice post doesn't seem to matter here. As long If it is liked or not liked.

What standard do we follow in all the mess? Maybe I might be the only one confused but is it terrible to say that I see better results spending a few minutes creating a post than I do spending hours on one and really putting thought into it?

For the time being they way things seem to be in my eyes is just to socialize and create whatever content that comes to you. Besides the fact of having to being popular with the reputation and having a lot of Steem Power, the identity of this platform is confusing and I hope we figure out who we are.

-Rant :P

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Glad that you are learning!

Just remember, when it comes to posts payouts on steemit, the RHYME and REASON is simple: It doesn't rhyme and there is no reason!

case closed!

I made a whole post about that recently, and people seemed to like it!

If you don't got the rhyme, people don't have the time.

The time is 9
and the rhyme is mine.

Since you had the time, that is why you rhyme

unfortunately, effort isn't what gets rewarded. Content that appeals to those who read it is what gets rewarded. It's like anything else, we have to catch the readers eye to get looked at and then provide the content that keeps them reading down to the upvote point.

I might think I'm writing gold standard material but if the reader doesn't see it that way, it's not getting upvoted or resteemed.

Yes so true. That's why I stopped putting effort into posts.

That doesn't mean that you stop making an effort, it just means that you realize what is a great post to you, may not be for your audience. Writing isn't about the writer, it is about the reader .

I totally agree with you but I don't think that's the current state of things at the moment. Perhaps after the hardfork we will see it be about the reader because at the moment, it's about only the whale reader.

I use a bot and when I wake up in the morning I read the posts that it voted for, then I read the posts that things like "Daily Tribune" and "Crowdfundedwhale" voted for, then I read some posts and resteems from my followed feed, then I cruise the 30 minute mark n the new feed during the day for new people to follow. Every now and then I go to someone's profile to read their last few posts.

That's how I found this post, which I will now vote up manually after reading it, reading the comments, and writing a comment myself. But even so there's a large amount of random chance in what I might read.

So I absolutely feel what you are saying. I still feel like my best story ever is significantly undervalued. In fact, the index I posted that only links to the best story I posted got more votes than the story.

Yea makes sense. This didn't take much effort to write. This probably one of the least time I took to write on a post. So since here are a lot of people using bots to vote, not much is really paying attention to what they are voting on and are voting on some nonsense posts. I honestly think this post I did is nonsense but apparently this is what get's votes.

Hopefully, for the optimist in me, there are about three main streams of posts.

  1. Gamified posting by people who are here to make a profit and nothing else. They may have a vague idea that improving the community improves their return, but they won't let that stop them from extracting as much cash as they can get from the system.

  2. High effort posts by dedicated Steemers which can only gain points by random chance. It would be nice if there were some residual profit that could be made by them for late votes. I know I have read at least 100 three month old posts to learn about Steemit, for which no one got any credit. This also includes creative and educational posts, which always have a value, but excludes gamified post which lose their value immediately.

  3. Personal posts like this one which build the community but have little other measurable value. They are topical, and have a value for having existed, in that you and I, for instance, have had a conversation that reflects in our future posts. Immeasurable and technically unrewardable, but a real value nonetheless. Current votes from people like me reflect that value.

Dang, I should make this into a post.

I wish I had a lot of voting power. Your information is worth something. You can try put it up as a post but I think it's worth more than you can ever get on a post :)

I agree.
I've made more off a two line post that I did just "off hand" than a two thousand word story, complete with pictures and video.
No idea why.

That has happened to me too. I think posting from the heart must be the reward in and of itself. Everything else is unclear!

It's confusing no?

I appreciate you sharing your thoughts. It gives me some idea of what to expect from the medium. I get a sense that STEEM is still working itself out and that it will be an increase in the user base which will improve matters. At the moment I imagine there are not enough people in each niche to make a self sustaining niche community.

Thank you, just was a little rant to spark up conversations to see how others feel or agree. We'll see how things turn out in a few weeks.

Unfortunately what is gold standard quality doesn't always translate into being popular. The Jerry Springer show for example was insanely popular for years, yet was crap on the quality scale (imo.)

I will say that there is an often unspoken piece here on steemit (and really authoring in general) of marketing and networking. When we put a post out, it's just one among a huge list (whether in the steemit feed, the chatroom, a discord channel, etc.) so having something that makes the post stand out from the crowd is necessary. This can range anything from the catchy headline/thumbnail image to build up name recognition and/or direct relationship. (My real life local friends are more on my radar for example.)

While I'm by no means saying this is ideal in the sense of good quality content being seen (and/or rewarded,) it's human nature, especially when we only have so much time/attention in a day to read (ideally) and vote.

It's for this specific reason that I tend to recommend to people I bring in (and provide that necessary help/hand holding at the beginning) to make their first post CONTENT take them no more than a few minutes to create (especially with them having to also spend time on the formatting and promoting.) Even when followers are established, it's still a roll of the dice being in the right place, at the right time, or added to a vote list.

I will say that I'm probably one of the few that hasn't moved away from manual voting. I have nothing against it (again since there's only so much time in the day) and often there is a human in the loop as a direct curator or to tweak the vote bot code itself. I just personally like 'hitting the button' and frequently vote on things for reasons outside pure quality or curation...such as an 'atta boy' for a new or progressing content creator.

Very good point. It just baffles me that there is no standard. I guess that the con of no cencorship

People like what they like and want what they want. However i do think that over time, the userbase increasing and there being more whales, we'll have an easier time finding curation niches.

Curation guilds do have some standards, and i foresee that style becoming the norm. Individual users will always be difficult to predict since they usually have a vast array of reasons to vote.

My experience was that I got no new followers when I posted something without a lot of effort, even if I got more valuable upvotes. When I work hard on a post I get usually more comments and more followers. But I'm just here for three weeks so I don't think my experience is all that important. ;)

Interesting. I've been at it since august so it's a mystery to me.

@bitcoinparadise - You are on my bot-upvote list because I have liked what you have written so far, and I don´t have time to read them as they come out 24/7 - so I prefer to read when I have the time to do so, which in this case is today - 2 days after you published this article.

I upvote @papa-pepper as well automatically with my bot - I like his content as well, but I do not have time to read his articles as well when they hit the feed, but I read them later when I have the time.

Think of it as a Magazine-subscription
I will keep you on my upvote bot as a subscriber to your content as long as you produce great content, and I will remove you from it if you do no longer produce.

That's what's so confusing because I considered this not producing and yet it did better than most of my posts. I did think "how is that post getting a high payout?" for not producing what I thought was not great content. Then I even heard you in Steemspeak about judging content and it's from a perspective. It's no biggie if you remove me from your bot. I am just trying to produce content just like everyone else and see if anyone likes it or not. Spending less time to write a post has been working better for me. Should I not go with the better results?

Well, here is the thing - your short term result of making a shit-post with a high payout will only result in the bot-owners taking you off their upvote bots and focus on users who produce better stuff. I can assure you that what I don´t want to read when I sit on the toilet with my iPad is some blogger complaining about how little money he is making and that he will not put any effort into making his posts better.

You are basically telling your subscribers and readers to sod off with that kind of attitude, and that is exactly what they do.

I understand and if you don't like what I produce anymore then that's understandable. I think It's a bit hypocritical after that argument that you had with @noganoo the other day. I even made a post explaining the change in attitude but I'm not sure if you read that one. I know I'm not really making anything and it's no big deal. I mean it is what drew me in as any investment. To me, seeing shit like I made was an issue and I wanted to make some "noise" and it worked :)

well, I just wanted you to know that your posts are being read. :)
Steem on

@fyrstikken, they are more now :P just a sneaky marketing strategy. I do appreciate you taking the time to read my posts.

My posting story shows there is no rhyme or reason. I have made 19 posts all about the same topics and all with great photos. Now the topic is not mainstream - Australian Native Orchids - though the tag is - Photography. It all feels a bit like baseball. Swing - miss. Swing - hit.

Unlike baseball I am not walking after 3 misses. I will keep posting because I get a buzz out of sharing and some people like my stuff. And that ultimately is I think what we are trying to create here. A place for sharing great original material - thoughts, dreams, observations, rants, inspirations, challenges, pains,, etc. Anything that might lighten someone's day.

And some day the rewards will come and some days they will not. What I do know is there are none in the other places I share stuff.

perhaps but it's a shame I see better results with half ass effort.

I agree. We just have to hope the cream rises to the top (and vote for them) and the "half-assers" of the world get disheartened after a few misses. They will as that is the nature of half ass - here for the easy wins and gone when the wins are harder.

So how can we make it harder for the half-assers? lol

I do not understand the ramifications and costs of downvoting so I will not profer any ideas using that.

  1. We could start to build lists of half-assers and make sure any bot voting we use (I started to use @steemvoter this weekend) avoids them.
  2. We could actively use comments to display displeasure - and then upvote the displeasure comments.

Maybe someone who has more insights with using downvotes could comment. My brain is not ready to grasp this field just yet - I am at overload after a big weekend of learning new dimensions of Steemit.

If we build lists, I would think people could just create a new account. Yea It's amazing on so many ways we could go with this platform. I appreciate the replies @carrinm

This post has been ranked within the top 50 most undervalued posts in the first half of Nov 21. We estimate that this post is undervalued by $6.17 as compared to a scenario in which every voter had an equal say.

See the full rankings and details in The Daily Tribune: Nov 21 - Part I. You can also read about some of our methodology, data analysis and technical details in our initial post.

If you are the author and would prefer not to receive these comments, simply reply "Stop" to this comment.

I see this on almost every post I do...

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