Contentedly Engaged

tarazkp (84)in #hive • 2 years ago

I have failed quite a lot this year in my opinion.

Here were the last two times:

4th of September 2021

25th July 2021

It has actually been about 30 times in the last year I have failed to get double digits on comments. This is the 347th day of 2021 and since I post on average twice a day (estimated) that means that so far, I can estimate to have about 700 posts this year. That means just over 4% of my posts have failed to get into the double digits for comments - but I don't have a single post this year that has failed to get comments at all - I don't know when the last one of those might be and I have been posting daily for 4.5 years.

Does this matter?

In the grand scheme of things, probably not much, but to me it does. The reason is that I like to create content that is engaging and people are willing to think about and comment on with more than - nice post, great pic, or some inane meaningless line. Most of my posts accomplish this and I suspect that when evaluated on average and compared to all other posts, my content probably gets some of the best comments on the blockchain - especially considering that I do this a couple times a day.

Since I try to answer all (I manage most of them I hope) comments with something meaningful in return, I end up spending quite a bit of time engaging with all kinds of people on Hive and, at all levels. I don't give priority to reputation or wallet, I just interact with people who take their time to give some thought to what the topic at hand is. I enjoy getting a wide selection of insight and I believe it has value in developing the content creator and consumer side of the community.

It took me a while to scroll through to the start of the year to look at all of the comments on each post, but taking a guesstimate, I suspect that I likely average around 30 total comments per post (perhaps @abh12345 can run the numbers one day) and most of the comments are probably quite decent. The average for my last 10 posts is over 40 and due to the "too long, didn't read" nature of it, it isn't the easiest to engage with - yet gets engagement. The idea that longform content doesn't get attention doesn't hold up.

Yes, I reward (most) comments too, which likely accounts for some of the comments I get, but not all - as I do think there are quite a few who generally enjoy engaging here on these posts. However, part of the distribution on Hive is through rewarded engagement, so I see rewarding comments as a value-adding mechanism itself and is highly valuable for those who might not be the greatest content creators, but still want to participate in the content communities.

A couple days back I wrote a post mentioning the importance of intention and I wonder what people really intend to accomplish with their content - what is the point? I hear people talk about "presenting the truth" and the like, but if no one is consuming or engaging with it it is failing to do anything at all. For information to have value, it has to be consumed, it has to be onboarded, interacted with, affect some kind of change in thought or behavior - so much of the content I see, doesn't seem to have any intention behind it at all, other than to collect a reward. It doesn't even seem like the people writing it are even interested in what they are writing about most of the time themselves.

As a content creator who values engagement and interaction, it is my job to build the conditions for consumption. A lot of people seem to still believe that votes are the only way to get visibility for engagement, but this actually doesn't work very well in most cases, especially since now, most people don't visit Trending on hive.blog at all. We can actually see this "vote for visibility" largely failing when we visit Trending, since many of the posts that appear there have little to no engagement at all, despite the votes on it. If upvotes don't heavily affect increased viewership and engagement, this also destroys the argument of downvotes are censorship - something to think about.

The only way to really increase readership is through building an audience and getting a post into Trending once, twice or ten times, doesn't do that at all. In fact, there are many accounts that are commonly in Trending for years on end which have close to no engagement, because regardless of the votes, the content doesn't have a readership - there is little audience.

The easiest way to get a post viewed is to attract followers who care about the content, something that not many seem to think about. If the content isn't attractive to the audience, why would they follow? "Attractive" doesn't mean pretty, it means that it offers the viewer something they value enough to spend their time on to read, look at, engage with and potentially even upvote. If they do not see it as valuable to them either directly or indirectly by being valuable to other people they value themselves, they are unlikely to use their stake potential to reward it, let alone give the account a follow and even less, share the content.

Sharing is not only through reblogs and Twitter either. I think that part of the reason I have been able to build "staked support" from within the community is that some of my posts have been shared privately in discords by people who have been interested in what was being said. Not all has attracted positive attention based on topic, but there is a social network at play here and the reputation of people goes beyond stake or that silly metric next to the name. Having trusted people share content is probably the most valuable share a content creator can get.

My goal for content creation isn't to create something attractive for the entire blockchain, it is to provide something of interest to those who are likely to read it and, those who might be likely to read it. I like to write across many topics however and due to broad experience and my own interests IRL, I am able to generally write in depth or, explore areas I don't know much about on many things.

But personally, my goal is to create and explore topics I care about, that I have myself invested into, the things where I have skin in the game. This is not just financial skin, but experiential skin too and of course, areas that I am looking to invest myself into in the future. Because of this approach, it is more likely that a lot of what I write is going to connect with people on their personal levels too - because we aren't that dissimilar from each other that there is no overlap in our likes, loves, desires and fears.

There is the common suggestion when creating anything to, "know your audience" and this is apparently very hard for many people, as all they think about is what they can get out of it, rather than what others could. They create for themselves alone, which is absolutely fine, but this isn't necessarily attractive or rewarded, since people are less likely to find value when they consume it. Which then begs the question, what is the intention of the content?

Many people don't care at all about whether their content gets consumed or not, as long as they get their own goals satisfied. For many, it is the reward and for others, it is having their ego stroked by a narrow group of readers, or getting attention, anyway they can. For me, I love to write and do so daily, but if there was one way to kill my enthusiasm to post like this on the blockchain, it would be if I was consistently getting no interaction with the audience. I am not a "throw it out into the ether" creator for likes, I want some level of conversation to be generated too. I know that for many reasons, engagement on posts ebbs and flows, just like votes do, but I hope that don't fail to generate interest too often.

There are already far too many platforms that have meaningless content that generates nothing of consumer value, but trillions for the platforms that encourage it. There are already many "aggregator" sites that collect news articles, many regurgitators of current affairs on both mainstream and fringe topics, and SEO content to enhance Time on Site (ToS) numbers - what is missing is peer-to-peer content, where people actually generate content to be valuable to each other to support building of communities and the relationships that strengthen them for improved experience together.

This can encompass all kinds of content - but still, intention matters.

If no one is engaging, the content is likely not having an effect on anyone, making it socially valueless. Is that the result people intend to have with the content they produce?

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]