Steemit once upon a time had a cap on how many times a blogger could post per day. This led to many bloggers becoming commenters but it also lead to an economics where popular posters were getting $500-1000 per quality post while many new bloggers were getting only $5-10. Of course this led to a situation where the new bloggers thought it was unfair and for this reason there was a hard fork which changed the economics of Steem.
The posting reward limit
Prior to the hardfork there was a reward limit for top level posts. This discouraged all bloggers from making more than 4-6 top level posts per day. At the same time during this time the payouts were daily not weekly, which again encouraged a rate of around 4 blog posts per day. When the hardfork was made it changed this by removing the limit of top level posts. When this happened many prominent bloggers knew it would dramatically change the economics and encourage shorter more frequent top level posts. As a result we are seeing this trend among bloggers along with complaints now about posting too often or posts being too short. In essence the complaints come in whether it's 4 long posts getting big rewards or many short posts getting small rewards.
The experiment and Hardfork 18
The experiment was supposed to fix the economics by flattening the reward payout line. This changed again the reward mechanism and adjusted the economics to favor new posters. When it happened the $1000+ payouts that established bloggers used to get turned into $100 payouts, but many more bloggers were able to get paid and most people including established bloggers were happy with this. After all $100 per post still wasn't bad and the price of Steem was also high at the time so the reward pool was seen as full.
When Hardfork 18 first happened everyone's payouts were very low for a full month. Prominent bloggers had to adjust to this and of course posted even when the payouts were $5, $10, and over time adapted. Hardfork 18 dramatically changed the economics.
Steem Power delegation
An additional feature was added to increase the ability of curators to manually curate. It is currently possible for anyone to delegate their Steem Power to anyone. This means if you think the curation is currently unfair or not good enough there is the option to delegate your Steem Power to people who do have time to curate on your behalf. This also has happened and decentralized the voting (it used to be that content wouldn't necessarily be discovered). In addition we also have the option to Resteem blogs which we think do have good content and bloggers with a lot of followers can help bloggers who are just entering into Steemit.
So where are the problems now?
Now begins the survey for readers of my blog. What do you think are the current problems?
- Do you think we should go back to the old economics of having a limit between 4-6 posts per day?
- Do you prefer longer more elaborate (longer to read) blogposts or do you prefer shorter posts?
- What do you feel is the right amount of posts a blogger should make per day?
Those are the three basic questions for now. This discussion will continue but the point to note is that under any of the economics a blogger was encouraged to post a minimum of 4 top level posts per day, and whether the economics were flatter, or under the old economics, there were bloggers who complained.
I think Steemit favors older more established bloggers. I probably would not have noticed this post if it were written by a minnow. The barriers to Steemit success for newcomers is much higher than it used to be. Every hot and trending post is written by people who are not minnows. I don't have a solution.
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.
@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.
I agree with what @viraldrome has said. The main problems currently are that whale gives votes to each other predominantly, that the reward system incentivizes bahaviours like described here by @snowflake, and excessive delegation of voting power to bots. But I think that was not the point of your email. Back to your questions:
Now we have some progress. Originally before Hardfork 18 the prominent bloggers were doing around 4 posts a day of very high quality. The competition at the time was about quality and length of the post was encouraged by the limit of 4 top level posts per day. Today the average poster is posting a few sentences with a picture, or similar short posts.
So it seems you recommend shorter posts. Is there a limit to how many short posts a blogger should be allowed to post a day or is this unlimited? If it is unlimited then this encourages the blogger to post as many short high quality posts per day as they want. If each blogger can only make 1 post per day, can you show me an example of a successful blogger who makes 1 post per day and is earning well?
I would not recommend more than 4. If 5 would be the average, and you follow lets say 100 people, your feed would contain 500 new posts per day or more which is a number I could not even screen through - but my opinion only. The fact that they are shorter doesn´t mean they are rewarded less (in case the fear is to not earn enough by not compensating the post lenght by post number). Or is this indeed the case? "Earn well" is hard to define. I like to follow also some people, just because they have some interesting thoughts, even if they post not every day. Are you only posting for the reward? I mean is it a full time job or your own source of income? E.g. for me, it is just a side thing to my office job, still I try to post things hopefully interesting to others. If I get some upvotes, this is "success" as well. So not sure, how you define a successful blogger.
If successful blogger cannot be defined then what would encourage the new bloggers to improve? What does the model blogger look like and what is success? If blogging on Steemit is not sustainable even for established bloggers then blogging just will not be attractive.
In my follow up post I mentioned Patreon. Patreon is what Youtubers used when Youtube demonetized thousands of established Youtubers. Is it possible that this auto-vote trend is actually the beginning of implementing a Patreon like model on Steemit?
Why fight against it? Why not legitimize this model by using SMTs to make it even better? I do understand the issue with people not reading posts which is why shorter posts are encouraged because if you think maybe people don't have the time to read them all as a blogger you will get to the point.
But the issue here and choice really is does Steemit want to encourage sustainable income for established bloggers or not? If not then established bloggers have to get sustainable income from somewhere else.
Lots of good questions. I think Steemit wants to to encourage sustainable income for established bloggers, but the reward pool is limited and with the current approach and voting system no new posters will ever come in the situation the currently established bloggers are - which might turn out as a slow death to the platform if next year competitive platforms will start. Maybe the only solution is that current trending posters earn less as a price that the platform is attractive for newbies as well, so that a sustainable growth of Steemit can be ensured. Otherwise we have a kind of inbreeding situation, when the same people are posting forever. In part one can see this today, but just my gut feeling, as I have a limited overview only.
no i do not agree with you.. although who people which are making good quality posts getting very well reward.. and they are also know that why he posting only 1 or 2 posts daily only..
However new members need your guidance.. here will be tutorial videos on this site for new members..
Thanks
Hi Dana,
I think the topic of optimal post # and how it should be valued needs to be extended. Perhaps when good author produces great pieces long or short, and especially if their blog shows the test of time, a better reward scheme could/should be introduced.
Not sure if you saw my reply in @stellabella's recent post, I put out a case that some number of small tweaks in the system will bring big benefits to all, especially to good and consistent bloggers.
The idea in my reply is to give everyone hope, let me know if this comes across as an encouragement:
https://steemit.com/deathspiral/@stellabelle/is-steemit-in-an-economic-and-social-suicide-death-spiral#@dj123/re-stellabelle-is-steemit-in-an-economic-and-social-suicide-death-spiral-20171106t234113550z
Up-Voted for sharing steemit history, past experimentation, and opening discussion for optimization.
See my most recent response post to this one where I recommended something similar to a Patreon model. I think it is fair if established bloggers want to be in a position to make sustainable income from their content. I think quality content or just favorite bloggers, artists, etc, are funded by subscription or patronage models.
This is not the only way but the gist of the problem seems to be that established bloggers make a sustainable income from blogging while new bloggers are struggling. Even established bloggers struggle in reality but the perception is that it's sort of an "either or" situation. I think ideally both established bloggers should be supported so as to continue to create quality content and new bloggers encouraged to create quality content to become established bloggers.
Will read @stellabelle as she was for 2016 the #1 most established blogger for a time.
For me a good economics for newcomers would be to end the 7 day limit for earning. You could still receive weekly payouts, but you could also still earn more. This would give some hope so that newcomers knew that even if they were not earning much now, once they go up the ladder they could still be rewarded for their past work (meaning the low earning posts they were writing at the present time).
Another thing that I think it would be a good idea is to reward views. This would create incentives for people to actually read the posts and would allow bloggers to earn from people that were not registered on Steemit. This would make bloggers less exposed to eventual flaws of the other economics.
This is actually a great idea. If the payouts were set up to reward "timeless" content rather than just news worthy content then we would have less "here is the current news" type posts. Before they made the change by hard fork the rewards for content lasted 1 month. They switched down to rewarding content only during a 1 week period. If they stretched the period back to 1 month the quality of content would for sure improve and if they made it without limit then it would improve much more, but again the issue is the economics were switched to favor short news report style posting.
I feel like this is just a period of downturn and everything will get better er once the price of Steem rises again. I feel like people should write longer blogs and post about 1-2 a day. For new users, we have all been there and have been there and we have to earn respect and work our way up
i think steemit is great for good writers and people who like blogging - for artists and musicians it is not always what we like to do ,and as a social network , i am not sure long blogs are the only focus that matters. i notice a lot of the older members only support eachother, and that must be nice for them, but to me the whole thing seems in a ever reducing spiral. The drive to gain users is one thing, but the network is not set up to encourage new members who are often leaving or giving up on writing long blogs after seeing very low rewards on well written blogs again and again. I like reading the well written blogs, and that keeps me here, i hope the network broadens to include incentives for various types of content, not just support for whales by whales. I upvote you most times when i read your blogs and have followed you for months. best regards, David
This post is very essensial for us .Thank you for crate this post.
Wow very nice I really I like your post
There is also a limit to upvote to the new members or lower reputation members.. Because only high reputation members upvoting to the higher rank.. they never upvoted to the lower ranks.. because they know they can seek only money from high reputation people or Strong SP People..
From this policy mutual policy of higher ranks people making them only reward for higher ranks. New members has no hopes.
I've seen some posters who aren't earning a lot per post who also have high reputation. I know one poster who earns maybe 1-2$ per post, who posts often, but has a reputation as high as mine. So I don't think reputation has much to do with it.
i agree with you steem power has the matter. but it is oftenly seen mostly high reputation people quickly gets upvotes and comments whether there content is quality or not.. and all people rush them fastly due to their high reputation. But this do new members like me.. because we have do not know how to work on steemit. Therefore here on this site should be tutorial videos like trending, new hot, promoted. here should be new tab for tutorial videos.
There is a reason for this and this is normal. In any industry people with higher reputations are paid better. Tell me one industry which does not favor people with a higher reputation?
To put it differently, trusted bloggers are paid more than new bloggers because they are more known, more trusted. This is why reputation has value in the first place and why people want to maintain the reputation. But I don't think reputation alone determines which bloggers become the favorites, as that is determined by something else.
To get on a trending page is not as hard as people think even for new posters. If you find a niche topic, and you post about it often enough, eventually you become an authority on that niche topic and trend. If you post like how everyone else is posting then because the topic is food, or traveling, or something people just seen before, they might not take notice.
I think highly rewards only due to quality of the content. Quality of the content matters 80% of 100. remaining 20% relates to others factors like reputations higher follower, etc. Totally agree with you.. but post should not be limited.
I new here but I think 4 max blog is okay,sometimes its hard to come up with an article to write. Second, I prefer shorter blog with pictures. I get bored reading a long post especially if the topic doesnt interest me much and lastly, replying/posting/commenting doesnt have a quota.
i do not agree with you. although who people which are making good quality posts getting very well reward.. and they are also know that why he posting only 1 or 2 posts daily only..
However new members need your guidance.. here will be tutorial videos on this site for new members!!
post is avray good is anice pick
One problem with Steemit is that people are using it for completely different motivations. Some do serious writing, some are using it to post fairly irrelevant things about everyday life (e.g., "here's a picture of the stirfry dinner I cooked tonight"), some are paraphrasing articles appearing in high quality online magazines and regurgitating the info here with a reference link. A lot of those posts simply have no value. But if someone with high Steem reputation does it, they receive blockchain rewards.
This needs to be separated out. Facebook-type status posts should earn zero value. Otherwise, they dilute the value of the blockchain.
For serious writers, we need a different business model. All curation must be manual, involving an expert in the field reading the material and giving editing instructions. Software bots that autovote should be eliminated, because they allow low quality posts from high rep people to earn value, fraudulently. Perhaps it would be helpful to borrow from Wikipedia's business practice. Reputation should not be based on popularity, but by a more informed process. And reputation should be restricted to a particular area of interest. This would prevent high rep people from abusing their status and writing low quality material about things outside of their experience area.
Journalists take a long time to research a story, talk with people who can provide independent corroboration (witnesses, experts, others with first hand knowledge of the subject). An article is written and then an editor reviews it to determine business value and whether it is ready for publication. That activity is well informed and has business value. The farther we get away from that, perhaps posting something every 20 minutes, or not speaking with people who have first-hand knowledge of the subject, or not doing due diligence and reading other material written on the subject, or not spending the time to develop an expertise in the subject matter ... then far fewer rewards, if any, should be given for it.
I support the idea of automatic head, this is definitely a good idea. But I really think that we need to return the restrictions in the number of posts. Your posts are interesting and useful. In addition, you have every right as an investor to publish many posts a day. But most people publish a lot of spam, pictures, links and other junk. Because of this, really high-quality content is lost and underestimated. I believe that limiting up to six posts a day will be a good return.