RE: [Analysis] Does Money Vote For Money?
As a relative newbie on the platform this was pretty interesting (and disheartening). While I didn't understand all of the terms used in your analysis (again, newbie on the platform) or the math in your analysis, the conclusions help to explain why some of the posts that I follow have large dollar values for less than great content, while some new users that are writing (in my opinion) better content make dozens of pennies per post.
I guess the other way of looking at it is that the fact that the higher reputation users are at least passing some influence out of their orbit is a good thing, even if it would probably help things overall if it were higher.
At the same time, I imagine a lot of them have been around for a while producing content and have earned what kind of content and tone gets those votes from others with similar reputation which makes it more likely that they'd vote for each other.
This is going to be advice that no one else on the platform is going to give you, but loosely because it is some of the best advice you are ever going to get.
If you want to remain happy with any community, no matter what kind of community that is, do not look and see how the sausage is made. Do everything you can do to stay out of administration, responsibility, a position of power, a position of inquiry, and generally avoid knowing how things work or why things work – just work with them in ways that give you gratified pleasure.
Because if you don't, if you see how the sausage is made, there is no going back. There is only suffering. You will become disenchanted, disheartened, and disengaged, while simultaneously getting sucked in if you show even the slightest amount of talent for understanding what you've seen.
There is no punishment like success.
You'll notice that in this entire analysis there is no discussion of types of content, what kind of content was being voted on, what kind of engagement was underway, just pure numbers.
That was no accident.
Because so many of the high Reputation accounts are fairly clearly bots or automated-augmented accounts of one sort or another, that is to say a lot of up vote bots, I'm not sure that a content analysis methodology would even be meaningful. It's questionable how useful looking at in group versus outgroup voting actually is, because I can't really determine how many of those votes were purchased. It may be that quite a lot of them were at the behest of another account, and votes placed willfully and with volition were even more incestuous.
There's just no way to know.
It's difficult to know what is going on entirely, but if you really want to touch the meaty goodness of the sausage while it's being ground, some of my code might make a good basis for starting to learn how to use Python to go rummaging around in the blockchain garbage cans to see what you can turn up.
Yap!! well said!! The only thing closer to the true success is: ¡The absence of it! ;)
To further the points that Lex made... I honestly believe that on this platform (the same as any other social media platform) - it's far more about relationships than the quality of content.
Exceptional content may be found by curators like @curie, @ocd and @qurator, but vastly, quality of content is highly subjective, and relationships are key. YouTube is another great example of this.. YouTubers with 10 years experience often have much bigger followings than others producing 'better' videos because they've had longer to create relationships... but by the same token, people can go viral and rocket up the ranks for a short time.