Creating a New Whale
Lately, Steemit users have reached 100K, CONGRATULATIONS! It was not long ago when the platform were open to the public last July 2016 and I was one of the members who signed up during that week but unfortunately, I am not among those who blessed with rewards, I guess there not for me. I now understand Steemit, we need to be somebody, a story teller, a good writer, a famous and known personality, a guru, somebody who has skills and talents, a developer and most of all a friend of the WHALES. I'm a nobody and I will not be expecting more from it. This is what Steemit community is all about.
Lot's people will argue on this and guess what, most of them are those who are currently enjoying the favor that the WHALES have given and continuously giving to them.
I think "CONGRATULATION" is far from being celebrated yet, because, of the current members of the platform, more or less only 20% percent of them are active and don't need to ask WHY because we already know the reason. This had been the problem I always heard in the community ever since I joined last July 2016 and this keeps on going on and on and on and on, until when?
Lots of people and good users, witnesses and talented members of the community are trying to look for remedies on how to solve the issue. Projects were built such as RHW, Curie, SteemGuild and hoping for more to come as people think of ways to improve the community because of the belief that someday somehow Steemit will reach to the moon.
But whatever they do, they could not sustain the fast growing numbers of new comers in the community hoping that their blogging talent and skills will be rewarded. Sad to say, most of them just happen to make an introduction and a few posts and leave the community or just parked their accounts. Out of that 20% who are active, how many of them are posting contents every day? Some great minds who knows very well their way around the community knows how to find that.
There are updates every now and then, informing that the community is growing fast. Yes its true, the Steemit is moving fast compared to what it was few months ago, but the rewards are also dropping very fast. Certainly because nobody is voting, oh no that's not true, we can see lots of posts has hundreds of votes wow that's great, yeah but wait, take a look at the reward, it's a dollar or two. I'm not talking about the chosen authors in the community who were enjoying WHALES votes.
Authors are trying to do their best, creating good contents, making it look great hoping that somehow, somebody will like and vote for it. They spent a number of hours making their article and publish it in a very nice format and boom, this is for the community, I hope readers will enjoy reading this article BUT at the back of their minds, "I hope WHALES will vote for it."
What is the problem?
There are lots of members in the community now, in fact we could not count them with our naked eye BUT what about the WHALES, clearly we can count them one by one. There is a clear implication of the problem here, WHALES are outnumbered. We could not expect them to stay around in the community most of their time because they also have a life, a family and businesses to take care of. Yes they are voting but they are doing it with BOTS. So the drive of all authors in the platform is to hope that their names will be included in the BOTS voting list.
Currently, there is this retention program that @ned and friends are doing at the community and I appreciated them for doing that. I know that their trying to put their best to at least making the authors happy for their work by giving them a few dollars every day for them to continue posting good and entertaining content. CONTENT is the life of the community.
I remember way back then when @dantheman posted an article (I just forgot the title) wherein he pointed out few purpose why they built Steemit, and one of it is to create a community of financial freedom. A community that doesn't have to worry about what you are going to spend tomorrow because Steemit can give it today. I know there's a plan, I just don't know what it is and when it will be out. Their silence speaks well, they are busy doing something that might benefit the whole platform in the future.
BUT wait, people are leaving some are sleeping and had stopped posting content because they felt that they are only wasting their time in the community.
Creating a WHALE
I hope nobody will ask me how to create WHALE because we already know how it's going to happen. Why Steemit needs to create a bunch of new WHALES? Because we need to balance the proportions which currently has a huge difference, they could not just cope up on the number of contents to be upvoted every day and if they wanted to, yes they can do it, but they need to lessen their voting powers to 1% or so using the vote slider just to spread their voting capacity, which will result to a much lesser rewards.
What will happen if this dilemma will continue in the next years to come? What if the users in the community will reach 1M? Can we attempt to see majority of their posts at $0.0 rewards because they are not a favorite of the WHALES? How can we invite investors if they are seeing lots of $0 and $1 rewards on every post? How can we expect to reach the goal of the community?
Every WHALE with 2M SP and above can create another 10 whales simultaneously every month if they wanted to. If they have the desire to make the community expand, it's in their hands, their holding the balls. I don't understand why they could not do it? I hope it's not because of greed or they don't like people to be enjoying financial freedom with Steemit. Maybe they have this thought that if they will make another WHALE with 2M SP, they are making somebody rich. That's another part of the story, and yes they could be making somebody rich BUT with that, they are building a strong foundation for the community. That newly created WHALE will also create another WHALE and another, and another, and another.
There's no point of being greedy here because creating a WHALE does not mean giving them money, but rather creating money for them and for everybody in the community. Every time a vote is casted, nothing has been deducted to their SP, in fact they are also making for themselves.
There are lots of qualified authors to become a new WHALE in the community. A WHALE that will spend their time supporting authors by giving them what is due to them.
With this, the community won't have to worry about retention anymore because as the chain will continue, lots of people will be happy than it does today, wherein only those who are in trending page are happy and enjoying majority of the rewards. We don't have to worry about the vote slider, adjusting them every time we cast a vote because we have already enough for everybody. All these are in the hands of the WHALES.
WHALES, it's all in your hands.
I enjoyed reading your post and some of your thoughts at the top of the article are the same as mine, thanks for sharing and upvoted.
I liked your post very much. Although I don't think we can create a whale. Your points are very good and this quote has me thinking.
Yes, some people who have already built an audience online or offline will get a lot of attention when they bring them over to Steemit, as they should. But everyone has a story and can build a following on this platform if they tell it well and keep posting consistantly. Not as fast as those who have already done the work prior to arriving here, but very possible all the same.
Most of us are minnows in a whale's body. I'm saying be the whale you truly are and the rewards will come.
Creating a whale is easy. What is difficult for them (the WHALES) is to make somebody rich. This could be the reason why they only choose to vote 100% to friends.
Then they can choose to start making their friends a whales like them. Making all their SP's at 2M. When that time comes, we wont have to worry about retention anymore, considering that all of the new whales will give back to the community by making another whale.
Very interesting indeed. I'll have to give it some more thought. Meanwhile, we can just keep writing good posts.
First whale is very beautiful and lovely!!!:)