Regardless of whether the price of Steem is rising or not ("not" seems to be the prevalent leaning at the moment), I find myself having a little more confidence in this venue, following the recent HF.21-22 changes... arriving at what many now call #NewSteem.
Earlier today, I found myself revisiting some thoughts from many moons ago, mostly centered on the idea of using this platform (or one of our many different front ends, to be specific) as simply a place to post for broader web consumption.
Are we open for business?
What MOST of Us Currently "Do..."
Typically, most of us around here tend to create content designed to be "consumed" within the community. That is — to put it as simply as possibly — "posting FOR Steemit." I'm just using the term "Steemit" very loosely here... I could be referring to Dtube, Actifit or any number of other venues.
That part is not what matters. What matters is that we tend to focus on creating content that's going to be served primarily to our "local" population, not the greater internet.
Of course, nothing really wrong with that... after all, we get paid for "member upvotes" not for "global pageviews."
But what if we were to take a bit of a chance, and cast about with a larget "net?"
Let's think about that, for a moment. If we truly want to increase the user base, aka "attract new people" and move towards some version of mass adoption, then we need to put our content in front of those new people, right?
Crow in the tree top
How I Got to Thinking About This...
Mrs. Denmarkguy and I were talking about the Fall Season for our respective businesses, and she mentioned that she was interested in running some kind of "Fall Relationship Special" on her counseling/coaching sessions, using my artwork as an add-on giveaway.
I told her that I would create some promotional posts for her offer, and post it to various social media.
At which point I thought to myself: "And WHY am I not including Steemlandia in my interpretation of social media to which I could post?"
Which got me to thinking about the fact that we do tend to isolate ourselves on our own little autonomous "Island" here... and — save for a handful of people who do lots of promotion on twitter — rarely do we cast further afield. And, to a fairly broad extent, content creators here don't do a lot of off-chain publicity for their content here.
Back in "the day" when we still had view counters on our posts, I did send a few to my greater social media network... and a couple got upwards of 3,000+ pageviews. I can't help but think that we need more of that, regardless of whether we get rewarded for those pageviews.
Evening light...
Considering Our Audience...
Fleshing this out a bit further, there's a difference between promoting an external service to the people of Steem... and simply writing a post that is 100% focused on the actual content, purely designed to reach anybody, anywhere, with zero regard for whether or not the outcome is lots of upvotes... or none at all.
For example, I use Facebook and some of my other blog sites simply to "promote." I don't care one whit where the readers come from. I'm not looking for WordPress readers for a WordPress blog post, and Facebook Friends for a Facebook post... I am just looking for people.
That's not an approach we take here, very often...
Purple flowers...
... for the simple reason of "there's money involved." In other words, it doesn't do me much "good" to get 10,000 hits on a post here, if nobody who's already HERE is going to upvote me.
And, in a sense, that's rather limiting... and I also mean "limiting" in the sense of attracting new faces to our community. Stated a little differently: Community growth is not incentivized!
So now I find myself pondering creative ways to make "externally appealing" content... here.
What do you think? What would you do? WOULD you do anything?
Thanks for reading!
(Another #creativecoin creative non-fiction post)
Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment-- share your experiences-- be part of the conversation!
(As usual, all text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is original content, created expressly for this platform.)
Created at 190923 23:48 PDT
1097
I posted something along these lines yesterday.. Not exactly the same points but if our posts were combined and given the amendment of please get out into the real world and do interesting things, many steemians would be forced to take stock of exactly what they’re creating here..
A feedback echo loop in the hopes of gaining 16 cent steem is well, a joke, to me anyway..
I’m pretty bored to tears with the majority of content here, and most that are here have strong opinions that big internet is the same or worse. But, I categorically reject these disgruntled claims from social media misfits as my very discerning attention span still finds wonderful stuff on even IG, Facebook, medium, and especially the heavily censored YT.. I even pay for Netflix which is kind of a jokes on me thing and not part of the free app domain but still I’m just saying steem doesn’t have much happening.
It has potential so I muster on as I see fit. I just saw that steempeak made a steem intro or tutorial video and guess what ? It is freaking 90 minutes long lmfao ! 90 minutes to explain monetized Reddit ! Of course I’m being a bit of an arse here, but the point remains ain’t nobody got time for that and if it doesn’t come with free breakfast or a time share scam at the end even the most easily influenced netizens will hit next and get back to memes and keyboard warrior life free from the trappings of “democracy”
An excellent and thoughtful comment @skramatters, and thank you!
As I mentioned elsewhere, there's a subtly myopic "smugness" around here among many of the people with influence that we "have all the answers to your social media dilemmas," but we actually have remarkably little to show for it... particularly in the context of having loads and loads of dynamic and interesting content to support such an assertion.
It reminds me of the early days of Apple vs. PC, where Apple users spent so much time being uber-smug about their "superior product" yet had very few real world applications (unless you were an ARTIST) to back that up... and so, they all say there, extolling their "greatness," while enjoying an 8% market share while PC based systems (that were "boring" but simply WORKED) had 92%.
Yes, that is a joke. And yes, a lot of people will come back with "tell that to someone in a developing nation where 16 cents pays for a days' food!" True, but I think it misses the point...
SteemPeak is perhaps doing the most towards developing a front end (at least) that is marginally USEFUL in a real-world context: It looks prettier, there are more features (like being able to group followers, favorite content lists and so on), and at least an ATTEMPT to simplify an interface that is otherwise FAR too complicated for the average web user who's idea of "How Things Should Work" is that you click a "Log in with Facebook" link and you're ready to go....
The smugness is comparable to the old PC vs apple camps, that's a great analogy.. Oddly enough I always found myself buying mac products second hand from artist friends and still to this day struggle on any other OS.
I will readily admit though that the mystique of apple hasn't held up over the years and I can imagine my iPad was my last used apple product purchase..
As for the tell that to someone in developing nation my immediate quip back is please tell me why this blockchain doesn't have a fantastic mobile app for those of us living in non first world countries? I include myself in that lot as I've lived on a second world budget for 3 years using only a mobile device on steem ever. It stands to reason if the focus was bridging economic inequalities we would have a mobile first design as well as fantastic and easy to navigate avenues for the less fortunate to mingle into the first world wealth distribution model we have here thus far. Furthermore, there would be a great emphasis to have created language portals and the best translators built into the platform so that those that aren't fluent in English could feel more confident in their content creation. I know steem is a baby and stinc is not worth discussing but I'd assume these kind of projects would be in the pipeline of a more philanthropic platform..
Steempeak by far has the best team here and they clarified that they will be condensing their 90 minute steem opus into a 10 minute general video in the near future.
Thanks for the well thought out reply and always I appreciate your presence on the platform.
Cheers
maybe instead of steempeak trying to be all things to all people.. they should direct people to the great work of @jongolson and his team on steemsavvy.com .. where they have built a library of shorter videos focused on one aspect at a time.
Ahhh, good to know.. I'll check that out.. No reason any one outfit should spread themselves out too thin, especially if the work has already been done..
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Yes it's true that even after HF 21/22 the trending page is very "Steemy" and it's rare to find a post that isn't unless you're in the "in crowd".
The truth is, no one would give a damn outside of Steem about steem. What people look at is title and post payout, probably number of comments after that. If it doesn't grab people then they won't be interested in joining.
So content curators with these big accounts who have influence over the trending page need to be more general in their approach and not just vote on steem centric stuff. Variety is the spice of life hey
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Yup, agreed.
And that's part of what I am poking around in, here. Keeping in mind that someone NOT signed in sees the trending feed by default... WHAT ends up there? It's like the storefront window to the world. In order to bring new customers in, you want your BEST stuff displayed there. And it's up to those big curators to make that a reality... so outsiders see that, and think "I want to be part of this show!"
As is, at the moment, that's dubious...
Dubious is putting it politely!
Yes that trending page is basically the "car showroom" of what's inside this place. Fill it with the same model of car with a slightly different lick of paint and see how long people stay around for 😁
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As a very simple case in point... neither Facebook nor twitter got huge as a result of publishing loads of content about Facebook and twitter....
An even better example!
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There's a certain myopic smugness around here that really isn't going to work if we are to build this place to a much greater level. Unfortunately, the nature of the rewards system makes it a self-fulfilling reality: Because you are only rewarded for "internal" content, people only publish internal content. We need to get away from that and make a move towards simply publishing interesting content that is venue neutral.
I ended up on Steemit (as it was, back then) because I followed an article link on Facebook. It was to an article about Universal Basic Income, which I was studying, at the time. There was not one whisper about "Steemit" or "making money" or "upvotes" in that article.
My decision to join was the result of reading that article (posted externally), then looking for other UBI articles here; then noticing that people were getting rewarded for their content here... getting curious and then making an account as a result of that.
And I think this comment may just form the basis for my next post....
My reasons for joining are somewhat different but actually not to dissimilar theme in the sense that it wasn't an article about steem that drew me in.
I have always enjoyed the idea of writing but never knew where to look. Particularly as my music is all about a life event of mine and I have a story to tell... But I had no idea how to write engaging stories or decent blogs until someone said, go to steemit from the music community I was in.
It was exactly what I was looking for because I just love writing and then joined some groups and took it from there. Would like to think my skills have increased somewhat just by being here. The crypto earnings didn't really factor in.
So I came to develop my writing skills through word of mouth otherwise I'd have never heard of this place. I wasn't writing about steem when I joined either, life stories, music and travel from September. Have only written the odd bits and bobs about steem from a layman's point of view to maybe encourage those outside in to the space.
I've been thinking of something similar, but in a bit of a different train of thought. Thinking about "repackaging" some of my posts for publishing elsewhere. In that line of thinking, I figured the Steem specific posts would not be candidates!
I have seen a couple other platforms that pay for posts, but I'm still in the investigation stage!
That's not a bad idea.
I do believe we need to have a subtle shift in ideology, away from always being focused on the money first and towards money being a consequence of creating interesting content.
It's a bit like "life" in general: I work at something I like fair well in order to get paid, I am not just out there "doing whatever" with a total focus on "where's my next paycheck?"
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Interesting thoughts. I'm one of those who makes posts only for steem. I hear it's easy to cross post, so I wonder why everyone just doesn't do that.
From my perspective, if we want more people to use steem, we need to make it appeal to a less elite class of folks. As it is now a user has to be tech savvy, discord savvy, publishing savvy, have a taste for gambling, and have a lot of time to figure out the arcane structure of the rewards system here.
there is a tendency for some to produce steem centric content. Mostly that is a lack of willingness to focus any where else. For others, it really is what they know.
I prefer writing a variety of content, it matches my broader interests in what I pay attention to.
Speaking of paying attention.. I have recently been noticing the front page of Medium. BTW, there are a lot of Medium centric posts that show up over there, so some things don't change a lot. I digress, I rather like their approach to a front page.
As a signed in user, I see posts from the topics I follow, some from my network and some from the top posts on the site. That gives me a broader view of what is going on.
Without being signed in I see top posts across a range of topics.
Reads and engagement via comments or highlighting is tracked there and that is what heavily influences what appears on the front page.
It would be nice to see a front end evolve into something similar and see how that improves the ability to attract non-members.