Why does it take three hours of scrolling the same feed to find someone new I'd actually be interested in following?
When I first joined back in 2017 I wrote a post titled something like
"How can one locate quality content on Steemit?"
I was utterly confused because the idea was really cool, but I would scroll for like an hour and find nothing but utter garbage upvoted to oblivion. I had just gotten done writing a post that took me several hours to put together and it got literally less than a penny in rewards.
At the time, I had no idea what a 'bid bot' was, so I didn't realize that people were paying for those up-votes to their meme filled nonsense. So it had me pulling out my hair pretty aggressively!
I feel like things are a bit better since the bots are pretty much dead, but people always find a way to game the system. I wish we could figure out a good, effective way to clean up the feeds so that real good content gets in there. I guess we all have to put the effort in to be better curators for that to happen.
When you're looking at that money beside a post, please keep in mind only half goes to the publisher.
This! And I'd also like to add that I find it a little cheeky when people complain about really good posts that get really high rewards, and even flag them... like $80+ posts or whatever. Give me a break... If people are going to complain about someone getting 100 bucks for a well crafted post, then what they are really saying is:
"Don't expect to be a full time blogger, and if you do - don't do it on Hive."
If this platform ever really took off, I would expect that the best posts would consistently earn over $100. Otherwise, why would any real content creators waste their time.
Like I said, those paid votes scared away a lot of consumers. Nothing made sense. Crap earning top dollar (most of that money was actually going to a handful of vote sellers but nobody knew that). Quality creators left out of frustration. In one of my first posts pointing out those issues I suggested the posts with paid votes be marked as 'paid programming' or 'advertisments' since that what they were, but I was ignored, things got worse. They almost destroyed the entire content creation element of this blockchain, for nothing.
Things are better but you're right about gaming and I pointed out how it didn't take me long to find an example of it. That name I mentioned was spamming garbage, and I'm sure the voters are also voting for many other garbage posts created in the same fashion. All this spam for a few quarters a day clogs the arteries here and we can't find the good stuff. Scroll and scroll. Click, realize it's just a shit post, exit, scroll, scroll, click, another shit post. Where are the people?!? They're around, just hard to find on the feed.
And of course limiting 'success' is a terrible idea. No need to pick on the actual content creators for doing well.