Interesting. Prior to Hardfork 18 and many of the changes I mentioned it appeared the situation was so much worse. Established bloggers were getting $500-1000 per post and posting 3-4 times per day. It was seen as unfair.
Today established bloggers might make $200-300 per day, maybe $2000-3000 per week. I'm surprised that people think the barriers are actually higher now because it implies all the changes to economics were for nothing. It could be possible that no matter what changes are made, as new bloggers enter in the competition rises, and the attention of curation becomes more scarce.
So far no one has a solution, but since we are all human in these comments and bots aren't taking the rewards as often as they used to, maybe there has been improvement at least for people?
It's just my opinion, and I fear angering whales, but the upvote systems where whales upvote each other automatically and don't read the posts really sucks. There should be some kind of incentive for whales to vote for minnows or accounts they never voted on before. I think people should lose some power if they just vote for the same 9 people every day. And gain power for spreading vote around...
@viraldrome You are talking to the wrong person. @dana-edwards is one of biggest self-upvoters and users of auto-votes to take money from Steemit. She posted 20 artcles in period of 24 hours. Every of these articles made 25$ thru auto-votes. You do the math on how much she earned. She is one of the biggest abusers of voting system.
You're not one of my readers so the survey is not for you. If you never read my posts, and you barely blog, do you have any reason to want to make Steemit better for bloggers or readers? Please allow my readers to discuss without your bias.
The survey questions are to find out what bloggers should do. How many times should bloggers post. What kind of content should bloggers post. It's never a situation where there won't be complainers and bloggers can't please everyone.
I see...your tactic is talking about anything beside your abuse of auto-votes. 18 posts in period of 24 hours...just wow, if that is not abusing reward pool, I don't know what is?!
Calling something abuse assumes that bloggers have some sort of responsibility not to blog. Very odd way of looking at things but since you barely blog I guess you would have that perspective.
Tell me what bloggers should do? Stop blogging? If you think there should be a cap on top level posts then ask for the top level post reward cap to be put back. The developers decided to remove it, not the bloggers.
Level of ignoring your own problem of abuse is staggering!!!
Do you want me to stop posting? Is that your idea of solving the abuse? Otherwise bloggers are going to do what bloggers do which is to blog.
I've narrowed the debate down to A / B.
If you think not then you're being consistent. If you look at Youtube then you will see when Youtube demonetized the Patreon model became more popular among established Youtubers.
No one in the debate is against new bloggers being rewarded or even becoming established bloggers. But what is a successful blogger?
@dana-edwards, to be honest, @cmoljoe has a point. I started following you because you occasionally write about artificial intelligence and machine learning. But I've seen situations where you don't appear to have independent training or knowledge in the material. I was hoping you were a computer science student just learning the ropes. But then I see you "blog" about so many different subjects, I'm starting to wonder. What are you really doing? Do you read articles from the popular tech magazines online and then just paraphrase them here? I'm starting to think that, so I've been reading you less.
In my view, there is no such thing as a professional blogger. If you want to seriously write about a subject, you need to have some independent experience with it, perhaps a degree, or work experience, or something. Otherwise, why would a writer's words have any value?
How do you know posts are or aren't being read and what do you think would fix it?
Suppose for instance the upvotes come from delegated Steem Power and not just one whale? Is this going to make a difference if the people who delegate their voting power have favorite bloggers?
In other words, if some people have favorite bloggers, then those favorites will be voted by some people, and you would like a way to change this?
You mention that whales should lose some power but we don't know where the voting power comes from unless we track the blockchain. Also voting power can be delegated which makes it quite complicated. Finally it would be like we are telling people how they have to vote which could bias curation in favor of true spammers, or content flooders, who are new but who don't actually produce high quality content.
So if it were implemented that all curation must put some percentage of it's vote to new posters, this would be perfectly fine but I don't think this would solve the problem. Also if the quality of new posters is not encouraged (and by the economics it's currently not), then the content isn't going to get any better just because new posters are creating it.
The people who signed up for automated voting probably aren't reading them. It's supposed to be their favorite bloggers but I am going to bet their favorites are all high rep accounts. I manually vote my faves and it seems like having it done automatically kind of removes incentive to read it.
Probably isn't definitely. We simply do not know whether they are a team manually reading the posts or partially automated where they read the posts after the fact, or fully automated where they never read the posts. In general it's going to be hard to scale curation to a level where curators have time to read every post UNLESS the posts are shorter.
So again it favors short concise posting because it takes less time to read. Some people complain about posts being too short, and if the posts are longer then of course curators will tend to read the long posts from the established posters. I don't have any good solution which would make the system perfect but I appreciate the discussion so problems can be noted.
Is there any thing bloggers can do about this?
I believe I've seen automatic voting in progress. I started to identify and follow people who had a consistent history of always making $40 and above on their posts, no matter how little work went into them. Then watched. One would post a story, and then immediately they started receiving 5-10 votes. People obviously aren't reading the articles. Nu human being can read that fast. And I doubt that people are staring at their feeds just waiting for these people to post.
I'm a software developer, so I read dev-related threads on Steemit. There are quite a number of posts over there teaching people how to code up software that polls Steemit for new posts, scans the author's names, and then automatically upvotes if the name is in the bot's preferred writer list. That's not curation. That's a rubber stamp. In a way, it's a type of fraud.
How do you know they don't read the posts later? I myself sometimes vote up posts from bloggers I like and read their posts later that day (after I've written my own posts). Nothing is wrong with that by itself.
I think there is something wrong with voting before reading an article. And it shows why we have a false economy on Steemit. You're voting because it's easy, free money. What if every vote actually costs you money, to be deducted from your Steem wallet? Would you be so willing to throw around votes? That would be like going into the grocery store and blindly throwing things into your cart, telling yourself you'll figure out later whether or not you actually need all that stuff.
And then you get home and realize that it's food items you would never even consider eating.