You want to reward simple links to other sites or material?
I sure as hell do. Along with memes, cat pictures, cute kid videos, a review of your favorite taco joint, #fail, etc.
Why?
Because if you reward link posting then many people will come and post links. Not many people will ever write blogs, compose music, or create paintings.
There can be a certain place in the budget for brand-enhancing "altruism" in the form of rewarding high-quality content, but it can't be all of the budget or anything close to it.
The purpose of this platform is to reward users in order to attract more users and grow a large community. The approach that developed out of a misguided sense of trying to corral rewards to those who are "more deserving" has been destructive to this primary purpose.
If you have people posting links, thoughts, and comments, and other simple content, and earning large rewards for that, one of two things will certainly happen:
People within the system will feel this is unfair and come up with ways to reallocate rewards to "more deserving" content. We can create curation guilds, we can downvote "excess" rewards when undeserved, we can attract a few more excellent content creators who will also get relatively large rewards, etc. The rewards for simple content will fall, but only because it is instead being paid to a relatively small number of other, more talented, users. Those without any particular talent or celebrity are left out. Potential new users from outside the system, without any particular talent or celebrity, see no reason to join, or if they do join, find that they can't meaningfully participate and quit. This does little to increase the value of STEEM. In fact, it reduces it as "content creators" view their rewards as salary and cash out.
People outside the system will see people earning a lot of money posting links, cute cat pictures, etc. and will want to join to compete for a share of those rewards. They will think, "I can do that!" and they will be correct. The rewards for most of that simple content will fall dramatically (a very few viral posts may still make a lot, which is good because it encourages more posting of potentially-viral content), but in this case the rewards on that "low value" content will fall because a large number of people have joined to compete for those rewards, dramatically increasing the size of the community. This will increase the value of STEEM because a huge number of people will have it, know how to use it, and represent a large economic opportunity and audience.
Early adopters of this platform, myself included, made a wrong turn in considering how to respond to the mismatch between rewards and value. We chose #1 and it turned out to be largely a dead end. It isn't too late to try again and see whether #2 leads to a better place. It is quite possible that it does.
I'm 100% supportive of this initiative. I see it as an experiment but a very important one that should go forward without obstruction or interference.
Even if you are someone who is more supportive of rewarding "higher value" content, this experiment may work to your advantage. We need to be growing a large user base for the cryptocurrency that serves as the source of rewards to retain and grow value. Once we do that, there will be room to reward some amount of "high quality content" as part of what this community is about. That is a far better way to support content creators than paying them a little money in an unsustainable manner short term, not growing the user base, and ending up with a token that continues to crash in value with no rewards ultimately left going to anyone.
Thanks for giving your opinion.
I myself have absolutely no talent at all. I can't play an instrument, sing, write fiction, draw, paint, dance etc. You don't have to be talented to be creative.
I started with awful posts few months ago and slowly learnt how to edit and write interesting posts. It is not a talent but acquired experience. I think that such low quality posts should not be rewarded. I think that new users, talented or not should earn their way up here through their work before they start being rewarded for their content. To reward such content is inconsiderate towards other users who put a lot of time and work into this community. We have to decide if we are here to promotin Steemit as community blogging platform or to turn it into profit driven entity that adjusts itself according to the "market" not people's creative input.
We have to decide if it is quality platform for creative expression or just another twitter.
The user base is already quite large and keeps growing. The community is well established. You could have seen it during last Steem Fest - these users are the people who make up this community and make it great, and they should be rewarded for it.
I can not argee with you that the user base is 'quite large' nor than that it keeps growing. It has been stagnant in the 2-3k range for months, and multiple people have analyzed it and shown that a very significant number of those are bots. The true number of users is probably closer to 1000 and not growing significantly.
Neither the size of the user base nor the rate of (non-) growth are economically viable. Unless adjustments are made, the platform will continue to stagnate and ultimately fail altogether. This doesn't mean that my ideas for adjustments are the right ones, but we can't simply stick with what we have been doing. It doesn't work and won't work. I say this not to insult or disparage Steemit or the people who have poured a lot of effort into it, including yourself, but because I want it to succeed.
I know they do want it to succeed and you try your best. You are right that we need more users.
I'm just not convinced that rewarding poor quality content is a solution. There are many other ways. One of them is professional PR. There should be group assigned for making this platform heard of in crypto-community and mainstream media.
For example, we must contact crypto news sites on regular basis so they keep writing articles about STEEM just like they write about other crypto projects.
I think that PR aspect is highly neglected. We cannot just rely on users to contact media or wish that posting more content is going to attract the media.
"Poor quality" is very subjective and I think a little too tied to one particular approach. There is more than one way to interact that people feel is informative, entertaining, and generally adds value to their lives. No one is proposing or supporting worthless spam. If it isn't something that gets people excited to join and interact, then it won't add value and this initiative won't go anywhere. It is an experiment worth trying. That is not to rule out also doing other things like improved PR
I agree with your here @smooth - I thought the user base had stagnated around the 5000 mark. I think it may soon be time to get people in who know what they are doing to get the Steem valves rebored and ready to fire on a full on assault on the non-crypto market. Anything else just seems like ultimate failure like you say.
Such a crying shame for the many man hours put into the platform - far more than any other crypto apart from maybe Bitcoin and Litecoin!
It did stagnate around 5K for a while after the big surge in signups but then dropped lower to the current 2-3K. Some of that may be reduced botting/spam after the rep system, though some was very likely actual attrition due to loss of interest or other reasons. There are still many bots included in the lower figure.