I’ve seen so many interesting posts on steemit, about philosophy, life, mathematics, music, art, people who actively promote steemit and they did not get proper attention.
This is sadly true...
I was very excited about steemit in the beginning and have been helping people on instagram to sign up and get started for a month now. Yet when I posted about it I got some votes: https://steemit.com/steemit/@getssidetracked/the-steemit-community-on-instagram-is-growing
Don't get me wrong, but 100 users manually helped get on steemit later and 620 comments in a month, it feels like dust compared to the 15k facebook page about steemit post or all "famous" celebrities now popping by and instantly growing past you in steempower.
1 month of work and dollarvigilante now has 20x more SP than me in not even a week. This also from someone who probably could buy 50x more and investing without flinching, yet people keep voting on his clickbait-facebook-level titles and posts.
I decided to power down on contribution. I bought 200 Steem myself a month ago and have earned maybe 200 from posts from which most was from one "whale" alone. But the time and users I got here haven't really been worth it compared to others. And I know many are in my situation, seeing already popular people get more popular, and now with the feeds working I unfortunately don't have the power or time to tey and promote myself again as much as I did in the beginning, which ended up being almost for nothing and I'm scared same would happen again and I would have wasted more time.
All this doesn't change my view on steemit the slightest, I still have high hopes for it and think my investment was well worth it. Just the investment in time wasn't as much.
One thing I hate more than anything else tho, what I've noticed happens often here. Is greed. A lot of users the site has helped to not be as greedy by voting - but those who already are stacked and go around saving them votes for maximized curation rewards in self-interest, never upvote people in their own posts comment-sections, and to top it all off only upvote their own posts while maintaining 99%+ voting power... you disgust me.
Hard for me to accept this, but just as you said, sadly it is true, I am from Mexico and like you, I am very excited about Steemit so I decided that I could help Steemit grow in Mexico so I took my iPad, created some nice Slides and installed it in a car that I have working in Uber so that all the passengers could find out about Steemit, published the story here https://steemit.com/steemit/@oumar/first-uber-spreading-the-word-about-steemit
And I don't want to say it was ignored (I do deeply appreciete the ones that showed their support with an upvote and specially the ones who took the time to comment) but after 12 hours despite this being a real life contribution to the growth of Steemit, my post has only 20+ votes :(
your post has no whales. that is the problem and why steemit will never snatch reddit userbase. no whales=no recognition=no user interaction no money for your time.
I know :(
the problem is due to the concentration of steem wealth in the hands of the few.
had steem done an ico this woudn't be happening.
they need to do an airdrop ASAP or someone is going to fork/clone this and do it right.
Main problem is not whales but incentives, the way steem works now is people upvote only thread with many upvote and only popular people.
dan should change incentives so that people actually bother to read the content they like. I have also noticed that people participate less in the discussion in a thread that won't be trending, if people only post in expectation of money it creates very fake environment which will put off a lot of newcomers. Social media is about natural interaction not money hunting.
I'd love to see the upvote buttons removed from feeds. You should have to actually click into the article and scroll to the bottom in order to vote on it. It would also be cool to decide how much power to allocate to your vote so it's not all-or-nothing (as williambanks also mentioned). I also love snowflake's idea of a trial run to try hiding the earning amounts from view.
That's a good idea. It shows you're about more than just making money.
@snowflake The problem is upvotes are default 100% and there is no way to scale it using the current front end on steemit. You have to vote via piston to give a partial power upvote.
Simple solution. Cause the upvote button to pop a popup with 5 stars, give each post a star rating. Each star is 20% of your power instead of 100% upfront all the time.
A 0 star rating would be a vote with 0 power and would cause a drag on earnings.
This requires 0 changes with steem and like 5 lines of code in steemit.
It adds a half second delay to the upvote easiness, but would allow people to give something a lot more granular than just I agree or disagree. You get a lot more say in the message you are sending with your vote and you get a lot more votes in general.
Literally, almost no changes required.
Your suggestion could definetely help but I think the best and easiest way would be to hide $ amount, and votes. Only author can view them. People can guesstimate these with trending ranking, there is no need for other people to know the exact amount earned or who upvoted and how many users did. If they really want to know they can check user's balance and history the next day. Or an alternative would be to reveal posts details a few hours before payout. If I was running the site I would even hide author's usernames on the actual post ( not in the comments) Only content matters nothing else, all other factors negatively influence curators in my opinion, I see no benefits.
dan can even try it for a few days and see how it goes, I guarantee you it will create better curation and atmosphere
Most if not all of the whales know how to make lower power votes using the CLI and do so regularly. This might be a nice feature in the GUI for whales but it does little or nothing to add value for most users so I consider it a low priority, or even a negative if it adds complexity and reduces ease of use. Anyway, there is a prototype of it in github so it will probably be rolled out at some point.
I agree. the distribution and visibility of posts should be reconsidered.
You are not only completely incorrect about the incentives, but the incentives are the opposite of what you state. When voting for something that already has a lot of upvotes (SP), the reward is tiny (an example of this in my case was the makeup tutorial, I think my curation reward on that was 1/10 or less what I might get voting a post with little reward). When whales vote for something that already has a high payout we are doing it despite the incentive not to.
You are right, I made a mistake there. The point I wanted to make which you highlighted is that people upvote posts that are popular even if there is no incentives to do so.
I think this behaviour could self correct by hidding posts information including author.
I think the issue is most people don't understand how the voting works and/or are very bad at the arithmetic so keep voting on everything that they see with a high dollar value. That said if I find something I really like and it has a high value I still vote on it out of principal even though the payout will be miniscule.
https://steemit.com/steem/@arcaneinfo/urgent-breaking-news-the-time-is-now-to-buy
Lets hope not, I like this place.
I guess you aren't aware that the new accounts on Steemit are an exactly an airdrop. Thousands of STEEM are being given out every single day.
I agree, and it would be great if it impacted... anything. I completely believe in the site, but the fact really is that it is only viewed as worthwhile to write to the whales. I like a post that gets comments and try to work to that goal. But 100 upvotes and $3.50 is hard to understand when one vote is seen granting far far more. The rules regarding voting power and curation are not at all clearly laid out for the new users steemit seeks to attract to understand, or even view. I guess I just don't really understand calling that an airdrop to the community when it does nothing to reduce the gap in voting power that exists and creates this confusion. It's an experiment though, I get it. Just thoughts.
It does address the gap, but only when there are many, many more users. Currently there are maybe 20K users (we don't know the exact number). With a million users the voting power in the hands of the wider community will be 50x larger, and the voting power in the hands of the whales will be more or less what it is now, or perhaps less since most whales are slowly selling off.
This is a beta site not only in terms of the software still being early but also in terms of the user base being very small relative to what is really needed for social media to work well. It has only been a month since July 4 when the payouts started and usage started to grow even to its current, relatively small level. Give it time.
The same thing happens with ICOs you would have a different set of rich people buying most of the coins. There is no easy solution to age old problems.
Just like I expected. Not a single shit was given today either.
sounds like you've been following my strategy to a tee - https://steemit.com/steemit/@dogguy/want-to-be-steem-poor-here-are-the-crucial-things-to-do-for-newbies-on-steemit
WOW! @getssidetracked, thank you very much for sharing your thoughts, I'm very thankful!
Steemit is at a stage where notoriety is more valuable than quality content when the opportunity arises. Whales need to reward fame so that the fame sticks around long enough to give us a more stable user base. @dollarvigilante is rallying people using strong language and click-baity, gag-worthy titles because that's what marketing is. Is he an expert? No. Can I see his make-up line in his header photos? Sort of, but I dont doubt for a second HIS make-up tutorial would bring in more viewers than mine. If we don't like it, we don't have to vote for it. The Front Page is dynamic, and the make-up tutorials of yesteryear turn to the thoughtful posts of tomorrow. The best thing to do in the current system is to post counter posts like this, search for decent content and to dream up possible solutions.
Check @rhi-marie's latest post should you feel so inclined, it might have some interesting answers.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@rhi-marie/freeing-minnows-caught-in-the-net-a-proposal-to-propel-quality-content
"HIS make-up tutorial would bring in more viewers than mine" This was hysterical!!!!!!!!!
Thanks! At least SOMEONE laughed. For an accused narcissist, his complexion is rather humble.
I think what we are witnessing is the second phase of Steemit with the herd, the masses deciding what is right and calling out things that are not beneficial for the bulk of users. The removal of rewards from Dollar Vigilante is unrprecedented actually, and it shows the shift that has come. The minnows are responsible for this shift, and the whales followed the minnows' moves. I can't say that I have ever seen this before. If it weren't for a few people calling out the absurdity of the logic of DV's post, I doubt anything of the sort would have happened. This is actually a good thing long term because it ensures that celebrities think through what they are writing.