The other day I posted something, and an hour later I came back.
I found something interesting.
How the hell does a post have fewer views than upvotes???
Don't people normally go in this order:
Find relevant content
Read it
Upvote it
????????
Apparently not.
Think about it.
When you go to the steemit main page, there are something like 8 random articles that are featured.
What is the probability that one of those 8 out of the thousands of posts here is interesting to YOU? How many of those 8 would be a good read? On a subject you're interested in?
Now think about the next most common page.
Navigate to the section that says "new"
Every day, thousands of posts pass through this page.
A few of those posts will interest YOU.
But every post that passes through the "new" menu stays there for less than 60 seconds. By the time you even take to read all the headlines, an interesting post could have appeared at the top of the screen and moved all the way down to the bottom.
What's the chance you'll find the article you're looking for?
And that's when you're actively scouting!
While you're away, all the interesting posts will disappear down the page so fast. Maybe they won't even get a single view. And it will only get worse as Steemit grows.
With the main page, you have no chance of finding them.
So that's why people use tags, right? To sort through the topics that interest them.
That's what I thought, too.
But apparently, the flow of STEEM isn't coming from the readers or anyone with any interest in the topic!
I started studying the metrics of popular posts, and I realized that my more upvotes than views anomaly
was wayyyy worse among the "best" (highest earning) posts.
Rather than 8 to 7, it was more like 100 to 1!
So no one is actually reading these posts, they are just going for curation points!
They know that the whale who posted it will get a bunch more upvotes and attention, so they try to be the first one in!
This system of browsing the main page for content used to work great back when Steemit was a small community, but it has outlived its usefulness.
This is the panel of Steemians sitting on the main page waiting to upvote garbage posts, where each person represents a thousand Steemians.
IF THERE WAS NO MAIN PAGE, these bumbling schemers would be forced to use tags and look for something that actually interests them.
Then, they might actually read and upvote posts that are actually meaningful to them.
It says somewhere in the Steemit mission that they are trying to "create large bounties for good content."
Is being a whale automatically "good content?"
IF STEEMIT GOT RID OF THE MAIN PAGE:
It could stop rewarding being rich and reincentivize making good posts.
It would kick out all the people sitting on the main page to curate people with >50 reputation without actually reading their posts.
Thus, it would increase the per day number of posts read.
It would help minnows get attention to start out.
I wouldn't have to put this stupid baby picture up to get more than 1 view:-)
Don't forget to RE-Steem if you agree!
Don't necessarily need to get rid of it outright...
Could explore allowing personalization of it and generally improving the discovery mechanisms on Steemit
I think a lot of people already use tags and look at the tag main pages, since they are more useful to the readers than the main trending or promoted pages.
Thanks for the link, good content, followed and upvoted! I think those features could definitely help fix this problem among users who want to get the best quality content out of Steemit. I especially agree that the trending page needs enhanced because it is unlikely that all users will enjoy the same one-size-fits-all content.
This site's affinity for obscuring old posts is surprising considering the precedent of other sites like Stack Exchange, which value their archives and put tremendous emphasis on getting rid of duplicate content. On Steemit, an idea will keep coming back in different posts over and over and then disappearing again, like an absent-minded professor!
The main reason why I feel the need to alter the home page is that some users are so much into the game that they just sit on the main page and upvote content to the trending page without actually reading it.
This creates strange metrics like this:
4x the number of people upvoted as actually read it!
This phenomenon gives whales automatic trending status, decreasing minnow exposure.