How to attract high quality content to steemit - and make sure that it stays!

in #steemit6 years ago (edited)

Dear fellow Steemians,

I think most people here agree that it would be extremely good for everybody if we managed to attract more high quality content to this Plattform - ideally content which is available only here. In theory this would be good for everybody: Good content would attract more users, more users mean a rising Steem price, a rising Steem price means that the money available to pay good content rises, rising payments should attract more high quality content producers. A virtous circle.

Unfortunately, it does not work like this. Rather the opposite is the case and we are in a vicious circle. A classical prisoners dilemma situation:

 

The core problem

Individually, it makes sense for everybody on Steemit to make use of the value of your post for your own benefit. There is many ways how this can be done: If you are a minnow, you can upvote your own posts, the dolphins can lease their Steem Power to the upvote bots and the whales can operate their own upvote bots.

The problem is, that this is bad for the system as a whole and probably also for everybody individually, but if you are the only one to change your behaviour, your individual share of the benefit for the overall Steemit community will be much smaller than the profit you are missing out. After all, you are able to earn as much as 30% or more yearly interest by not curating your upvotes.

The developers of Steemit had thought about this problem and came up with a solution, which they thought would work to keep things in balance and to create a virtuos instead of a viscous circle. In the White Paper they explained it by the analogy of the Crap Bucket:

The Story of the Crab Bucket

A man was walking along the beach and saw another man fishing in the surf with a bait bucket beside him. As he drew closer, he saw that the bait bucket had no lid and had live crabs inside.

"Why don't you cover your bait bucket so the crabs won't escape?", he said.

"You don't understand.", the man replied, "If there is one crab in the bucket it would surely crawl out very quickly. However, when there are many crabs in the bucket, if one tries to crawl up the side, the others grab hold of it and pull it back down so that it will share the same fate as the rest of them." 

The idea behind this is simple: Give the community the tools to make sure that behaviour which is not good for the community is corrected by the rest of the community. These tools are the flags or downvotes.

Unfortunately, Steemit has ended up in state where most of the Steem Power is concentrated with people which have all no intention at all to use their Upvote power not for their own benefit but instead let it work for themselves. this is difficult to overcome as those people also have that biggest influence on the development of Steemit as they control the witnesses.

This all together leads to the situation that there is not enough money left for high quality content producers to be paid adequately. I think that @yallapapi is right in his analysis that this is the biggest problem - there is simply not enough money available to allow for high quality content to be attracted. 

I think that it will be extremely difficult to overcome this situation with a big bang. Instead, I want to offer a solution how to step by step correct the situation and bring back Steemit back on the path which was intended by its fathers:

The solution: A new tag - qualitypost

I have created a new tag called qualitypost, which I urge people to use if they consider what they have written is exactely this: A high quality posts. the other 4 tabs can be used just as they have been used before.

Curators, which take their job seriously (and although there might not be many) should upvote only those posts which come with this tag. This gives an incentive to people using it as it will maximise their chance to get paid.

On the other hand, people using the tag qualitypost should refrain from using upvote bots. People doing this should be flagged and downvoted by everybody seeing this. Also, I will create a bot that automatically puts a comment to these posts to mark them.

Generally, I encourage people to use the flags and downvote tools to make sure that really only quality content is trending in this new category. 

While this might be a slow process, I think it has a fair chance of working out. We would create a small niche inside of Steemit first, which is much easier to keep clean of spam. If it grows, people would tend to look in this category first as there chance of seeing high quality content would be highest. This would in turn result in lower interest for the other tags, which would also decrease the incentive to get attention and the possibility to get extra upvotes besides the ones you have paid the upvote bots for. This would reduce also the income for the upvote bots, which might also help to change their motivation on how to spend their upvotes.

All of this needs no major changes to the Steemit system. However, I would hope that maybe some day in the future it would be possible to combine different tags, so that it becomes possible to view only posts which for example are tagged with steem AND qualitypost. But this is nothing which is needed immediately.


I would be extremely interested to get your feedback and hope that this initiative might help to give Steemit a fresh start and to support its future development. 

All the best,

rondras

PS I will use upvote bots to make sure that this post gets read. As I do not want to break my own rules with the first post I have not used the qualitypost tag




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Many of our fellow steemians who posted a worth reading articles but unfortunately due to their low reward which is not compensating to their effort in making such articles, most of them were discouraged and leave steemit for good. Some steemians has so many ideas and information to share but they or i may say "we" can't express it fully since english is not our mother tongue. We have the difficulty in expressing ourselves and this seems to be the hindrance of writing such good articles.

If I cannot understand the meaning of a post, I can not judge if it is high quality. I would thus neither up- or downvote it. I am afraid that this language barrier will continue to exist - but maybe people could be a little more relaxed with regard to grammar and spelling mistakes, if the content itself is high quality.

@rondras

Extending the scenario little bit :
So in few months every post on Steemit shows up with #qualitypost , since everyone thinks their post is the quality post.

Now the curators have so much work on their hands to find the really truely Quality post.

What do we do then?

Example:


I think this is a #qualitypost question :)

Thank you for this interesting question: I would not think that people dare to use the tag massively for low quality post if this niche is set up from the beginning with the intention that low quality posts are flagged. Nonetheless, if there is still many good quality posts, this would then be a luxury problem for curators. There choice would in any case be easier than in today's world.

That's a great idea!
We can read quality post easily using qualitypost tag. Thank you @rondras for sharing your idea to make steemit better place for everyone!

Let's hope it helps!

It is a small step - good one though but you can see - all bots are not bad, if you believe your content is quality, you should be able to pay bots - it is bad only when bots are used for worthless content. The main goal of Steemit is to find and reward a quality content.
You should be rewarded the most if you helped find something worth it that was hard to find. More about it is in my post: https://steemit.com/steemit/@petermail/how-to-save-steemit

You are right - the bots themselves are not bad directly. But indirectly, as it sucks away curation money which is not available for content. You got to use them now to get views. But we would be better off without them I believe.

Bots are here to stay, we should reward them when they upvote quality content and penalize when they upvote bad content. Quality content must be found by consensus and therefore upvotes should be secret for first 7 days to avoid sheep-voting.

If you would not see the votes for the first seven days than the argument for the bots that they are a promotional tool would be completely absurd. The only reason to use them would then be for sheer profit.

Good point: How do we construct trending page if votes are secret? I guess the solution could be voting in rounds - in 1 hour, 5 hours, 24... after each round we would show the votes. But it could cause other problems.

I think this might work, and definitely worth a shot. Then there are people like @lynncoyle1, @yoo1900... Who maybe without them, I for one would have been discouraged.

If this can work, then I will definitely look at my content being exclusive to steemit. I think I only have two posts that are. Others have been on my blog previously.

P. S: must the tag be the first? Would try it with new content I'm working on. Because in your P. S, you mentioned you haven't used it, but I can see it's your fourth tag.

Thank you solcross. Regarding the tag: I had not used it, but it seems that if you mention the tag with a # in front of it in the post it picks it up automatically. I have deleted the # sign now and now it is gone.

Okay. Thanks for your feedback. Good to learn something about the hashtag as well. Cheers

You are welcome. And by the way, I think it does not necessarily be exclusive content. It would just be nice to bring maximum value to the plattform.

I totally agree with #qualitypost sir @rondras. This condition, too, has become a hot topic in Indonesia last week. I also agree with the term a vicious circle. this vicious circle does not pay attention to the quality of the content.
However, my core point is the language. Most of the steemians have difficulty making content with English, because writing in English is a skill (Maybe, because Indonesia is not colonized by the British: LOL).
On the other hand, Indonesia is very rich in culture, attitude or civilization, or other social studies. I really regret when the post message in a post not delivered because of the problem LANGUAGE. Sorry sir @rondras, this is just an outburst from me a frustrated person.
thanks so much, maybe you can give me a solution or intruction :)

I think you can find your audience - and you have to find your audience in order to be able to earn money here. There is contributions also in other languages than English. But of course somebody who does not speak or understand these languages will not be able to upvote those contributions as he or she does not understand the content. Maybe we should however try to value the content a little higher than the style. I am sure that my English also contains many mistakes as I am not native.

Thanks so much sir @rondras. I am very happy to read the visions of the viosioner like you. Good luck always sir...

Great idea, but i don't like the idea that people are here for the money. Maybe this is because I'm new here. For me steeemit is a just a great place to post my thoughts, read interesting content, discuss important topic with people from all over the world, train my english, learn something new and etc. So iti s a social network and a hobby. The fact that we can discuss any topic here openly holds me stronger than any payments can.

People like you are keeping this place together at the moment. It is part of the reason why I am here - but I do not mind earning a little money. But even if you do not want to earn any money, the current system makes it more difficult to find interesting stuff to read - and for writer with interesting content to be written.

Hello fellow artists! Hopefully, you haven't given up on yourself or your dreams. I've continued to cultivate my skill and explore my talents long after college. Though the bottom has dropped out here in the U.S after the Great Recession (2008-2009), work has not been the same since. I've always been very creative, drawing and sketching a way for me to artistically release and create my own solutions. Whenever I was without a steady income, I found myself in a library or internet café in front of a big stack of paper. After some time, that stack became dozens of sketches that I brought to finish the creative process (hope you have one) and muscle on through to completing every goal set forth.

Now I self-publish my artwork, through various means online; using Facebook, of course, Instagram, with every post I share to my networks. My support is from the artists and other design professionals worldwide, friends, and family who sponsor my progress through Patreon with their pledges. On Patreon, I've developed a mail-order subscription system that rewards subscribers every month with my new artworks delivered directly to their doorstep. Also, the artwork I make creates primary material for white-label products such as sold on Society6 or Shopify, where my many new fans can own 100s of creations.

This system played well for many years, cross-linked together on my website, www.artistcraigahamilton.com, that I've expanded into discovering new and emerging networks to distribute my original content. In addition, I now blog about my artwork to hundreds of thousands of people all over the world on Steemit, which rewards its users with cryptocurrency for producing and sharing online original content. Steemit features blockchain technology to back its operative token and has its very own ledger that supports additive value on their network. This means the art I create now mostly covers its own costs and leaves me free to self-publish at my own pace. I highly recommend anyone seeking financial freedom as I have to listen and share my experience along. I'd be more than happy to detail on this further.

Ok, I digress, this post has all the makings for a Steemit revolution, but without the trappings of financial jargon that currently pervades all discussion on cryptocurrency, Steemit's appeal is strictly limited by its aims of propagating content creators to support the system. We Steemians are both capital investors and shareholders in STEEM whenever we post and diversify our content when we share to the network abroad. I do believe a tipping point is coming, however, that day is some time away. Facebook is struggling to play catch up with the state of integrating cryptocurrency (read: blockchain) and social media, leaving its 1 billion-plus users in the past. When I joined Steemit, I felt it was the future and the more I continue to use this platform, I am feeling positively sure I'm on the forefront of communication technology, so yes, unmistakably ENORMOUS potential for everyone here to market themselves to each other and earn our keep!

Bless up Steemit! Learn more about #ThisBraveNewWorld we're sharing I wrote about here.





Thank you @rondras for sharing this!




Thank you Craig, extremely cool stuff that you are producing. Unfortunately I am extremely untalented ;-)

Thanks for this nice and informative post. I like this post.

great your post.I always try to vote for everyone, hope you and me will vote. My Steam Link. Https://steemit.com/@zarzish

That's exactly what we need to do. We need to produce content that's only available here. It's one thing that could make this platform unique!

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I love the idea! Steemians, new and existing need to be continually encouraged to write great content. Its defiently worth a shot and will be interesting to see where it goes!

I think that alot of the problems with Steem is that is does take time and is hard in the beginning and can be discouraging when you write quality content only to make a few cents...

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dear @rondras,
I like your post but not the approach. All of us think that we write quality posts and so i think using the tag will put stress on the curator, will it not?

let us think of ourselves as a large decentralized company with at least 30% of our employees as editors/curators who will curate a few articles every day. again if there is consensus then and only then the article should be tagged with #qualitypost. Curators must be interviewed before "hiring" them and the number of curators must be adapted to load in the system.

All decisions are transparent and hence is more trust worthy

Hi adarshh, thank you for your reply. Of course this would be stress for the curators if it becomes a lot of posts. But still it is much better than filtering it our from the whole number of posts. And the average quality for this tag would be better than elsewhere as people would be scared (and they should be) to use it for bad quality posts as others are encouraged to flag these posts.

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A great idea to make a strong platform on sttemit and have a huge Earning with this tips we can build a strong place in steemit and make a huge amount of money for earning . thank you is very useful post and very useful post so thank you, for giving the idea how to make a powerful and quality content on steemit...

 6 years ago (edited) Reveal Comment