This post is a question I am presenting, and I am looking for helpful answers and comments.
The Question Is...
Why do my posts "disappear" from the feeds?
I do a lot of manual curation every day. I don't use autovotes, bidbots, or even self-votes anymore. I'm just trying to find the best content I enjoy rewarding each day, and it's getting harder and harder to do because, I think they are being purged from the lists.
They're gone!
The latest confusion swirling my mind is why certain posts are not appearing in the feeds anymore. It's like they've been removed entirely. Currently I don't know if there is an easy way to locate older posts (days, not even weeks old) if I don't know if it exists from an author I don't yet know about.
If I'm lucky, I might remember to peruse my favorite author's blog feed for recent posts. That's the best I can hope for. Why aren't their posts appearing in my feed? My feed is exactly where I want to see them. What is the point of following authors if I don't get to read their posts?
What's missing?
Since I specialize in curating bonsai posts, I'm going to use this keyword as an example.
First let's look at the tag search.
tag search: #bonsai
https://steemit.com/created/bonsai
It says the last post was 7 days ago. The last post before that was 3 months ago.
Not true...
Remember, this is my specialty category of observation. It's muh baby.
Why don't any of THESE show up in search?
- 8 days old, $0.57, 45 votes, missing from search
- 8 days old, $0.06, 40 votes, missing from search
- 9 days old, $0.06, 50 votes, missing from search
- 13 days old, $0.50, 25 votes, missing from search
- 13 days old, $.053, 17 votes, missing from search
- 14 days old, $11.30, 602 votes, missing from search
But these ones do show up?
- 7 days old
- 3 months old, spam/plagiarism, $0, 4 votes
- 3 months old, spam/plagiarism, $0, 4 votes
- 3 months old, spam/plagiarism, $0, 2 votes
But wait, there's more...
Much, much, more!
What ELSE is missing?
search keyword: bonsai
https://steemit.com/static/search.html?q=bonsai (sort by: Date)
Once again, so many missing posts as I mentioned above. They never appear.
Instead we find these...
- Four Google Ads that take you off the site: Ad1. Ad2, Ad3, A4.
- 8 days old, $20.27, 317 votes, Keyword in comments about my activity
- 11 days old, $4.46, 96 votes, definitely deserving to appear in result searches
- 14 days old, $0, 2 votes, curation post linking to my more valuable missing post
- 2 months old, $0.03, 7 votes, spam/plagiarism
Conclusion
So far I have tested:
- steemit
- busy
- steempeak
- steeve (sorry I couldn't even get this to work, it requires a login)
There is a dependency in what users deem valuable, and what the blockchain deems valuable. Regardless of the number of votes and value a post receives it might not get saved on the search feeds by the blockchain. Instead, often posts of lesser value, importance, or validity are preserved, and I find this behavior befuddling to me.
Is this a blockchain hiccup? A cruel joke that some developer might tell me will go away if I stop paying attention to it? I doubt it.
If it isn't the curators who determines what gets saved and what gets lost, then who is making these important decisions? Why would I prefer someone to make decisions for the whole? Doesn't that defeat the point of decentralization on a digital world-wide scale?
I'm speaking as someone who cares about the historical chronicles of the valuable information by thousands of talented writers being produced every day that is being lost to the wind. Where does it go? Why does it go? Will it ever be found by those who are looking for it? Can/will this erosion of data be better cataloged than the default behavior performed by the blockchain?
Comments Welcome
Feedback from others who may be also frustrated are also welcome to share in the comments below. Perhaps some experts out there can help shed some light on this situation for us.
For sarcasm and troll comments, it's a free country if you want to add your two cents. I won't penalize you, but I won't entertain you either. I'm looking for answers, not drama.
https://steemlookup.com/#/ works, a tool from @curie
You can search by your tag along with other fun things. So this will have to do for now.
The feeds issue is a strange one, but most likely can be resolved once hive mind is linked up properly.
Posted using Partiko Android
Excellent tool from the master curators.
That was really helpful, and works like a dream with. Thank you.
That's the way it is - unfortunately. Posts vanish after some days. If you look for posts older than a week you have to search for them with the search engine you usually use or use Esteem.
I do some curating, too, and know how much work it is to separate the wheat from the chaff. I mosly use the Steem Search Engine. It's ugly and the way it refreshes automatically makes me want to pull my hair out but you can look for posts in specific topics with low rewards but more than just a photo and a dozen words... Another tool I like for searching is Custom Feed - looks better and has some nice features, too.
And yes, there are four to five tags where I use "/created/" daily. It's the best way to stay up-to-date in my niches of interest without cluttering my feed with a lot of posts I don't want to read only because every now and then someone writes about the things I'm interested in.
The first two work like a dream. Custom feed wasn't showing me all the recent results in my tag search, just 3 month old posts and beyond.
Thank you for sharing, those are all very useful. Esteem is pretty good for a cleaner design. Steem Search Engine would be great for filtering through lots of posts for quality stuff, or for help finding a post I can no longer locate.
That is, indeed, rather puzzling. I would love to hear what the awesome @steempeak team thinks about this, so I am tagging @asgarth, @dmytrokorol, @jarvie, @r00sj3 💙
Thank you for finding my post @thekittygirl.
I'm guessing you found it on my blog, and not on the feeds, right? Joke!
Yes, indeed! LOL! 😜
Does anybody else make a habit of doing tag searches on a regular basis? I used to think this was a great way to discover new talented authors, but now I'm not so sure. Are there authors even more talented that I can't find through a normal search?
I usually search my favorite tags once a week to find out if there are any deserving posts I may have missed. If many deserving posts are being eliminated from those search attempts, I'm not sure how much good my efforts are doing.
I don't know if this is applicable, but I was curious why I've only seen a couple @mountainjewel posts, after reading your post. So I went to their page and discovered I was no longer following them. Hmmmmm.........
So I thought to check all my followed people, and there are NONE! All the people I had followed have been unfollowed somehow.... :((
Yikes! Thank you for reporting that. Did you notice a change in your number of people followed?
The number of people I was following was around 165, I think. But when I clicked on that, there was none listed. As I hunted up people and followed them, the number increased, even though the ones I refollowed had been on the original list.
I don't know maybe @dragosroua can help us?
Congratulations! Your post has been selected as a daily Steemit truffle! It is listed on rank 10 of all contributions awarded today. You can find the TOP DAILY TRUFFLE PICKS HERE.
I upvoted your contribution because to my mind your post is at least 5 SBD worth and should receive 150 votes. It's now up to the lovely Steemit community to make this come true.
I am
TrufflePig, an Artificial Intelligence Bot that helps minnows and content curators using Machine Learning. If you are curious how I select content, you can find an explanation here!Have a nice day and sincerely yours,
TrufflePigThis is one of the things I first noticed on Steemit. Good content is actually REALLY hard to find. I'm glad you posted this, because now I know about steemlookup.com ! I think this will go a long way in helping me discover the content I am looking for.
As far as my feed goes, I don't follow that many people, so I have not really noticed posts disappearing from my feed... but maybe i just have not noticed it.
How would you notice? It's pretty hard to prove something exists if you don't know about it (ie. every political scandal ever).
They claim every post should appear in your main feed in sequential order, but I really don't trust it anymore. Human error included, sometimes I scroll right past the posts from authors I am looking for and don't realize it. By the next day or two, it's already buried and gone.
There seems to be a lot of concern over people leaving steem, but I think a lot of it is because authors are feeling there is a lack of exposure to their posts, and rightly so if curators cannot find them.
Glad the search tools people are sharing are helping caring curators like you @mattlovell. Be sure to review your favorite people you follow to make sure something weird hasn't happened, like recent activity you did not notice, or you following/mute settings are different than you expected.
I really have no idea @creativetruth. This site just needs a lot of improvements and I think it will be a while before it happens when steemitinc rehires developers that could change things a bit.