SteemIt's Troubles - A Newbie's Perspective

in #steemit7 years ago (edited)

Good morning! Day two on SteemIt and I'm excited to get started!

In this post I'll be examining some of the issues with the SteemIt platform (From my one-day of newbie experience) and how SteemIt might go about addressing them.

I had a busy day on SteemIt yesterday with five posts, rocketing me up to level 28 on day one! Overall the platform has a lot going for it. The monetization of posts seems like a great incentive for bloggers, and the editor is extremely easy to use and format.

The downsides? Mostly that the platform creates incentive for bad behavior, and junk posts are often more valuable than real content.

My posts from yesterday based on current profit:

Each of these posts was original content. Each one took me roughly an hour to write between researching, formatting and writing. Overall I'm going to be rewarded about $1.30 x 75% = ~$0.98 for more than four hours of work. I actually think that's pretty fair compensation considering that it was my first day and I don't have an audience yet.

As someone who's just starting on the platform, some of my posts might be worth $0.01. Someone else without major influence who drops a vote on my post is essentially throwing away that vote. It won't make my post substantially more noticeable, and it won't make the curator any substantial amount of money.

As a result, people who are solely interested in earning Steem have no reason to read posts at all. The easiest way to make money is to upvote a post that's relatively new by a major blogger or whale with a large following, as such a post is likely to gain more upvotes and be profitable. For this reason, there are bots whose only job is to upvote new posts by whales. Other bots provide upvoting services. Someone who got the first comment on a whale's post and wrote "Plz upvote." can make more money than I did as an author contributing four hours of my time to produce actual content.

The root of the problem? There is no incentive to interact with content on Steem. There is only incentive to interact with the Steem platform itself.

What I'm getting at here is that there is no reason for someone who is chasing profit to read a blog post, or make meaningful commentary. The fastest route to profit completely ignores the content of the post, and only cares about the importance of the original author and the timing of the response to that author's content. This system is great for encouraging interactions, but the interactions that it encourages the most are entirely meaningless.

How do we fix this? A few ideas:

Warnings, Suspensions, Bans

  • Establish a community team of moderators (If it doesn't already exist)
  • Allow posts to be flagged for review by moderators if they fail to contribute to meaningful discussions such as "Plz upvote". Down-voting alone is not effective, as many of these posts actually get up-voted.
  • Allow posts to be flagged for review by moderators if they are verifiable plagiarized content.
  • After moderator review, reward moderators and users who have reported "bad" posts. Warn / suspend / ban the accounts creating these "bad" posts if moderators agree with the users reporting them.
  • Bot accounts should be suspended or banned if they contribute to automated up-voting or automated commenting.

Reward Structure Changes

  • Create incentive for people to interact with new authors by decreasing the monetary value of their up-votes and comments on subsequent interactions with the same author.
  • EG a first interaction by a user with an author will fetch 100% of it's normal value. The next interaction of a user with that same author will fetch 50% of its normal value, and so on. This could recharge over time in a similar manner that voting power recharges, but on a per-author basis.

There's plenty more that could be done, but these are some starting points.

How can we improve the incentive for users to actually read posts and meaningfully contribute to the platform?
Are any of my suggestions awful? Let me know!

Thanks for reading,
-Matt

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Hey @weaselhouse, I like the effort you are putting in your new steem account, hope you'll have a great start.

There is a statement in your post with wich I don't agree: "The root of the problem? There is no incentive to interact with content on Steem. There is only incentive to interact with the Steem platform itself."

In my opinion, commenting on posts is the best way to grow on steemit. when we start out, we don't have an audience yet. So posting is almost useless, because the only people who will see the post are those looking at the "new" tab in whatever tag we posted in. why would someone be interested in a random post?

When we comment on a popular post, we gain exposure to a lot of viewers. The post is popular, so lots of user will read the comments. That's your chance to shine. In fact, I have found your account through one of your comments! This is the only way that I could have found you.

I've been on steem for a few months, and I noticed that when I produced good quality comments on popular posts, I received a lot of new followers, and most comments made more upvotes and more money than my average posts.

This is why I suggest that while we grow our accounts and our followers' number, we should spend more energy on writing good quality comments than on writing posts. Once we have a decent following, we can start taking posting seriously.

Good luck on steemit!

Thanks for the advice (and the upvotes)! I did notice a surge in new subscribers after commenting on a popular post today.

I feel that there should be ways to develop a solid foundation of followers without having to "siphon" followers from the comments on more popular blogs. It feels like a weakness in the platform to me, although I can't see any immediate solution to the issue.

Gaining a following on social media has never been easy... Try to do it on youtube, it's muchh harder than on steemit.

I truly believe that engaging your reader is the key to success on Steemit. In order to engage you need to offer them something of value, that is meaningful. Yes, this might produce spam comments, but it will also produce meaningful dialog. Best of luck on @weaselhouse on Steemit.

The thing is everything is blockchain based. You cannot even delete your own post here. It's not the same thing as other blogging sites before. Steemit isn't just a blogging site. It's a trading platform as well. With regards to moderators, it doesn't have to. Everyone is free what to do. Steemit is a democracy actually. Less censorship. Also, there are bots here created and supported by whales which can track down plagiarism, and it will receive downvotes.

I'd love to see moderation on Steemit, but that goes against the whole "decentralized" ethos. (Not that said ethos is even consistent...) Makes me wonder how long it'll take for this to turn into another Nazi haven like Twitter.

Diminishing returns on interaction with the same author repeatedly is something I've seen suggested elsewhere. It would penalize folks who legitimately cultivate a dedicated following for their content, though. Hmm. What if curation rewards were inversely proportional somehow to the Steem Power of the curated author? Then it'd have more of a focus on lifting up fresh talent than grinding whales.

What if curation rewards were inversely proportional somehow to the Steem Power of the curated author? Then it'd have more of a focus on lifting up fresh talent than grinding whales.

I think that would be problematic too. Whales are incentivized to stick around and create quality content because of the income. If there's diminishing returns on larger number of followers, their earnings would plateau and they'd probably be happier on another platform where they don't have that issue.

Diminishing returns on interactions don't necessarily have to penalize whales. You could still have full returns to the whale, with diminished returns to the curator. It's not ideal, but it's food for thought.

An aside: Upvoting posts that have already paid out accomplishes nothing, alas. So I appreciate the sentiment of your visit to my blog, but you'd best save your voting power for newer posts!

Good to know, thanks.

Thanks for this post, Matt.
Yesterday was my first day on Steemit too and I'm still trying to figure things out. I noticed that I was willing to upvote good content from newbies like me, but others were not and your post helped me understand a little bit more why that may be so. I think you're absolutely right, that junk posts, by nature of how steemit works, appear to be here to stay...but how will Steemit get those like me who are interested in actually blogging real content to stick around? I don't want to lose my momentum but it's hard to shake the idea that I'm at a disadvantage.

You could invest a few dollars into SteemIt to give yourself a bit of a boost. That's probably the easiest route.

Otherwise, just stick it out. Eventually one or two or our posts should get noticed by larger bloggers (If we post quality content often enough) and we'll get a large upvote that will land us a bunch of new subscribers and Steem Power.

You could also try upvoting some high-valued whale posts, which should pay out in a week or so, yielding moderate returns. There's some strategy to how to do this that you can research, but in my opinion it's part of the problem with Steem to begin with and I really don't believe that the solution to fixing the platform is to go along with it's flaws. Same goes for the bots that promote your content.

thanks for sharing. I observed that also. we must have good quality content posts to get more upvotes since we are newbie. and a team is a big help for our success.

Hello, also on my second day here on Steemit. While I share your concern over all the talk of whales and bots, I just wanted to chime in that the Mod stuff is something I'd be very wary off. The entire reason I'm even here on Steemit is to get away from overzealous moderation and would hate to walk into that firing line again. Bots a never good for a network, purely on bonds of credibility, but a more mechanical fix would be a better one.