In the last survey a couple of my readers suggested that these are the problems:
- Auto voting encourages curators to not read blog posts
- Curators tend to vote for their favorite bloggers (many of whom are established bloggers)
And some solutions were offered:
- Require curators to upvote new posters with a percentage of their voting power or they lose power
None of these solutions have much to do with the bloggers as bloggers don't decide anything except how often to post, what format to post in, when to post, what to post. The blogger must follow the economics set in place by the developers, and must provide content of sufficiently high quality for their curators.
On the question of returning to the top level post cap:
- Some bloggers and readers think a return to the cap is a good idea.
- Some bloggers and readers prefer longer more elaborate posts than the current trend.
- Some readers and curators seem to prefer shorter posts because they don't have the time to read many long posts.
My thoughts on these solutions are that I don't think most of the solutions will make that much of a difference but I do think some of them are interesting. The reward capping in my opinion will encourage longer higher quality posts again but then the rewards will likely to go fewer posts and this seems to me a decision made during a time of scarcity. The price of Steem is going down so the reward pool is something some bloggers might think should be rationed.
At the same time the solution to require curators to upvote new bloggers is interesting but under the current economics I can see a problem. What would encourage the new bloggers to produce quality content? Established bloggers are established because they have a track record of creating quality content but new bloggers aren't necessarily going to create quality content. This to me seems to favor the short quick posts as curators will have to vote for any new blogger no matter the quality to avoid being punished themselves.
New questions
Now I have some new questions but the gist of this debate seems to be centered around this fundamental question:
- Do we want to encourage established bloggers to keep blogging on Steemit or do we want to encourage new bloggers to start blogging on Steemit?
This may be a matter of balance but if the balance tips too far in favor of encouraging new bloggers then established bloggers eventually will leave for other places where they can be more successful. The market for blogging on Steemit is finite and if people want to see more content from their favorite bloggers long term then they'll have to find a balance which allows their favorite bloggers to continue posting while also not alienating new bloggers. This becomes more difficult when Steem goes down in price and this same thing happened last winter when Steem was spiraling in price and people blammed the top bloggers and excessively high payouts.
If new bloggers are favored completely over established bloggers then from day to day or week to week it will be like a lottery. No matter how many times you post, or how good your posts are, you might win on some days and lose on others, and over time as more people post the odds of winning go down. If reputation, being known, having a lot of followers, all are removed, then new bloggers have an even playing field but blogging as a whole becomes less attractive.
We see similar on Youtube where you had at one point in time popular Youtubers who made a lot of money, had a lot of subscribers, but then one day Youtube decided to demonetize thousands of Youtubers. These Youtubers have resorted to Patreon and other means to continue to produce content. The same in my opinion will happen for established bloggers on Steemit if the balance tips too far in favor of new bloggers. Established bloggers on Steemit will produce more sponsored content, and rely on subscription models.
Are auto-votes a prelude to the subscription model/Patreon model?
In Youtube when demonetization happened we saw established Youtubers go with the Patreon model. Patreon on their website advertises itself as being a way for creators to get "sustainable income". This is something most established bloggers on Steemit seem to benefit from, but it's also something that established Youtubers or bloggers anywhere on the Internet benefit from through Patreon. Is the auto-voting just a mechanism to enable something better in the future?
SMTs will enable bloggers to have the Patreon like business models. Bloggers must run a business to continue blogging and popular bloggers with good reputations will only be able to blog in a sustainable way if enabled to do so. New bloggers in theory should be able to gain subscribers too but if no bloggers can gain subscribers then established bloggers may have to actually use Patreon on top of Steem which to me seems ridiculous given Steem is a superior technology.
Thoughts?
You mentioned some interesting ideas but there is so much more to consider and I realize it is difficult to talk about everything in a single post. You should ask yourself the question: are established bloggers on steemit motivated to keep making quality content? They reached a point where they have many followers and no matter what they write their posts will generate a sure income. That really lowers the bar even for new bloggers, how do you think they feel when they spend hours working on a post that pays them few cents and then they see more popular authors posting mediocre content making hundreds of dollars? I think it's important to attract new bloggers as that will bring fresh air and new ideas. Established bloggers here can make easily hundreds of dollars per post, so I guess it won't hurt them to allow newer users to grow. One of the issue of steemit is that it is very difficult for new users to be noticed regardless of how they write. Just have a look at the trending front page of steemit. It's decorated with posts from only established authors, most of them are not exactly top quality, so yes we need more new authors.
You have to ask yourself how did they get those followers? By providing quality content for months, years? To stay motivated to produce quality content (from a business perspective) you have to see something in the data which shows that there is demand for the niche, or in other words you have no way to subjective determine quality and you cannot determine it objectively because no such measure exists.
The only thing we have are numbers, data, which is collected from the metrics of the market. The market determines subjectively by it's own measures which posts get rewarded. The rewards are not just in $, but in followers, in upvotes, in attention, and so on. It's simply not possible to produce 100% quality posts for all readers as different generations or demographics of readers are looking for different measures to determine quality.
Established bloggers make $100 an hour anywhere and established anything tends to make more, so it's not like it's exclusive to Steemit. And in anything, everyone spends hours at first receiving little to no attention, doing a lot of high quality work for little to no recognition, until eventually they get recognized. This isn't just how it is on Steemit but in just about everything unless you can show me data proving otherwise.
Expensive bloggers cost more for the same quality
I do agree quality from established authors are going down over time, but also Steemit is becoming less fun over time, and the rewards for posting are diminishing over time. Growth alone doesn't make the platform more fun. By less fun I mean there are more political conflicts on Steemit this year than there were last year, and as more people join in the conflicts keep getting bigger, and frankly it becomes less and less fun to interact.
It's not just about the dollars which is all young posters probably see. The community is deteriorating. Established bloggers with lots of followers are part of the original community, but new bloggers have a bigger focus on posting just to make money and less on the community development aspect. The culture of Steemit has also shifted dramatically to reward new bloggers but quality hasn't gone up (actually it has gone down), so there is no evidence in my opinion that spreading very small amounts of money to very many bloggers increases the quality of the content. If the Steemit platform were fun then people wouldn't mind posting quality content but Steemit as a whole is not growing at this time.
For example, if you are a blogger and your blog posts don't get you much in terms of $, maybe you are able to get lots of followers? As long as your metrics keep improving it can remain fun for you because you are growing. In a time like it is now, where there just isn't a lot of growth from any direction (not a lot of new people joining Steemit compared to other times, and the price of Steem going down), then everyone new and old are not having as much fun.
I think the only way to improve quality is to reward quality consistently. This never happens on Steemit, not for established bloggers or new bloggers. What happens is you have new bloggers who are on a lower tier because people don't know if they can produce quality content, and you have established bloggers on a higher tier because they have track records. People who curate tend to bet on the bloggers they know can produce consistent high quality content (because they did it in the past), but as Steem rewards go down then even established bloggers have less time to post and have to change strategies.
There isn't a way out of this. Quality can't be expected to rise if payouts and overall user growth on the platform are decreasing. It favors the bloggers who can afford to post high quality content from developing countries (these are the new bloggers you speak of) who will be able to post 1000 word well researched articles, or books, for maybe $5-10 each. This is sustainable for people in developing countries because the cost of living in for instance India can support a blogger who posts for $5-10 a post, but it's a spiral down because eventually people in India will not be able to compete with people in Africa willing to live off $5-10 a day.
I have a full time job and even that doesn't pay 100$ an hour..so bloggers must be doing pretty well!!. You are right, we should not look just at how much a post pays, to me it's also important to be able to reach people. If we talk numbers, the number of users actively reading content is very low. Often even popular posts have less than 100 views (probably we go down to 10 views for a new user) if nobody reads what you write your words are just quacks in the void. Writing something knowing that no one is going to read it is very discouraging. I understand popular authors had to go through the same issues and earned the followers they have but I don't judge them from their past, I just see what they write today and in many cases it's not great. Things move in self-perpetuating loops. If you are surrounded by enthusiastic and talented people they will also motivate you to give your best and to improve. On the other hand, when everyone else around you puts less effort, things start to go down. This being said, I think there are some pretty good articles too but I think more effort should go in shuffling the posts and sorting them by their quality. The past performance of an author should just be one of the variables considered, I feel today that has too much weigh and it's crushing the new users. Obviously I am not objective in this as in me it's still fresh the frustration of spending hours to craft a post that was seen by less than 10 people. But I can't complain as I am doing much better than many other people. Steem is a superior platform than many other popular websites out there, I think it will be important to be dynamic and be supportive of change. It's like when you swim, if you keep moving you stay afloat and you get somewhere, the moment you stop moving you start sinking.
The first job of a blogger with under 10,000 followers is to reach 10,000 followers. This is the long vision, not the short vision of getting maximum payouts per post. Having 10,000 followers is more in measurable wealth than having 10,000 in Steem Power which may or may not be worth much in the next 6 months. 10,000 followers is always worth 10,000 followers, but I guess I'm the one who sees that.
People posting often are gaining followers in a tough "slow growth" season for Steemit. It's almost like we have to post just to keep our blog growing at a pace for it to feel worth it to keep blogging on Steemit. If our Twitter account or other accounts are getting followers much faster then people eventually switch their efforts around.
Established bloggers experience that too. This is the market and no matter what metric we check it doesn't seem like growth is happening very fast. If we track views, the views seem to be slowing, if we track followers, that too seems to be slowing, and if we look at the Steem price, that is going down.
As far as your job not paying $100 an hour, it really depends also on where you live. If you live in New York, California, or Toronto, $100 an hour is like the minimum it costs just to live in such a place. Of course bloggers who don't live in the United States will feel like $100 for an hour worth of work is a lot and even bloggers who live in some of the cheaper areas in the country might think that, but this again is market dynamics not determined by the individual bloggers.
A blogger in India or Africa right now can be looking at posts getting $10-20 and thinking it's a lot of money for an hour worth of work. An American blogger would not think this. I agree on the keep it moving concept, but at the same time I agree with tracking metrics and to be honest established and new bloggers are discouraged because the UI of the site does not display success in any metric except payout.
Payouts are advertised all over the site while other metrics like followers, or the overall growth of the content on the site, or the amount of views a post gets, these are given the small print if reported at all. This gives everyone the impression that the Steemit community is "just about making money", and so people who blog expect to make a lot of money and leave if they don't make it quick.
Don't get me wrong, I like money too. I just don't think Steem is even anywhere near it's potential as a concept and think now is not the time to fight over money (fighting over crumbs annoys the hell out of me). I believe in growing the pie so we all can make $100 a post and up (there was a time when this was happening even for new posters).
I think Steem should try to find additional sources of revenue to be used on improving the quality of the community. Currently there are no ads, and it may be an idea to allow only companies that accept Steem to promote their products or posts a bit like on Facebook or Twitter. Or even finding external sponsors for some educational projects on Steemit may be an idea. Otherwise we will all have to move to India :)
I really see no easy solution for this because Steemit isn't really designed to support a price floor on the cost of labor. This means the established bloggers eventually will be priced out of the market if the market is efficient because they are "too expensive" for the quality of content they produce. This is going to keep happening in cycles as formerly cheap bloggers become "too expensive" as the price of Steem drops. The only way out of this is for the price of Steem to keep increasing so that cost cutting isn't necessary.
Just like in business, when a business is short on revenue one of the things it does is lay people off or cut the pay of it's employees. So of course in the Steemit scenario cases will be made that certain bloggers are too expensive for the network to support at this time. But it doesn't mean there are any better bloggrs to replace them. Yes the network can afford to put in place for argument 5 Indian bloggers for every US or UK blogger, due to the fact that in different countries $5-10 means a lot more than it does in other countries. So the reward values are not at all universal to all participants which means eventually the US/UK bloggers everywhere will either deem it's not worth the time or they'll see growth.
Growth doesn't have to be in the $ per post, but it has to be somewhere, such as followers gained per post, or something else. The problem with the Steemit UI is it doesn't help bloggers to track any other important metrics except $ per post, so as a result bloggers are obsessed with that.
I think we should encourage everyone to blog on Steemit so the newcomers can learn techniques from the older bloggers on this platform which can help them progress
How do you keep the older bloggers while encouraging the new?
Keep them as role models to teach the newcomers as creating posts that will guide the newcomers how to succeed on the paltform , about crypto and updates that come along
great post like it and upvoted.....
keep it up!!
nice post is a nice