Powerful post; you mentioned the disproportionate influence that SP creates.
People starting out, I'll speak from my experience, I read about 25 introduction posts. I looked to the introduction posts that had generated the most I could find (a range between 50-100+). So, I put in some effort and crafted the first post to introduce myself. A week later I got my first 0.005 steem.
Next - Content only holds value for 1 week. Many forms of content is VERY limited by this constraint. A video for example, might attract a handful of views and a few likes within that 7 days... what happens if the video goes viral on day 10 and gets 1000's of more likes after... well, it is gone.
Next - Unless you are a whale and have people just waiting for you to post so they can get a chance at curation rewards, then any success depends on bots OR the long and drawn out efforts of slowly attracting people towards your own content... and I've learned recently about the epidemic of resteem bots (about 1/3 of my followers have 0 original posts and only resteems).
Most people do not have the time and dedication to collect pennies for articles written that might take a few hours to write and format, add images, sources, etc... then to watch it disappear into obscurity while giving a few cents, then to look on the trending page seeing garbage click bait that is 2 paragraphs and a picture getting 1000$ worth of steem. That is a kick to the balls that people generally won't want to put themselves through.... so, they just stop posting.
That's really only looking at the negative end, I wouldn't be here if there weren't some positives to offset that, but I understand the perspective that if a system seems unfair, people will not stick around.
If people are not sticking around, then there's nobody buying steem and people selling, so, the price will drop.
rant over.
Haha we have the freedom to rant here ;)
I agree on that the 1 week limit on receiving posts rewards does indeed incentivize people to write for the short term, the mentality is "what can I write for today."
However the value of a post can be ongoing, the information in the post can be consumed infinitely so long as the steem blockchain is live. We have started to associate value with money, and have disregarded the fact that when write a post for the long term and people like it, they can come back to your blog and upvote your other posts. Additionally, people can earn different ways on their blogging. Not only through upvotes, the conventional blogging.
Thanks for coming by btw ;)
Well, its a bit of a double edged sword really - If I stumble on an older steemit blog post and I see that it has few upvotes its like a quality filter, so to speak, that tells me if I should invest a chunk of time into reading it. Thus if everyone is writing for the short term to get that built-in reward from upvotes it gets very repetetive content.
I think too man are so focused on the "hit piece" and the reward now, rather than building a following and thinking long-term.
Interesting to follow his discussion!
Brilliant Newby Comment :)
You are right, but you can write a novel worth of tutorials, not even breakthrough the startup SP, and people will gain value for years.
Knowing that the rewards of efforts for any efforts end at 7 days, it's better to write a singular article as multiple small parts spread out daily than to make a solid full length essay.
Yes, you'll make more attractive posts, over time you will build a larger following, but over those months and years, you still get to see garbage posts making hundreds or even thousands, daily.
The system is designed in such a way where there's a built in motivation to post click bait, to look into strategies like timing, what bots to use, what is the best time to click like... It makes it into a game.
Actually, even posts like this where there is a discussion following are few and far between.
"Content only holds value for 1 week. Many forms of content is VERY limited by this constraint."
Nothing to add to that.
Very good point.