I'm sure everyone can agree, the benefit of more people resteeming your post is great on a platform that has otherwise limited discovery mechanics.
But what is the real cost of such a thing?
Assuming this was an ideal scenario, the cost or damage of such functionality would be almost nothing while the benefit would be large. However this is not really the case in our community. Many people can feel it that something is not quite right with the way resteems work, and some key elements are at the core of this feeling that there is something wrong with the way sharing content works here.
Turns out, there's more than one thing wrong with it.
☢Problem #1: It clutters your blog, making your posts harder to find, and clutters the feed of the people following you as if they were following many more people. This is the most obvious to everyone, that the friction between actually resteeming and digging through all of the resteems is much different creating a dissonance between the two and making the experience not so great for the people reading content, there is no way they can read all the giant posts you are resteeming and nobody really even expects them to.
❖Solution: Options for filtering the view of resteems on steemit simply to negate them in your feed or when viewing a blog would drastically alter the effort needed to find the posts from the person you're interested in, and gives an alternative way of viewing your feed rather than the general consensus of unfollowing people that resteem too much. The downside is that resteems become less effective overall, but the benefit is much greater than this because viewing filters are generally optional meaning those people just have another tool for finding what they want to see.
☣ Problem #2: There is no way to add context to why you are resteeming something. If you share a post you may have any number of reasons for sharing it, and in some cases you want to STRONGLY URGE people to read it and would love to tell them why, but you can't. All resteems are essentially equal. Suppose you share this and want to say why you are sharing it so anyone that sees you resteeming it knows before even opening it what purpose you have for sharing it... what do you do? That is the problem, you don't do anything because you can't do anything. As far as I know your options are limited to leaving a comment here hoping they see it for context, making another post referencing this one which invalidates resteeming anyway, or some kind of spam to break out of the shell of this page without actually posting about why you are resteeming something. This is not the ideal sharing mechanism.
❖Solution: Any time someone resteems they should have the option for attaching a small text-only comment about it for revealing the context of them sharing it, even a simple "lol" is a million times better than every resteem ever having the same message attached (nothing) This context could be why they like the post, or a specific and important part of it they want you to see, or even something negative if they want to draw more attention to something bad (like a scam). This would be limited to 1 or 2 lines of text, just enough to give some context but not so much to compound the cluttering problem even more (another filter could be added to remove sharing context, but nobody would use that one).
☠ Problem #3: You cannot undo a resteem on your blog.
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Let me repeat that incase it doesn't quite sink in
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☠ Problem #3
YOU CANNOT UNDO A RESTEEM ON YOUR BLOG!
☠ Even if the original post was edited into something you hate.
☠ Even if you got conned into doing the resteem by way of "contest rules" under the idea that "you might win a prize after post payout but if you don't resteem then you're disqualified, regardless of your other efforts you must resteem to win"... sound familiar?
☠ Even if you did it by mistake, nothing matters.
It says are you sure and the deal is done, game over the person you resteemed is now in control of your blog page. "resteem this post to win 25SBD" later edited into "resteem this if you are [insert extremely offensive anything]" and now you have resteemed that you are a nazi and think kittens are hideous creatures that should have their fur burned off to help accelerate climate change and kill all the other animals so that the aliens can harvest their organs for unobtainium... You don't like that? Too bad because it will remain on your blog (without context) for everyone to see what a terrible person you are for thinking kittens aren't cute and there's nothing you can do about it because resteems can't be removed. Even having some scam on your blog is bad enough, but half the time those people will also edit the post into some garbage right before payout (when edit locks) so then you are seen as resteeming garbage and can't change it. This is really not good at all. Nothing about this is good. This is one reason I never resteem anything.
❖Solution: This solution is probably the most complicated to implement, but the easiest to explain. Actually, it's so easy to explain that I don't even need to explain it and you already know the answer: people should be able to remove resteems, simple as that.
So imagine for a moment that you have all of these solutions in place already. How do you think this would change things on steemit? Maybe you think it's a small effect in fringe cases, but I see a lot more happening when people feel more in control of their own blog, their discovery mechanisms are improved, and their ability to communicate through sharing is unleashed...
Subtle changes can have a big impact, you know?
I only hope that one day all of this is fixed for steemit.
Maybe someone that works on steem can find this and add it to the list, or raise it in priority, or reconsider not letting people remove resteems just to give facebook a fighting chance or whatever the reasoning was.
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so anyway
YOU SHOULD RESTEEM THIS POST
ahaha
^_^
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follow me, I post things sometimes
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These are no small things with little effect. With things being as they are I never re-steem.
Edit: - never..? I resteemed once in 6 months. But that's not a lot, right?
This is another area that other social media platforms have Steemit beat (the other major area to me is direct messaging). I would love to give a bit of reason as to why I resteem something. I think it would add value to the fact that i resteemed it.
Also, it would be great to see resteems on the article page.
Well, it is indeed a problem. I used to use resteembots all the time. But as my feed is filled with resteems, I find it less and less valuable.
You're suggestion to add something or a mood or anything to a resteem is a very good idea!
I've never had a resteemabuse with altered content, so that's really not an issue for me, but it should indeed be possible to undo a resteem.
Good work man, hopefully it gets picked up!
Good to point these things out. If they're addressed this platform has huge potential.
Useful Information, Thanks for sharing with us, its the small things that count in such big platforms, especially in the rate that Steemit is growing aswell!!
Well said. And some very good points!
Good points, resteeming always feels like a gamble with possible pitfalls. If these three simple but major points were improved or "fixed", resteeming and being resteemed would be greatly beneficial.
New information for me, thank you so much @alphacore
As a bot that rewards good authors with resteems, I am interested in what you wrote, and the topic in general. Let me add some comments:
Problem 1 - cluttered blog.
I believe that this is how it should be. Resteeming something is a sacrifice from the resteemer as well as reward for the author. If we remove that, there will be way too many resteems (like - there will be bots that automatically resteem everything, even if it's 10 posts per second). The resteems are supposed to be a filtering layer for good content (if something got resteemed a lot, it's probably worth reading) but if there are too many of them, you are back to where you started - being surrounded by more posts than you can read the titles of.
Problem 2 - I fully agree! Giving context in Facebook style would probably be pretty cool.
Problem 3 - I disagree. Trusting the author is part of the price of resteeming. If we remove that part of the price, resteems will become too cheap.
There is another problem that you didn't mention. A post can only be resteemed once. Some people like some posts a lot and want to expose them every day, an D not just right now.
That's not possible at the moment. A post can be resteemed by a user only once.
I am not sure if that should change... It's a complicated issue.
Right now there are multiple prices for resteeming. The cluttered blog and trusting the author, but also the trust of your followers (if you resteem crappy content they might leave you), and others. Resteems are not free (and shouldn't be)
That's why services like @resteembot and others exist.
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