You would never earn a penny if you don't have someone who would like to vote on your content.
Too bad that currently "someone" means someone with a lot of power, which in turn realistically means a bot, because otherwise we're back to not a single penny.
But for original, high quality content there's a better chance to lure voters because it increase probability that ... it will lure even more voters.
Technically yes, in practice high quality alone is orders of magnitude not enough to matter. Votes of "common" people are literally meaningless, you would require dozens of them to cross the payout threshold (and I assume that after HF it will be even more). Literally the only chance at getting literally anything is to be somehow noticed by someone powerful or to get an upvote from a bot. So far the latter is infinitely more probable and usually absolutely independent of quality.
So yes, once you get that, high quality might help in propelling you even further, but without a random boost there's absolutely nothing in there for you. If you want any sort of gains then if you have to choose between focusing on getting bots' attention and doing high quality stuff, the former is the obvious choice.
All in all a casual user has nothing to do here - either scroll some Hot/Promoted, where first and foremost promoted stuff is, quality being only secondary, thus not really attractive in general, or scrape the rusty bottom of the barrel in New, which is pretty much entirely uncurated, because why would anyone bother, there is literally nothing to gain here and the quality is mediocre 99% of the time.
If you ask me why I'm here in the first place, well I gave up any hope for Steem as a content/social platform and now I'm just curious to see a how this failed experiment is going. Even though it's failed, it's still interesting to see how it fails.
You mean votes of people that didn't care to be vested in the platform.
Yes, those are meaningless by design :-)
There's no such thing as bots attention.
True, you need to be noticed by someone with SP to get rewarded.
HF21 is improving that chance by bringing more incentive to those.
True, votes from bots are independent of quality because they are bought.
That is also being mitigated by upcoming EIP included in HF21.
Because 1% of the platform are content creators. Others are just greedy, eager to grab author rewards. HF21 makes that situation better.
Yes, Steem is an experiment, and I'm around because of curiosity too, but I disagree that it's failed. IMHO it's not. It added and still ads a lot of value to whole industry.
This platform is no longer about content creators. That concept died roughly 18 months ago. At present, and I believe that what HF21 is about .... Is 'How do we ensure we can pillage the rest of the Steem?' ....
And all the little guys like us have buggered off - it's a real shame, we had something great going back in 2017, but the place sucks these days, and I really do think all the wankers who like to spank off and flag posts are going to get this place to themselves...
Playground bullies ....
Image Credit
Any pointers to relevant information on HF20 (I assume that's what you refer to by "roughly 18 months ago")? I mean sure, I could try to backtrack through steemitblog and find something, but I have a vague feeling I'll spend an unreasonable time doing that while someone better versed in getting around here will be able to find that in a few clicks. Also I'm interested in not only the dry technical specification, but also discussions like this one.
You guys turn against whales, not realizing that people who hold and buy SP are the ones who give any money to people who just want to cash out...
If it weren't "the rich", the small guys would have no one to dump their rewards to and you'd get 100% of nothing.
Ok, I have to admit I wasn't aware of this. Too bad that so many of those more invested in the platform are "greedy, eager to grab author rewards".
Why would a new content creator bother at all with joining here, only to drown in the cesspool, virtually undiscoverable? Why would a new user with a few hours to spend every other week bother with sifting through trash and casting votes that won't matter anyway? It seems very all-or-nothing, with 100% nothing being the most probable option.
It doesn't look like you could contribute some ok stuff every now and then or skim through new, upvoting good, undiscovered posts and gradually build yourself some reasonable power. If you're lucky to randomly get someone's attention you'll be getting maybe 0.1SP a week on average, which means it will take about 150 weeks = 3 years to amass anything above those 15SP you get by default via delegation, which is still virtually nothing.
By the way, it would feel much nicer if the delegation was not dropping at exactly the rate of you getting SP. It is a bit disheartening to know that no matter what you do, you will always have 15SP until you surpass that. It would be much more encouraging if it was for example still inverse proportional but at half the rate: 15SP delegated when you have 0 (15 total), 7.5 delegated when you have 15 (22.5 total), down to 0 delegated when you have 30 (30 total).
Most (really most, like 80-90%) of my account's value comes from a few upvotes from a bot I didn't ask for (or at least not knowingly). It claims to do this automatically. I thought it was more common here (i.e. that bots are not only pay to get a vote or join some sort of a community by using a particular tag and/or delegating some power or similar).
Unfortunately that's true, but they are harming themselves the most. HF21 is a step forward as it's much less effective now to be such a greedy bastard.
Because with all that flaws and issues we are facing, it's still something vs nothing, compared to Facebook etc.
I can also agree here. That's ridiculous and I was pointing that out to Steemit.
Plus - lack of gamification. Gamification is IMHO the key. Too bad that I'm far away with my skills from frontend related subjects. I'm still hoping that others can deal with that.
Smart bots that are fighting for curation rewards might chose to upvote content that "looks" promising in terms of getting more votes.
I'm not sure whether dragging author rewards down for low value posts will help much, but we'll see.
But more importantly, that's quite a false dichotomy with "something vs nothing". Some people are fine with just the exposure and flow of likes on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. Ego fodder has its value too, after all. On Youtube, deviantArt, Bitchute or Twitch you can actually make money quite directly. Add Patreon and its clones to the mix and suddenly getting 0.10$ worth in an exotic cryptocurrency does not sound as appealing as you seem to think, especially given that only the first week matters. Steem is far from being a God's gift at monetisation, sadly.
Seems like I agree with most of what you are writing, maybe except that I still think that we have a chance to make a difference here :-)
Well, go ahead then and good luck to you, not like I have much power to decide here anyway. I'll just drop by every now and then as usual.
HF21 is trying to improve discovery. So wait and see.
Does this guarantee that every valuable contribution will be discovered? No, but it improves the odds.
Making Steem better step by step is a step in the right direction.
You guys turn against whales, not realizing that people who hold and buy SP are the ones who give any money to people who just want to cash out...
If it weren't "the rich", the small guys would have no one to dump their rewards to and you'd get 100% of nothing.
By "you" you meant me? Because it's me who you are replying to :-)
I suck at replies in busy posts... hence why I posted on multiple places on this chain :D