Youtube is one of the most congested and crowed platforms there is, due to the sheer amount of content being posts every day.
AN HOUR OF CONTENT IS UPLOADED EVERY SECOND
Due to this congestion, it is extremely difficult for your post to get awareness of any sort unless a big youtuber comes along and shouts you out. Ask any youtuber, they'll tell you it's very very hard to gain any traction at first.
Why is steemit like this?
The amount of content being uploaded to steemit every second is on par if not greater than youtube ALREADY, proportionally based on users. This is because so many people keep dumping out posts, trying to make it big and earn $10k over night.
Why is this the case on both youtube and steemit?
Unlike reddit, both of these platforms offer a form of compensation for your work. This only drives the competitiveness between users higher.
Why is steemit not like reddit?
On reddit it doesn't matter if you have 0 karma or 100k karma, YOU ALWAYS START OUT THE SAME PLAYING FIELD EVERY SINGLE POST. You don't get to jump ahead in upvotes or the front page just because you have a lot of karma. If this were the case reddit would have been dead A VERY, VERY LONG TIME AGO.
Why is this BAD?
Another way reddit and steemit are similar is in the way that users that have grown the most, youtubers with millions of subscribers or steemit users with 100's of million vests and tons of steempower control the platform. This highly decreases the ability for innovation, new users to grow, and good content in general. This is because a post CAN NOT become popular with out the help from big users or "whales". We already have an extremely poor distribution of power and the platform has only be out a short time.
What can steemit do to fix this?
I'm really not sure, but I know something needs to be done for this platform to survive. Let me know what you think and if you have any ideas in the comments section.
The system probably needs to focus more on rewarding quality bloggers (blogs) over rewarding single content. Should center more around crediting the blog account for number of subscriptions, kind of like Utube subscriptions. However In this case the blogger would received an automatic number of (weekly??) up votes based on the number of subscribers and the SteemPower that those subscribers hold.
The second thing is that there should be a more granular system of up- voting.....something like High, Medium, Low. This will insure that the up votes apply more appropriately. Right now the up votes are binary. Ether you get the vote or you don't. However quality content is judged on a number of varying perimeters. ie.... the quality of information provided, the time and effort invested, the intent of the blogger. Therefore curators should have the ability to award, for example 25%, 50%, or 100% of a vote. This will help to more equitably and precisely allocate the organizations resources.
All that said. Steemit management is an A class team. I'm sure they are working on some excellent solutions.
@xyrzbest I really enjoyed this article, it was very honest and highly underrated. Upvoted!
@james212 I could not agree more, I fear that for every amazing success story we may have dozens of people who feel slighted and we may end up with more negative publicity, than positive if this is not corrected soon. Also I would like to see more rewards to commenters, on other sites, many people only read the headlines and then scroll to the bottom to read all the funny comments, which they consider to be better than the professionally written news articles.
Changes are in the works. Don't worry. We're evolving!
https://steemit.com/steem/@team-leibniz/putting-a-stop-to-masturposting-a-solution-is-currently-being-discussed-and-why-you-should-consider-being-more-judicious-with#@condra/re-team-leibniz-putting-a-stop-to-masturposting-a-solution-is-currently-being-discussed-and-why-you-should-consider-being-more-judicious-with-20160720t145313412z
Lets hope pewdiepie doesn't join us, he may take top whale.
There are interesting arguments in what you a saying. But we must also take into consideration that steemit is so young compared to youtube and other medias. I expect a lot of changes will come so we don't end up in the same place other mediums went.