These are were my thoughts about two days ago. We've experienced a not-so-smooth transition but i am still hopeful things will pan out well.
It's really too early to say anything at this point but from my own observation, many people aren't happy about our current situation. Bidders aren't happy; content creators aren't happy; stakeholders aren't happy--haven't been for a long time because they are losing money.
My position. I haven't done the maths and I honestly do not want to because it will only point to one thing: I'm wasting my time. My earnings have dropped, engagement has never been great. Basically, there is no real incentive to post. Writing and posting are automated habits I have formed for the past one year of putting out content every single day! It's not a habit I can get rid off easily, even though everything is pushing me away. So at this point, steem does have something working in its favor and that's the loyalty of steemians.
It might get worse. Anytime soon dtube's delegation will be halved, going by the steeminc post about delegation. So I'm looking at less than $10 every week, half of it would be held as steempower, so we are looking at $5, roughly. I don't know what part of the world you're in but that's grossly not-enough. And before you jump into the comment section to tell me how steem is a long term investment, I want to let you know that I know that alright. It's a long-term investment and also short-term investment. I want quick gains and also want to hodl for the future. That's my position.
I actually knew this was going to be the case after the hardfork. My major option was to bid regularly on my post. The strategy was to bid regularly with the belief that most people trying to earn ROI would most likely find my post and curate, coupled with my bid, that should leave me with about 10%-20% ROI, which is quite decent for a guy like me. 4-5 bids weekly would have done the trick and I really don't need to buy steem. Just power down and pump that back it. Sounding like some Ponzi scheme but I'm certain it will work if I don't get downvoted which is gradually becoming a popular thing here. I heard of a group threatening to disrupt things here if their bidding business is affected. I believe we will be having many of such fights in the early stages of this said hardfork, so brace yourself.
Like I was saying, I was going to explore my bidding options but I'm not and for selfish reasons. But fundamentally, bid bots are anti-steem, whether you choose to believe it or not. Think of bidding as printing more money whilst the value of the said money decreases, plus you're putting more money into the pockets of those who already have enough. Like I pointed out in my previous paragraph. I can really increase the steem I have without necessarily buying steem by just powering down and using the liquid steem I get from that process to bid. In other words, more steem less value. Dumb right? But people still do it--i still do it.
Using bid bots was my last option. I wanted to become a dolphin. But of what use is being a dolphin when the value of your stake is equal to that of a minnow a year ago? There is a catch though: steem will someday increase in value when the bull run starts and cryptocurrency goes mainstream--that's the dream of an average steemian. Yes, someday this will payoff so let's ruin things now because the future is guaranteed--steem will moon.
I'm not here to make a case against bid bots. Whatever you choose to do with your money is fine. Hey, I might still bid because you know what? If this dream of ours actually becomes a reality, I will kick myself hard for not bidding my way to the top because it won't matter how i did then. So that's the dilemma. Bidding has become some sort of necessary evil.
Now back to steem. Despite all the changes some people are still earning quite well. They've been able to build good relationships with some top steemians, so they enjoy the benefits of knowing such people, one of which is regular upvotes. Also, they write some decent stuff. However, I feel one of the things that might reduce all the effort put into this hardfork to nothing is this kind of behavior--rewarding people because you're affiliated with them. Now, more than ever the role of whales and orcas is vital to the sustainability of this blockchain. People earning top dollar for regurgitating the same type of pseudo pro steem posts every day isn't doing the blockchain any good. If they are really passionate about steem then they should take that massage outside to the people who do not know anything about steem. But then again, they have the right to do whatever they like, as long as they are breaking no rules here.
#newsteem isn't easy steem. The stakes should be raised. If steem is going to be difficult to earn than I want to see people work for it or we should just all earn our 30cents and hope steem moons someday. That's something I'm looking out for in the next few months. The only change i have felt so far is that people aren't earning as much as they used to but content-wise it's still the same. I'm not here to argue what quality is or not. I know what i consider to be quality. If I begin to see that I might start to buy steem. Currently, the only place I can confidently put my money is in steemmonsters. Steem hasn't won me over yet. You know it's quite different: investing your steem earning and investing your fiat in steem, the former is easier. I can easily powerup all the steem i earn but putting my fiat into steem, that's another thing entirely. First of all, i must be willing to go through the huddle of buying steem and also convincing myself that steem is a worthy investment. Personal opinion: if you haven't invested at least $100-$500 of your fiat in steem than your faith in this project hasn't really been tested. Why do you think these so-called investors act in ways we think are against the interest of steem? Most of them have lost a lot of money. Their faith has been tested and most have failed. It isn't easy though. We can criticize them all we want but losing what most of them have lost, it is only rational to pursue self-interest.
The way out. This whole article will be useless if i don't proffer some form of solution. That's what separates me from a troll (i guess).
TRIBES.
I think we've moved from the era of dapps to tribes and this for me is the only way to salvage the blogging culture on steem. It goes beyond using tags. the communities should be active and small. Yes small. I strongly believe in the power and capability of small groups to deliver, especially when they include the right set of persons and resources. Like i have said in the past, most of the steem discord groups became useless because they increase in size and most where just duplicates of themselves. In other words, for #newsteem to thrive tribes must thrive. This way the blockchain is decentralized further into smaller groups that can cater to its member. They will need the support of big stakeholders to achieve this. So if you have a lot of steem and don't know what to do with it, then maybe you should find a tribe to support.
In conclusion, I want to say we are in the process of rebranding. We should not fall back to old habits if we are honestly concerned about the growth of steem because if we do, I can boldly say steem will have nothing more than 3 active years left of its lifespan. Collaborate with others if you can and if you're a lone wolf like me then put your best foot forward. Nothing is guaranteed but we can fancy our chances if we take the right steps.
I expect it will be a while before we see how the new changes will affect things going forward. Yes, author rewards have dropped, however, I'm seeing a big increase of activity in upvoting on posts made since the Hardfork, so that could make up the difference. Remember, keeping hold of your SP is now more lucrative due to that increase in curation rewards. People are seeing huge jumps in that area of earning.
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Like i said in my first paragraph its too early to define anything just yet, i was barely stating some of my observation. And yes, a am holding on to those steem (for now)
I hope we see improvements as things progress. You've done well here, it would be great to see you come good and grow your brand. Just make sure you're doing what you enjoy.
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Good post bro bro , indeed it will get worse before it gets better. I agree the dapp era has moved to the tribes era and soon to be the dapp tribe era. Many are focusing on the tribes as they see it as a way to earn more than they would posting for steem ( but then they sell for steem). Many will get fed up and start to explore and go to cent and purplishox but then they will realize , it isn’t easy anywhere , it’s not supposed to be or it wouldn’t be sustainable. Many aren’t even posting what they really want to post I realize , they are just going where the money is, at some point that is gonna burn many out. They way i see it, post what you love in your small tribe and build, exactly as you said. Support will come
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Sorry for the late reply. Couldn't yesterday.
I haven't really sold mine. Most are worthless at this point so i really don't see the point.
Lol, i have learned the hard way that steem is the real deal.
That's where tribes come in. When we have more specialized tribe it won't matter what you want to discuss because you can earn doing that.
I feel it's way too early to tell whether my author rewards will increase or decrease because of HF 21/22. I'm in the middle of re-arranging my autovotes to maximize curation rewards myself, too. I don't want to support bid botted low-value content but I want to optimize the timing of my vote. I believe many others are doing to the same. Today, @exyle voted on a post of mine for the first time ever. I believe there are other mobile voters with a lot of SP looking for new authors to support.
True that--your first statement and i stated something similar in my first paragraph.
Really it is your stake man, you know what's best for you. I'm not even judging anybody, barely stating how i feel about this service. Would still use ocdb occasionally. Really there are no rights or wrongs here.
Maybe i might get lucky and get upvotes from a whale but I'm not banking on that and honestly, that does not aim anymore. I just threat earning as a by-product of being creative.
Pretty much agree with everything you say here Nonso 👍
I'm in the hospital right now so can't write more of a long response. Personally I think that delegations have ruined steem. Without them there would be no bidbots.
P.s. not many people speak truth on steem because of the FACT that you'll suddenly lose support from certain people if you speak these truths. Good on you for not buying into the BS. One thing never changes, there are people here who earn tones for basically dressing up their opinion in pretty words, then there are a load of people who actually create interesting stories etc. One is massively overvalued and it's a shame, because no one outside of steem is interested in steemians opinions about steem... no matter how well written.
P.p.s. I'm not talking about you here, there are many of the 'top steemians' - tarazkp is one that comes to mind - who write very well, but 99.9% of they write is about steem. If all whales and orcas support is these steem-centric authors, then newsteem will fail because even in the case of a bull run, there will be nothing here for new steemians to read that they will understand.
Before delegations and bid bots there were off-chain deals. It's a very narrow view to blame delegations. Besides, to view Steem as a blogging platform as it was in 2016 and and 2017 is very narrow a view. There is vast potential for delegations to be used for many purposes.
Steem itself is a difficult topic for newbies to understand, which is why Steem-centric content will be welcome. I do agree with you, however, that other topics are very much necessary but I think Tribes are already addressing that need and communities will do so even more in the future.
I'm afraid I don't agree. The result of tribes, when you get down to brass tax, is that people are being brainwashed into thinking that the rewards they get in the tribe token should be enough for their content. Tribe tokens aren't worth fck all. Basically, we're all being sold the idea that it's acceptable to go back to the start for us... Meanwhile those who actually get decent post rewards in steem continue the circle jerks and actually make some money.
Of course, if tribes succeed then I'll be proven wrong and I'd be happy to be.
As to what you're saying about delegations. I don't think I have a narrow view at all. Without the delegation mechanism projects would have had to actually invest in steem power to incentivise their target audience. This would have created buy pressure on the token offsetting some of the sell pressure that had plagued steem. I'm not the first to point out this negative of the delegation mechanism. During the bull run steem had a massive userbase and potential market for projects to target. Many would have bought SP if they hadn't have been gifted SP. Meanwhile steemit.incs SP could have been put to work in many ways we can't even envision because it didn't go that way.
An informed opinion is very different to a narrow view Mark.
What should be enough for one's content is for oneself to decide. Every content creator alone will decide that for themselves.
I thought the issue was the prevalence of Steem-centric content and not money. You said there was too much content about Steem here. I answered that Tribes and later Communities will address that implying that this is because they are focused on specific niches.
The tribes are so small that they're really just seeds that have the potential to grow into something larger. I think it's too early to judge the tribes. I think one tribe that has a very good chance of growing into something much bigger is DPorn. The adult industry has always been eager to adopt new technology. The PORN token or PORN POWER to be exact has one clear use case in addition to speculation already: it can be used to incentivize the content creators to create content to please you. The community is so small that everybody talks to everybody. Someone with a lot of PORN POWER is capable of simultaneously acting as both a consumer and a producer. That's something totally unique. Other tribes may have similar strengths deriving from their unique characteristics.
I don't think many of those apps would've bought any SP at all in that case, particularly not during the bull run when it was very expensive to do that. And no, Steem never had a massive user base. If we now have 10,000 unique daily active users, we may have had something like 50,000 at best. Steemit, Inc has always had very limited personnel to do anything with its SP which it holds mainly to power down and cover the cost of development, running full nodes and buying storage space for binary files from Amazon Web Services.
STEEM was already under massive buying power during the bull run but it wasn't sustainable as the entire altcoin market is still extermely speculative.
Sorry about your health mate, wish you a speedy recovery. And yeah i feel some type of way when people keep regurgitating the same thing, but i believe if we can get his tribe thing working fine it won't really matter if someone like tarazkp talks about steem every day. It is of value to a lot of people within the steem ecosystem but i also wish a lot of people outside the ecosystem get to see and understand the same thing.
I dont really think delegation is a problem. It all depends on how it's been used. I have benefited from delegations and used it to curate manual some good content.
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I'll advice you on a few things.