Day 2! (I'll reuse my bio unless there's something else anyone would like to know.)
*I'm the sole proprietor of Ribbiting Science, which began as a facebook page on March 8, 2013. Unfortunately, not long after I hit 500 likes, facebook changed its algorithm and almost overnight the page growth plummeted. After a few years, alternative social media sites started taking off an it's given RS room to grow on more friendly platforms.
I now make written and video content when I have the time and started using Steemit actively about a month ago after getting my account in October and waiting until I understood the site/community better so I could put up content that would appeal to the userbase here.*
For my submission today, I'm sharing the 1st of a 4 part series I wrote about the growth of human knowledge and the importance mistakes play in learning using evolution, dinosaurs, and a goofily-stuffed Swedish lion as examples.
Part 1 - The Lion:
https://steemit.com/science/@ribbitingscience/lions-and-dinos-and-science-oh-my-part-1
I look forward to getting to read through a few more posts here, have already found 3 new people to subscribe to for interesting content. Good luck everyone!
@ribbitingscience this article was very well done and I really enjoyed not only reading this, but learning a plethora of new information. That lion is possibly the most hideous thing I have seen that isn't supposed to look like a gargoyle LOL. Definitely shows that it was probably given as a royal "joke" of sorts. From the side it's not so bad, but the frontal view is the stuff nightmares are made of HAHA. Very good article, seriosuly. I have got to see more of your stuff. I know for certain that you have a bright future on Steemit and you are a great member to have available to educate our community members. The more we know the more we grow ;)
Day Two's winner has been announced. Please, put another entry or two in for Day Three. Your hard work is going to pay off and trust me, the networking we are able to do on here is absolutely priceless. I'm looking forward to more of your work. Thank you again for your entries!
The funny thing is that I ended up having to write this first section pretty much last. Turns out basically no English source has an accurate story of the lion's origins, ended up having to recruit a Swede to translate articles from two reputable newspapers for me. Overall, very worth the effort. :)
@ribbitingscience I can't imagine how difficult that must have been for you! How did you by recruiting someone for this?
Thankfully, I was able to find someone through my account over on Minds, a very nice fellow by the name of Edgar was able to find and translate some articles for me (I also contacted the portion of the Swedish ministry in charge of the museum the lion is kept in). I was shocked at how little research any english source had bothered to put in to verifying the basic details of the story (they had instead just copy and pasted from each other).
@ribbitingscience I also had to deal with Facebook changing their advertising up. It hurt my businesses terribly when one day advertising at $25 a day was fruitful and then the next I'm getting jammed for $125 for the same results. They killed small business advertising with them to suckle off of the teat of big business. One reason I can't stand facebook. How serious of a marketing plan did you have in motion with them when they smashed small business?
Thank you for entering your article! Your entry is valid. I'm about to go read it now, honestly can't wait!
Around that time, I had seen two fantastic videos done Veritasium on youtube exposing how incredibly sketchy facebook's advertising was (and the situation hasn't improved in the 4 years since):
Video 1:
Video 2:
I tested it out myself and saw similarly spurious results after just $25. Around the same time they also began tweaking their algorithms that murdered growth rates of smaller pages, a science page with over 20K followers I was helping to manage at the time even began seeing declines in activity.
One of the ways facebook pages monetize (generally the main way back then) is by selling merchandise through third parties. However, Facebook began tipping the algorithms against posts containing urls (and good luck getting nonmonetized posts to trend if they have a youtube url) without monetized boosting. Less activity for more money seems to be their monetization model at this point as their active user base continues to decline (and I can't wait to see how poorly it works out for them).
Regardless, hope you enjoy the article, had to break the original essay up into 4 parts since it was just too long to fit in one post.
It's insane that they changed the way they handled everything and ultimately will be the demise of a nice chunk of their income. Not that it really matters to them though....they are loaded. I lost all respect for FB when they pulled this underhanded move and stopped advertising with them. Best thing I did was seek out other outlets!