I like to watch moto-vlogs on Youtube. I enjoy motorcycles and the scenery. I don't watch every moto-vlog because some of those people are lame. What makes a popular moto-vlog is the person. It's them adding their personalized touch. What they say, how they say it, who they are.
I'm an artist here. I always tell new artists to add their personalities into their posts. Not many want to follow the art, they want to follow the artist. There are literally millions of images to look at. What sets them apart is how they look, and who did it. That's how this works.
Let's say you came here and decided to talk about trees. All of your posts were trees. Pictures of trees and words about trees. "This is a maple tree." Who follows a tree? Nobody. Those who came here to share information and not their personality typically struggle because people want to know people, not trees. The moment you personalize your tree blog and make it about you and your experiences with trees, more people become interested and the rest of the tree blogs stagnate. This is the entertainment industry. That's how it works.
its the only way to get some votes
No it isn't. I've been here since September 2016. We didn't have these stupid paid votes before. We had people willing to look and find people who were interesting. If someone's blog is failing these days and they can't even pay people to look, it is NOT the fault of the platform, it is their own approach to blogging that is holding them back. That's life.
Maybe back in 2016 it wasn't this way, but Im here since June 2017 and it's pretty much what defines steemit for me. I get what you say about the person behind the blog, the personality you add to your content making it unique and worth watching/reading. But in my opinion thats not the case in here, its not even close to be like this, if you check the trending page as I said before you are gonna see the same users everyday, with the same shitty posts (in most of the cases, Im not saying all of them) rewarded with thousands of dollars, and whales keep voting for that shit. If you are new here you must be lucky to be discovered by ocd, or curie, or maybe make friends with some whale, it thats not the case then try to be happy with your 0.something posts.
So why not just fix the trending page?
Have the paid programming posts removed and put in the promoted tab after someone uses a bot to "promote"
Detect the self vote and have that removed from what the trending page picks up as popular due to high rewards and just let the other votes speak for the post. If someone games the system by using an alternate account to trend consistently, remove that vote as well. They'd still earn their rewards, they just wouldn't be exploiting the flaw to gain more exposure and they wouldn't be there all of the time.
Limit accounts so they only qualify for one trending post per day. They can still make as many posts as they want, it just can't hijack the page.
Simple stuff.
By the way:
Only because you guys make it happen. I'm still here. I'm not buying votes. When you buy a vote, you bump my work down, so I certainly won't be voting for yours. Especially if you or someone else has $50 beside their post and 5 views. There's no way in hell I'd vote for that nonsense because those people are using tricks and attempting to mislead me into voting for them. NO thanks.
I totally agree with you in the fixing the trending page points, it's one of the most important keys to keep "a fair ecosystem". I'm still here too, and if was only about money probably I would last a couple of months, and I tried bots at first, the leave them, then used them again, then leave them, and so on. And if you check my wallet its nothing from the other world, I could buy bots, self vote all my posts and comments, I could rent some SP with my liquid money on bittrex and binance and I wouldn't make even a 10% of what some people are making with shitty posts everyday, so I don't care how minnows try to make something here, it will probably not affect the reward pool more than a couple of whales doing the same things.
For me, personally, I need to keep my track record as honest as possible. I could get work outside of this realm and use my blog as a reference to what I'm able to accomplish. If I bought my "salary" here, I wouldn't be able to laugh in the face of a low ball offer. Things like that are important to me. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, right? If someone came here scouting for talent, they would not look at the ones who are purchasing "success". Those folks are shooting themselves in the foot. Really though, it seems they just came for money and blogging or showcasing their talents comes second. That's doing it backwards. They don't know, because they're amateurs.
Anyway, that's just how I see things. People can game the system all they want. It's not everyday a shoplifter walks into a store, announces their name and kindly points out the fact they're about to leave with as much as they can carry. At least we can admire their "honesty."
I get your point, and I agree with everything, or almost everything, but as you said every action has an equal opposite reaction, so at the ends y sums up in a mix of what people are really looking here, and thats how content get spread, and wrote, and curated, and etc. its really hard to surf through steemit and find some interesting articles, not because people are not writing them, there are a lot of people doing amazing things.
At least people are getting more engaged in the comments, and discussing real things, not bot comments, this last pricing high brought a lot of things in here, in a good and a bad way, with their own reactions, thanks to both of those things more people ended up getting to know more about how things were going, or at least I can see that peculiar thing as a positive thing.
I think a lot of the points you brought up here are some that will get fixed or reshaped with communities and then hopefully with SMT's. I personally never check trending, which sometimes makes me miss important posts or people that have joined the platform but the vote-trading which is basically like self-voting 100% daily is what makes me not look there anymore. When I have free voting power to just curate for the sake of curation I find myself more often checking through tags in hot/new and tags that aren't as popular or abused.
I really do think communities will help this a lot, it will incentivize moderators of those communities to keep their tags clean and of high quality for other curators to spend more time in them much like subreddits work and grow.
SMT's will also change a bunch of things but its too early to say exactly how and what.
It feels weird responding to a comment knowing that the others above you may not read it. But oh well.
I really hope communities comes sooner rather than later, and I hope they don't wait for EOS before bringing them out, instead just keep EOS for the SMT's implementation. It's a hope because we all know we lose a lot of talented people everyday because they don't get discovered or it takes 1 month just to get approved.
It didn't take too long for Ben Lee, Donal Logue or Andreas M. Antonopoulos to get discovered here and it's great that they are here, but there are also people just as talented leaving frequently, I really hope communities changes that, allows us to discover people easier and more importantly keep them. That will make this place fun.
And OCD helps with that, great work building it.
I'm one of these: I'll believe it when I see it.
I hope we see change in the future but in the mean time, it would be nice to see some change.