I'm going to share with you my radical vision of what Steemit could be, but first, let me get something off my chest!
"What? You, Steemgoblin? You have something to say?"
Imagine that! Right?
Yeah, okay, I'm outspoken,but it don't mean I'm wrong!
Among the things that have been impacted by the trend toward paying for payouts, (vote buying) reputation scores shouldn't be one of them, but do not be fooled.
There is only one factor increasing or decreasing reputation scores, and it's...
Drumroll please!
VOTES!
That's right one more thing that is for sale here in anarchocapital land, reputation! Nice, huh?
Here's how the reputation score works, though. For every point you gain, you'll need 10x as many votes as you needed for the last one! That means that a 61 is 10x as impressive as a 62. Did you know that? So, when you see these guys strolling around with a (70) ahem, @markrmorrisjr, know that they've earned their bones,or spent a lot to make you think so.
In my opinion, this like many other things, should be a combined score, including, perhaps an average number of comments per post, replies to posts, weight upvotes on comments more highly than on posts?
It just seems to me that making this up for grabs to the highest bidder, makes the one and only "earned" statistic on the site almost as worthless as the vote counts and payouts. And, I'm still sitting here saying, credible, quality, evergreen content, that adds something to the readers life, ESPECIALLY outside of Steemit, is what we need.
Let me tell you a little story.
If you were old enough to be using the internet to search for "how to" articles about eight years ago, you will recall a site called "Ehow.com". It is quite possibly the biggest cautionary tale of the SEO wars.
Ehow was owned by a company named Demand Media. They hired a bunch of content producers to crank out howto material by the bushel. They had a list of thousands of topics and for 350 words, they'd pay anywhere from $12-$20.
And they did have editorial standards, so a lot of it was decent stuff.
But, they got too big
Over the course of about two and a half years, if you searched "how to" for any damn thing, the top two or three options in search results, were on Ehow.com. The problem was, they didn't pay the toll!
Google is a particularly pernicious beast. It rewards those that toe the line and send them money, but it does not necessarily reward success, hard earned. While Ehow was getting these results almost entirely organically, due to the huge volume of content, Google wanted a bigger cut of the profits. Ehow was turning into an adwords juggernaut, but the money was going in, not going out.
Then came the algorithm wars.
Eventually, as anyone in SEO can tell you, Google worked the system until organic results no longer took the top spots, paid advertising is what you almost always see topping even the "under the line" listings under the promoted entries.
Long tail keywords became the last resort of those trying to build a legit audience.
Ehow died.
While their content is still online, even searching specific titles of their work rarely brings results anymore. Tweaks in the algorithm, coupled with the haze of time (who thought "most recent" should be the best way to judge relevance? DUH!) has all but obliterated them in search results.
They were touted as the biggest "content farm" and thousands of writers lost good paying gigs as they slowly cranked down production and shifted their focus.
So, what am I trying to say?
We could be the next "Ehow", but in a good way!
With 250k pieces being added to this single domain every 24 hours, we are one of the fastest growing planets in the interverse!! Imagine if even half of that content was well written, properly constructed, optimized educational content! We could be bigger than Facebook! (the world's largest collection of random links and memes, struggling for relevancy)
That level of content would be drawing more and more quality content producers!
And I'm not talking about the YouTube heads that bop in here with a built-in audience of 5 million! (some of them are great! but many only feed their audience on steemit, crypto, steemit, and more steemit!) I'm talking about makers, indie film producers, small record labels, high quality podcasters, people who make real content, for the real world!
And, to be fair, we're getting a few of them in now, but not like we could be!
So, @steemgoblin, why is this a good thing for us? More competition=smaller rewards, right?
NOTHING COULD BE FURTHER FROM THE TRUTH!
If people came here and found reams of seriously good, useful content, instead of small pockets, surrounded by oceans of floating garbage, they would be inclined to take us more seriously. And what does that mean?
Let's do a little exercise in logic, shall we?
We know there is a limited prize pool for each 24 hour period. The steem blocks are produced at a specific rate and 75% of it comes here for us to battle it out over. It's locked in. We cannot increase it.
BUT WAIT!
What if there was a way to raise the reward pool to a billion dollars a day?
Every day, the reward pool percentage of new steem comes to 48,029.695, at today's price that is
$186,355.22 USD
Or about $0.75 per post. So, if you're doing better than this, pat yourself on the back!
But what if that pool jumped to 1 BILLION dollars?
Right @steemgoblin, we knew you were crazy, but wow, what an imagination!
It's crazy, so crazy, it just might work!
If there is anything we know, it's that bitcoin has opened up a brave new world, a world, where a coin, based on trust in a blockchain ledger, can rise to $20k per share!
And here's where this gets interesting! Ready??
If the price of steem rises to $20,820.45, the daily reward pool=1Billion!
Okay, so do the math, let's say at that point, there are a hundred million pieces of content a day being created, each of them would be worth an average $10!
But, that's not going to happen! That would equal more than all the pages being added to the entire interverse daily as we speak!
So, let's say it was ten million! Okay, each post averages out to, $100.00!!
But, @steemgoblin, there is no way for steem to reach $20k!
First of all, if you think you can, or you think you can't, you're right!
But seriously, I know this is unlikely in the near future. There are, however, predictions, that some find credible that it could rise to $15k by the end of 2018. What would that mean?
The Reward Pool Could Grow to $72.04 MILLION DOLLARS A DAY!
WTF??
Even if the volume of content increases 10x each post would average $30! If it grew 100x, to 25 million, the average post would still be worth almost $3!
But, before I finish, let's see a slightly more reasonable goal, shall we? Since we know the price is driven by supply and demand, and the supply is steady, it won't get more scarce, until demand increases.
If steem goes to $33 a share, 10x current levels, (a daily pool of almost $1.6 MILLION dollars in value!) and content doubles, each post would be worth an average $3.16!!
You can see why it makes sense for someone like @markrmorrisjr to pour so much time into @dolphinschool and helping others, can't you?
That's why I think it's time to stop competing for peanuts and set our eyes on a bigger prize. Sure, you're going to need to have SP, absolutlely, but when your little vote gets multiplied 10x over, you could earn $50k annually from as little as 3 or 4000 SP, upvoting your own two posts a day.
(this is based on the fact that the pool of SP will grow at the same rate, only the price of individual coins will rise.)
I think this is what is called for:
- Good content producers need to produce for an audience outside steemit, at least in part.
- Content should be created to add value to life outside the digital world.
- Curators should begin to promote content that fits these parameters.
- Less "steemit is great!" content will be needed as time goes by.
- Outside promotion of steemit posts should be increasing!
- Add a link to the steemit signup at the ends of posts!
If we can shift our focus to becoming the next "ehow" (in volume, not style, quality, or type of content) by creating steem content to appeal to an outside audience, we can grow the platform, increase demand for steem, and raise the price!
The search engines largely dictate which articles will have a long term future. Content producers get zero rewards for their content after the payout is complete. I see these as the two biggest limiting factors. Perhaps if authors could invest steem back into their best posts to readvertise articles into search results, it could offer secondary returns infinitely. Like if I put 500 steem to have a post be ranked higher than all the people who invested less, my post will be ranked higher, and pay me money for any new upvotes I get for the next 7 days. I won't get the 500 steem back, but I get rep, votes, a payout, followers, and top exposure to be seen as a recognized name brand. Or is this already how the system works?
I don't think you can promote a post that is past payout. I've never tried. You could buy outside ads, but most of those views will be non-steemers. If they join, you might get something out of it, but I'm not sure how to monetize that idea. I wish I did. When I first got here, content was supposed to get another payout every 30 days. A lot of us were banking on that. But, then it changed. Love to discuss ideas about this.
That I feel is where the platform is missing a lot of potential. We can never be as relevant as wikipedia for instance. On steemit only the recent content has an incentive, while wikipedia always has the most valuable knowledge presented (according to the authors who edit it). There is no way for the casual web surfer to filter through 100 articles and find out which posts were written by actual experts or good writers on a topic. The ancient monks of Alexandria would reproduce the knowledge of the greatest minds, and repair any tomes that were falling apart or disappearing from circulation. It would be great if we had authorized "monks" to re-post the best articles in various tags, and send the rewards back to the original authors. Actually, I think communities could spring up to do that right now if they wanted to.
I agree, I'm thinking on that. I know authors like @markrmorrisjr have a huge back catalog and it's just sitting there. In fact, he said early on that the residual income was a huge part of his decision to try steemit in the first place. Because otherwise, your work is out here for free, now what? Can you sell it other places if it can be had for free?
I completely agree on the fact that there should be a way to lenghten the post payout period for quality posts somehow. The way things work now, valuable posts simply get buried underneath a truckload of new posts every day again...
Yep, 250k is the number I've been seeing most recently. That's a hell of a lot of crap content. And all of it treated equally past payout, honestly.
All the things you say are true. However,I see a need for Steemit to invest some of its resources outside of Steemit. Into some physical entities.
The Crypto has the potential to remove the imprisonment to working within a corrupt financial system, What about every other aspect of life though.
I keep parading this this comment in different manners in various posts. I have idea's, not the finance or know how to complete. Maybe with time.
So, what do you think would be a good first step?
I am open to discuss possible Steps, However, for that discussion I would suggest a faster format of communication.
The most natural way to go in my view would be power/energy.
that's an interesting idea. I think there's a lot of work to do here in the digital space first. Not sure how the blockchain extends to the real world.
It is more investment from here, I do not know everything, But I assume there is some server somewhere for steemit, If that is so it has a non remunerative cost.
This costs need to be covered. Lowering the cost here with Energy costs is a start to a company. Providing this energy at a lower cost then is now, encourages to receive energy from the new company. (non profit) Any profit goes back to reinvestment in the expansion of the energy grid. This initial start I see as simple and straight forward. Complications come after this step in my mind as to the direction to after a Sustainable growth in energy is established. Where to invest next, this I have a few option in mind on, all related to reducing the cost of daily life.
Actually, no. The network is both decentralized and distributed. The servers are nodes run by witnesses. Those witnesses receive sizable salaries to run them. They are also the ones that debug the network and do the bulk of the heavy lifting on dev work. So, a lot of the tools you find around from groups like Busy.org, that's all witness work. They get a couple hundred k a year, in addition to their earnings from here. So, that's ordinarily a great idea, but in this case, it's not really applicable.
It appears. I used the Server for steemit as an example of a start where no one individual would be the benefactor.
For me I wold say , Let us make a start and use my house. that leads to conflicts of interest, which is one thing I wish to avoid. I believe those who begin a project like this, should be rewarded, but rewards capped at a max to be agreed. Where to start is just one thing to be established agreed upon. If a group thinking together are working toward the same goal. That goal been clearly defined, I;m sure agreements can be made with ease. A level of generated income can also be agreed upon before allocating funds to other projects with similar interests of benefit can be pursued.
Got to start somewhere ,
I think that is already happening to some extent as different communities develop on here, right now like three fourths of the content is cryptobabble but every day there is more and more interesting content being created. Like how when you start looking for really specific things you end up reading forum posts as the amount of content here increases people will find themselves reading steemit content from the outside. I did a search for the title of one of my posts and it was not in the first few pages of results, perhaps someone could look at some sort of automated SEO when you post.
Well, for one thing, the search function, SUCKS. Seriously. It's hard to use and the results are interesting. But, I agree that the good content is on the rise, however, not as a percentage of content produced. I think there's more useful content, because there's more content and a percentage of it has always been useful.
Will it not just let the buy votes which we look down upon in the real world, reap higher value rewards? Steem community need to regulate in some form? Create a standards chart? impossible?
Meh, those people are still going to game the system, but the rewards at the middle, and lower end will be enough to make it attractive to create solid content here.
I completely agree that quality content should not be limited to the SteemIt platform only and could be used to attract new platform users by spreading it around the internet.
At this point there are 2 things that need to happen (probably more than 2, of course): SteemIt should lose the image of crypto-oriented platform and become known as a ‘blogging platform’ (which will happen over time, when more and more authors post quality articles about other topics), and SteemIt users need to be educated on how to get their articles seen outside Steemit, for example by learning how to optimize their writing for the search engines, and how and where to promote.
Initiatives as @dolphinschool will play an important role in this...
I agree. I'm looking for a simple way to do an RSS feed from a steemit blog. If I can find that, I'll have it implemented with the @dolphinschool stuff, Mark has done a bunch of work with RSS networks, where links from a single steemit blog could be posted in 30 or 40 different locations instantly.
Have you checked this post I wrote in my old account?
As a #dolphinschool participant, I can attest to the beauty of the school. It helped me learn a ton in just a few short days... raised my confidence and level of participation.
I whole heartedly recommend @dolphinschool
There are no regrets that come with real education and something worth while.
@jeejee
Very cool, @jeejee, I've been amazed watching all of you! Every single one took something different away from the experience, it seems.
Yes @steemgoblin, That just goes to show you that everyone has something to gain from it!
True.
As a blogger, I've been advising my followers to write for Google searches as well as Steemit. As the audience grows, we all do better. This post is spot-on in what needs to be done to get there. I'll keep doing my part to reach those goals.
Thanks! Well, I'm looking to partner with some people to do something a little more structured in this regard, possibly. You might also check out @dolphinschool, I know @markrmorrisjr that runs it feels the same way.
Unfortunately, I was one of those Demand Media writers that lost their job. It was a really nice one too, even with the occasional strict editor. I see what you are saying here though, and I agree that we could transform this place by writing for the masses outside of Steemit!
When I think of what I might have earned off a home repair site holding all of the content I build for frigging Demand Studios, I feel like crying. But, it was a gig. Not too bad, overall. Better pay than most other writing platforms, and I was super fast. I could eight to ten pieces a day and not get dinged for plagiarism once. I had a 97% publish rate, without rewrites. I think maybe the revenue share program on Steemplus could be used to create some info channels that run a little deeper. I'm working on it.
Well, let's do it! I think there's a way for some of us to team up. @markrmorrisjr was a Demand Media writer for two years, over 3000 articles. That's how he got started in freelance. You might also want to follow @dolphinschool. He runs it, all training all the time and He's going to start doing some stuff on this and the SEO of steemit.
I can see your thought pattern and understand where your going, but I think maybe I should stick to dolphin school 😳
@miryana, you should definitely use whatever works for you best! I can't fault for you following dolphin's schools advice.