Interesting People #23: Dragos Roua on Steemit’s problems, and what we should do about them

In this conclusion to our three-part discussion we talk about some of the more contentious issues on Steemit: self-voting, upvote bots, users who flood the feed with low quality posts, the project’s apparent lack of leadership, and more. If you missed them, part 1 of my interview with Steemit witness @dragosroua can be found here, and part 2 is here. 

OK, we ended the last part with a mention of bots, which leads me to one of the supposed problems on Steemit: upvote bots like @booster, @randowhale, @lovejuice, @nettybot and @discordia. There’s also @treeplanter but he’s a little different as users don’t make as much profit, but instead he plants trees in Cameroon as part of an awesome program to save Abongphen Highland Forest.

Now, I’m using most of these bots on all my posts at the moment. They’re there, and if I don’t make use of them, I’m at the disadvantage. Let’s say I’m a new user… I want my reputation to increase, I want my posts to have visibility and I want my rewards increased. I feel my content is pretty good, at least better than the users who plagiarise someone else’s writing, or post a single photo and a word or two and are happy to take in a few cents. Given that these guys can use the same bots to boost their rewards and raise their reputation, I’m going to use them too while they’re around. What are your thoughts on that?
Dragos: So first of all, the reputation goes up when somebody with higher reputation than you upvotes you, but there’s nothing in the code that you get more Steem Power the more your reputation goes up. Reputation’s a vanity metric.

It does nothing?
Dragos: Exactly – it does nothing, from a financial point of view. If you look at the whales, some of them have a reputation of 42 and they’ve never posted at all, and they have like 500,000 Steem. Reputation is not tied to anything, but so many newcomers are interested in that.

Now, I think upvote bots, as you call them – well, I wasn’t very aware of them because I’m not in the target anymore, but I see that as a little bit of an ecosystem going on. I think it’s a good thing because it gives people a way of consuming Steem and making Steem travel from one person to another. That’s important because they are creating processes, and the platform needs processes between people to discover and understand the real value of Steem.

If you keep your money, and this other guy keeps his money, and that other guy keeps his money, nothing will happen. The real price will not be discovered. Price is discovered only when there is interaction, and I think these upvote bots, which can be made for better or worse, can help with that.

There’s nothing wrong with that – it’s like a community boosting feature. They may probably create some form of social engagement as well, like the example you gave of the guy planting trees in Cameroon. I have nothing against them. It’s a cool way to get something going on.

So, as a counter to that, I can send to a whole load of bots and time it so that I am featured in ‘hot’ and I can promote myself more, and it shows what could be a shortcoming in Steemit in that the kind of content that rises into your attention sphere can be manipulated by paying money for it. I may have the shittest article but I have enough SBD to promote myself, while someone else’s great post which should have risen on merit remains below the fold. What do you think of that argument?
Dragos: I think you just described the Steemit business model! (laughs) The Steemit business model is paying for users’ attention – this is what everything is about! Steemit is a way of buying people’s attention with money, and I think it works. It works everywhere. You see a lot of shitty content in the form of advertising on TV. Why? Because people pay for that.

It doesn’t change much from the inherent structure of the human being, this Steemit, nor the way our attention is sold to advertisers. It just eliminates the middle man, OK? That’s what it does, but in a way that is revolutionary.  So, I don’t see this as a shortcoming at all. I see this as a symptom that Steemit is going in the right direction. If you want to grow higher on the platform, you may have to pay for it.

OK, that’s really a great way to look at it. The next thing I wanted to ask about was onboarding. It’s slow to get new users in, and Steemit is trying to go up against platforms that have hundreds of millions if not billions of users. We’ve got a really slow influx of users, and many of them, when they arrive simply put up low-quality content clogging the feeds. You really need curation – someone to go out there and find new people. But then you reach a critical mass where you can’t spend time looking for new people or you won’t have time to read the content of the people you follow and really enjoy. Can anything be done about the amount of poor quality content?
Dragos: I understand what you’re saying and I’ve run into this myself. This is usually referred to as the tragedy of the commons. The paradox when you go mainstream and you’re not niched – you know, if you look at Steemit as a very ‘cool’ place where all the cool guys hang out? Well, if you also want exposure and want to gain an audience of hundreds of thousands of people, well you have to balance this.

In the beginning, even 8 or 9 months ago, Steemit was a place frequented only by guys who had a common interest in anarchy, blockchain, that kind of stuff. Very few people even knew about Steemit at that point. The quality of the content was a little bit higher – at least, it wasn’t shitty. The reason for people being there was to share information and actually build something.

Right now, we have an influx of people from places that are less developed, and they’re seeing Steemit as a quick way to make a buck. For them, $1 is something like food for a week, so it’s important for them to do something that can generate that revenue as quickly as they can.

So, I don’t excuse them, but this is something we need to be aware of. If Steemit is “blog and get paid” then a lot of them are going to write shitty blog posts hoping to get paid for that.

But there are two questions in what you asked. The other is “what are we going to do with those guys?”… and I say, I don’t know. This is how it is. My approach is to ignore them. If you ignore them, they will naturally get selected, or filtered. Another thing I do is I post more or less regularly a few rules of how not to be a Steemit douche and I keep that in my footer. Also, I am encouraging people who post meaningful comments.

This is how you create a bit of glue between your followers. In the beginning everyone will say, “hi, upvote my post because I upvoted yours! Follow me!”. I totally ignore them, and I don’t flag them, because after a while the energy gets consumed and they think, “OK, I don’t get anything for that, forget it”. They will stop.

The other part of the question is: how do you create an audience? At this time, Steemit as a platform is quite opaque. In a way, it is like the initial App Store. Their metacontent was like a black box and you couldn’t do much about that. This is how Steemit is right now and it poses an interesting challenge, because you really have to do your homework.

Say you’ve found this platform and you believe it will multiply your blogging skills and suddenly turn them into money, and it will serve you an audience on a silver platter… well, I don’t believe this is going to happen. You have to work hard for your audience. I have had a blog for nine years. I started in 2008 after I sold my company, writing in English and I worked for two years… for two years… posting every day – every fucking day! – until I got on the first page of Reddit and got really viral and had like 20,000 visitors in one day. But remember, I had to work for two years. And now, you are here for three months and say to yourself, “OK, nothing’s happening. I have no readers!”. Well, you have to work hard! (laughs)

Because Steemit is so opaque, you have to do it old-school: follow people, spend time identifying them and posting meaningful comments – get their attention. It’s slow but because of the fact we have money involved here, the bond seems to be stronger. Once you form a bond with a follower, because you know that there’s someone else exchanging money in the transaction, that bond will last for much longer.

In other places it may be like, “I heard of a blogger, he sounded really cool, but I don’t remember his name” – no. Here, the bond formed is really strong. But I do believe that it will take longer to build an audience right now, but the audience you build here will be more valuable.

Cool. Awesome insights! So, I’ve only really heard about this and I’ve only experienced it once as I’ve only had one of my posts go huge when @hendrikdegrote gave me a $500 upvote and I got on @curie. Unfortunately Steem tanked that exact same week and by the end of it, it was worth around $290 – but that doesn’t matter, as it was my first exposure to whales. I initially thought, “wow, hundreds of people must have read it and voted!” but when I looked closer, it was actually just one major votes and not all that many page views by this time. I got talking to some people on Discord who started telling me how you get these whale circle-jerks where they all upvote each other and the money just goes to the top people. So, some people say, “there should be a maximum post value cap!” and others say, “there should be more even reward distribution” while others just say, “fuck it, life’s not fair, so why should Steemit be any different?”. What’s your attitude towards this?
Dragos: I think this is not a problem with whales.

It’s a problem of people?
Dragos: It’s a problem of people, because if you take away the amount of money the whales have, and you look at the voting habits of whales and minnows, you’ll see that minnows tend to vote each other and create circle-jerks the same way the whales are doing! (laughs) OK? Just take the money out of the picture and you will see that people are voting the same. It’s just that the whales have more money than the minnows.

If you really want to become a whale, you can just buy Steem. Put $100,000 on the table and you can have about 100,000 Steem*, and then you can vote for whoever you want! Your vote will probably be worth about $100.
(*Note: this interview was conducted before this week’s Steem price hike.) 

The idea is that if you really want to make an impact, it’s the same as with every other area: buy something. I can see where it goes a little bit off if you’re imagining that Steemit is an equal place for everybody. Yes, it’s an equal place – but it’s not fair.

There is no such thing as fairness in life. You have an idea of fairness, I have an idea of fairness, that whale has an idea of fairness… I’m sure that for that whale, it was very fair to vote for their people, and they have no problem with that. I think fairness is a problem that is very subjective. If we try to enforce this with rules, we go into places I personally don’t want to go… I grew up in a socialist country until I was 19 and I don’t want to get there on Steemit, period.

I know how it is, and I know when people who have no idea how it is say, “OK, we should go there with Steemit”, well I just want to tell these people, “fuck off, you don’t know how it is!”. There’s no such thing as equal pay for everybody because we are different. We have different skills and expectations, different energy and abilities, so everybody should be paid according to what they do, not according to some rules.

@hendrikdegrote – making minnows’ dreams come true since September 2016. 

My personal recommendation would be to not get into those kinds of discussions, about whales circle-jerking and so on, and instead start to build slowly your circle of dolphins. That will be much more useful! There’s a thing that all the people who focus their attention on the circle-jerks aren’t seeing, and that is that while you are whining, there are people out there making money! And not only through better blog posts or writing skills – those are secondary in this place. Community building skills are more important! You first build your audience, start to create relationships with people, and then start blogging and measure this over the course of at least six months.  Instead of just whining, just post something good, hone your writing skills – stop whining about it being unfair. Who cares? Everything is unfair! (laughs)

Well, I kind of think the same thing. It stings sometimes to see the rewards for some of the posts out there, but at the same time: it’s just not fair. Life’s not fair… somewhere near here is a guy living in a cardboard box. You think he cares that some whale has not upvoted me?
Dragos: Yeah! That’s such a first-world problem! “Oh my, this whale didn’t vote for me, I am so poor!” (laughs) Look at it that way – from the perspective of the guy in the cardboard box.

So, I also wanted to ask about self-voting. Some people have a big problem with this – sometimes on posts, sometimes on comments, sometimes altogether – what do you think? I think self-voting your posts, if you feel you deserve it, is a fine use of one of your 10 votes per day. Likewise, you can strategically vote on a comment to get it up above all the spam and that much more noticed. What is your take on this?
Dragos: I don’t think this is something bad per-se. Once you get to a certain level of Steem Power, and I am talking about the way that the entire Steemit enterprise works, your level of Steem Power entitles you to a certain amount of the reward pool. It’s like shares in the company. In the whitepaper, this term “shares in the company” is used quite frequently. If you want to make use of the Steem Power and draw some shares from the ongoing printing of value, I think that’s your right.

Now, if you do this all the time and you upvote all your comments, I think you are doing it a little too much. I don’t think it’s bad from a financial point of view because I don’t think it will hurt the platform too much, but it’s bad for you as an individual because you will focus too much on giving value to yourself first. That never works in the long run.

If you go an upvote yourself for a year, you may probably get to a place where your ROI would be 3 or 4% per year, and this is better than keeping the money in the bank. So if you have this point of view, you can say to yourself, “I’m going to post on this platform, I am going to upvote the shit out of myself and my comments, and at the end of the year I will have 3 or 4% more money than I initially invested”.

What you are losing by going with this approach is the chance of a serendipitous encounter with other people. You may benefit from the fact that outside of the plastic bag in which you’re voting for yourself, you may find more influential people or more helpful people, and that’s where the real value is.

Say you put in some money and upvote yourself and end up with, say, $3,000 more at the end of the year – well, if you got just six votes from @hendrikdegrote or similar over the course of a year, well, that’s amazing, because you made the same amount of money from other people, while you are helping other people.

And six votes. That means you have two months to generate each vote. In two months I guarantee you that if you do your job right here, with community building, writing, curating, stuff like that, you generate more than that.

So, like I said, I don’t see something bad per se. I am upvoting my own posts, but I am not upvoting my comments. I am upvoting all the posts I publish, which is 2 or 3 per day, and other than that no. And I also have this contest where I give full upvotes to other people.

Through the steem.supply Easter eggs?
Dragos: Yeah, through the Easter eggs, stuff like that. I try to build a community and I try to build positive expectations around my activity, because when you build that, it will come back.

On top of the fact that it’s really useful for checking up on your upcoming payment, @dragosroua also rewards users who discover the Easter eggs he hides in the page. View full size.

OK great. Well, now total open ended: if you could suggest something that should change about Steemit, what would those be?
Dragos:  There is a very subtle situation that is going on here that probably hurts Steem more than any technical stuff, and that is: who the fuck is leading Steemit? Who is running this?  

There is some Steemit, Inc which is focusing on its development, and there are a few witnesses who are basically following the technical side of things, which is good in the beginning as you have technical guys who don’t let the network collapse and so forth. But, I see that from this collection of witnesses, something social should emerge. Some direction should emerge, and we should start voting on more sensitive issues than, say, what integer size should be used.

I think this lack of leadership which is perceived, and thus probably real, makes people confused – especially newcomers. Let’s say I come to Steemit and I wonder, “where is the Mark Zuckerberg of Steemit?!” – there really isn’t. There is Ned Scott who is following the development, and I know from sources very close to Ned and from my discussions with him and from his commenting on my posts, that his vision is that he builds something and then expects other people to build on top of it. To create ecosystems around it! Not to be like a huge, monolithic behemoth like Facebook or anything like that.

This way of transmitting that message is not very popular, and Steemit has a huge communication problem. The more subtle the leadership, the more visible the communication issue, and I certainly think they should do something about that. They had a few trials and errors, like hiring some marketing guys and stuff like that. But they’re quite young, and I understand. Ned is 28, Dan was in his early 30s, and it’s east to get stuck with people the same age. They want to hire guys in their 20s who know about marketing… but at the end of the month or the quarter or whatever, you realise the guy knows nothing, and he’s just followed hype and so on.

Now, maybe he is well-intended, but now you need to set your sights on people who are mid-level or more senior, and really know what they are doing. You need them in your close circle of people who are leading your development.

Well, wow, what can I say Dragos – thanks a lot. This interview has really run over time and I’ll probably be able to break it into three parts, but thanks so much for your time.
Dragos: Thanks so much for having me – it was a nice experience!

Yes, very cool – I’ve really enjoyed talking to you. Cheers!
Dragos: Thank you. Bye!

A massive thank you to @dragosroua for sharing all of this with us. You can vote for him as witness and visit his website at http://dragosroua.com/. Curious about when your next Steemit payments are due? Check out his app at http://steem.supply/ 

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