One of the more commonly seen types of posts on the front page are testimonials from people who've hit it big, offering advice on how to do the same thing. But I noticed that while a few parallels can be seen in their methods, for the most part they advise a wide range of different methods. Can they all be true? Maybe. But I mean to propose a different possibility.
In the 1960s, B.F. Skinner undertook a series of experiments with a variety of animals, but most famously pigeons. His goal was to determine to what extent he could shape their behavior through a sort of automated training regimen called operant conditioning. (In fact, I wrote a story about it)
If you've ever sprayed a cat with a spray bottle or given it a treat when it's good, you've engaged in reinforcement and punishment, two key elements of operant conditioning. But supposing you gave the treats randomly? That's what Skinner did with his pigeons.
Confining them to small cages in a grid so they could not see one another but he could monitor their individual behavior, he first rewarded them for performing specific actions to create the association in their minds between action and reward.
Then, after a time, he set the treat dispenser to give out treats at random intervals. The fascinating result was that every time, the pigeons inferred that whatever they happened to be doing at the time caused the treat to be dispensed! So if they were hopping just then, they would set about hopping in the hopes of another treat.
But if, the next time a treat was dispensed, they were instead twirling? They would not give up hopping because it worked for them once. Rather, they would begin doing both. A sort of hopping, twirling dance. So it went, each time they did something different when a treat was dispensed, they would add that move to their dance routine.
Before you get high and mighty about how much smarter humans are than pigeons, remember that we used to dance in the hopes of making it rain. And really, a lot of modern superstitions follow the same basic pattern of mistakenly inferring causality based on a coincidence.
I've recently had some unexpected success on this site. But I am not about to set myself up as someone qualified to tell you how to do it. Because what worked for me may not work for you. Some of the advice I have seen is valid outside of Steem and just generally good life advice like "be persistent" and "you can't win if you don't play" but the more specific stuff where people purport to have determined patterns in Steemian behavior or applied complex ideas pushed by economists to this site are somewhat sketchy.
Where large sums of money are involved, we desperately want to be in control and understand how it works so we can be more effective and thus more successful. But in many cases, like the US economy, nobody really fully understands how it all works.
They just convincingly pretend to so people will buy their books and employ them, the way that medieval kings employed men claiming to be wizards, who said they could discern the future from the stars or bring down plagues upon their enemies.
I don't really know why I've been doing better and better recently. I know that I'll use the increased voting power to preferentially seek out quality content being ignored, because getting noticed was my big problem early on. I already haunt the "new" tab for each tag instead of "trending" for that reason. But I can't tell you how to use this site and wouldn't presume to. Just don't let Steemit make a pigeon out of you. :)
The problem is with defining what the quality content is. Different people might have a different opinion about it. As I have a basic understanding of what constitutes good writing, I noticed multiple times that here at Steemit many poorly thought out and written posts gain much audience praise, while many well-written pieces don’t get much notice if any at all. It happens because the content that has artistic or cultural value puts a certain demand on a person’s mind, while the content that only written with the purpose of entertaining doesn’t. A well thought out and well-written content could stay with you for a longer time and might even compel you to read it over to fully understand and enjoy it. However, most readers don’t want to make even a slight effort and are happy to simply find out what happen in the end and then forget all about it.
I'm not sure I like being compared to a pigeon, but it's a valid analogy. Too many people hop for their treats! Humans naturally like to look for patterns. It's easy to over analyze stuff and draw false conclusions about causality. I think there's a good dollop of luck to it as well, sometimes you just happen to post at the right instant when some whale that's in a good voting mood is looking at new posts.
I've been watching myself, the the Steemit bell ring$ and I start drooling...ha!
Yes it is funny seeing all these people with the answer to how to make successful posts. The funny thing is nobody really knows how to do it.
Hi! I am a content-detection robot. This post is to help manual curators; I have NOT flagged you.
Here is similar content:
https://steemit.com/steem/@alexbeyman/steemit-success-superstition-and-operant-conditioning
Reposted to add image sources. Editing not available on articles that old apparently. You're doing a good job, robot.
excellent post congratulations
That study and others like it are why I can't play slot machines, well that's not the only reason, those images go through my head each time I see a room full of people at the casino.
My one visit to a casino at Niagara Falls freaked me out so much I never went back. I could feel the slot machine screwing with my emotions, and watching old people pump quarters was one of the most depressing things I've ever seen.
Agreed. In the same sense, learning about supernormal stimuli changed the way I think about porn and advertisements. I would like to imagine I am less easily manipulated now, but the neurological wiring that these industries exploit is very deeply ingrained. Maybe inescapably so.
On human sacrifice by the Aztecs:
'What was the reason for all this carnage? Archaeologists will tell you the Mexica were reenacting their own creation myths, or that they genuinely thought that if they stopped sacrificing people to the rain god Tlaloc, he would stop sending rain. Or the sun would stop rising. Those of a more Marxist bent say that sacrifice was the way the ruling classes intimidated workers. All these explanations are plausible; none of them really satisfies. One Mexican archaeologist offered me all these theories and more before finally admitting, “I don’t know.” '
http://nautil.us/blog/we-may-never-truly-fathom-other-cultures
What if it was this process, out of control?