I totally understand your view, and it is a very important issue. Personally, I started out here about a year ago. I knew nobody on the website (other than my brother who recruited me), and I had no real 'followers' from other websites to bring with me. For my first ~6 months here, I was posting tons of content, and most of my posts were making almost nothing. The majority of my friends were actually making fun of me for "still spending time on that stupid website", considering how little money I was making for my time. After almost a year of consistently working on building a 'brand' for myself, and consistently producing good content that people seem to enjoy - I am now actually making a decent amount of money from the website.
I think the problem is that the platform gives people the potential to earn, but there is no guarantee of earning. There is no 'formula' either, or recipe for success. It is up to each individual to find what works for them, and to try and make a name for themselves + build their following.
Users have learned to survive you should only "upvote" these Kobe Bryants (earlier the better), and not touch anyone else, lest you should lose money with your upvote. So people are sitting on the New posts section waiting for posts from these Whale, Kobe Byrant whatever users and trying to use Max SteemPower and jump on a post early - so it is almost like daytrading.
Kind of off topic from my main point, but just FYI - people who are doing this are probably earning less from curation rewards than they would get from upvoting a decent 'undiscovered' post. The curation formula is very misunderstood, and there is very rarely a time when upvoting a 'popular' author is good from a curation rewards perspective.
Back to the main point though, I do agree with what you are saying. Believe it or not, it is actually a lot better today than it was a year ago. I think that many of the major stakeholders are looking for ways to improve it more, although the big question is - how.
Keep in mind too, if we develop a platform that makes it easy for new users to sign up and make tons of money without putting in a lot of effort to improve the platform/community, then many users will likely find ways to exploit it in ways that are not good for the long-term success of the platform.
I'm very open to ideas on this subject though. I think finding a way to make the platform more appealing/fun/fair for "the average user" is a very important thing to get right.
This is the key takeaway almost everyone needs to have. Steem is a great ecosystem and toolset for people to monetize their work and passions without the interference, fees and middlemen of other crowdfunding and media platforms. But especially as the user base grows, it's quite unreasonable to expect great success for everyone. Steem becomes a microcosm of the internet in general. Not many people can start a blog or Facebook page and make money at it.
The hard truth is the inflation rate of Steem is currently about 9.5% We'll say 10% and not even get into the fact that all of this doesn't go to content creators... just for the sake of simplicity. That means the average earnings of any user on the platform should be about a 10% gain per year. Period. If a minnow has 10 Steem Power and finishes the year with 11 Steem Power, unfortunately that's the norm. For everyone who over performs that amount, there will be hundreds or thousands more who underperform that.
We need a group of users and fans who interact more casually and I think we'll see that as Zappl and Steepshot evolve. Of course their success may mean even less of the rewards pool for the traditional long form blogging we've all come to accept as reward worthy. The normal use scenario will probably gravitate toward a balance where the vast majority of content earns nothing, professionals steadily earn, and everyday users have that jackpot chance of a post going viral like on Reddit, Facebook or Twitter now, but instead of just the thrill of a celebrity retweet and thousands of likes, they can also see a windfall post payout as well.
The reason to bring over hundreds of people from Facebook would be to build a community and group that would support each other. Active, participatory groups do the best. Collaboration isn't collusion. If a few thousand people flock to a certain tag and spend most of their time positively and earnestly interacting within that tag, they'll all see their earnings improve from the robust, concentrated activity.
thanks for getting back so quickly. It is a extremely complicated I can imagine - because the last thing we want is mainstream folks coming over posting photos of their spaghetti dinner, or their cat or whatever and getting $20 for it. Yes I agree with you it does take time, but there are a few - OK a lot of things I don't understand. A direct example:
This openmic post was great, this guy got 21 Responses, 24 votes and received only $3.40. Way underpaid - if you poke around the openmic thread you will see loads of posts that were of similar or lesser quality ( I am a musician) - with very similar Response/Upvotes ratio to what this user received, that are up in the $120-$150 range. Now is this because of the amount of SteemPower or account value of this musician/user in this example? Or was he just very unlucky and was only upvoted by users with low account/SteemPower values? This is part of what I don't understand (there's plenty more) and I am just using this example because it highlights the financial rewards "lopsided" issue I mentioned
https://steemit.com/openmic/@tim-rumford/steemit-open-mic-week-45-love-in-vain-cover-tune
So I won't ramble on any more - I really THANK you for writing me back so quickly, if there is anything I can do to help let me know, I am not a programmer/IT guy, but I am a pretty good businessman and if I can help in any way to make this great Steemit platform (which I LOVE by the way) a better environment by sharing my experience and view on how I see it, please don't hesitate to contact me at any time. Thank you for all your hard work, I know I will be successful here after a bit of time goes by. Also I do not understand the "curation rewards" from upvoting strong posts, but that's a whole other subject and I will research that more on my own. Take care
Well as far as the earnings from posts, there are a lot of factors that go into it. The payout amount is purely based on the amount of SP if the votes. A vote from a user with 1,000 SP is worth the same as 100 votes from 100 users with 10 SP each. The quality of the post is not the only factor as far as whether it will earn votes/rewards. A lot of it depends on who the author is - have they built up a following so that lots of people see their posts when they create them? Have they developed relationships with their followers, so that people actually want to take the time out of their day to read the post? Of course there is always a little bit of luck mixed in too :)
There is a lot to learn about the community/platform. I find it quite fun. I've been here for over a year now, and I still come across new stuff to learn about :)
thanks!
"only $3.40" - So this guy who nobody knows got 3.4 dollars for playing guitar and singing directly from their home when he decided to share it on social media and everyone is complaining? Let him go do the same on Facebook and Reddit or anywhere else and let's compare the results.
I do agree that everyone can't get "fair" rewards from the start. That would be very hard! This kind of problems continue to exist when the majority of voting power is in the hands of 0.01% of users in the platform. Minnows should be more vocal about changing that, maybe something would actually happen then.