I think someone should compare the payouts on all the posts about cryptocurrency stuff (some quite repetitive) and compare them to the overall payouts of categories like fiction. It would be especially interesting to see the value-per-word and payout-per-viewer. Because the way I see it? Steemit started out as a crypto-enthusiast blogging platform focused on crypto topics, and some are really keen to keep it that way.
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Indeed, I think this is the main issue with the platform. That it's too focused on crypto. While it is expected to start like that due to the fact that it's based of it, not exploring other ideas won't expand it. Gaming grew a bit, at least from what I see with my own blog. Those post do alright, but when I post stuff that I consider just as interesting (or more), like space related stuff, they bomb...
Meh, with time it'll grow if dolphins and whales allow it to expand.
But... but... but... wouldn't that mean there wouldn't be anything else to read? Just endless navel-gazing crypto info until everyone on the whole platform knew exactly the same amount of stuff and there'd be no need for anyone else to post?
Sounds like the gene puddle would become stagnant pretty quick...
Variety is the spice of life!
It's surprising to hear the assertion that this "started out as a crypto-enthusiast blogging platform."
When I first heard of it, in a YouTube interview with Dan and Ned, they stressed that this was in many ways a publishing venture, on which people with a wide variety of interests could post interesting and informative text, photos, vids.
If it were limited to crypto-enthusiasts, it would not have grown as much as it has. Even though I've been following the crypto world for 5 years and have held bitcoin for almost that long, there's no way that I would have joined Steemit if it were simply a crypto-blog. And I'm sure the same is true for thousands of other current Steemians who are not necessarily crypto-enthusiasts, but still have plenty to offer to the platform and to their fellow Steemians.
We don't understand all things crypto, and our interests are not limited to such.
As I've said before re Steemit, it's a great place where we can let a hundred flowers (followers!) blossom, and a thousand schools of thought contend.
One more observation. I believe that most witnesses and whales are granted certain powers to essentially determine what and who is rewarded and supported. For a platform that is supposed to be meritocratic, that seems to be granting excessive power to those few individuals.
They may have earned that power, but that does not mean that that power will never be abused.
Here's a simple experiment: look at the trending page. Count the posts that are NOT about cryptocurrencies or steemit itself. Myeah. That.
@techslut, the trending page is roughly 50% steem/crypto/etc (tons of topics) and 50% everything else(tons of topics)
While there still is a disparity from different posts, the fact of the matter is that berniesanders (I know you recently had a big run in with him) is actively fighting this exact type of behavior to promote other categories. While I agree it would be interesting to see an analysis of the mean payouts per topic as a function of length, what you will find is that crypto will drop a lot due to the vast amount of crypto based posts that don't make money.
Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity. Instead of flag wars, these whales can take the time to set up a community curation task force to reward unnoticed authors and attract new and engaged users to the platform. They have enough SP to empower such an effort AND profit from it. A lot more than they are profiting from singling out specific users, like Michelle and myself. It's kinda why bernie stopped downvoting me - it was a waste of his resources.
The problem with a purely curation approach is that there simply isn't enough SP (there is only 250,000,000 steem, in total, in existence) and because there is only so much steem there is also a daily maximum amount to be rewarded. Nobody wants us to hit maximum because if we do then posts simply won't be able to be rewarded, or they will have to be rewarded out of other means (remember how the German market was after they started printing marks after WW1?) The point is flagging can help prevent us from hitting the daily cap which was less of a problem 1 year ago (or more) but now with the current user base we have actual problems surrounding this. As for bernie downvoting you... Based off of his estimated, and previous, wealth that he has spread around god knows how many bots... He could honestly set up a bot with a few million vests just to downvote you and it would never affect him, he has been trading steem and SP internally and externally (changing it to other crypto currencies) meaning we no longer know exactly how much wealth he has invested into his bot army (as we don't know if he has other bots that he hasn't powered up through steemit).
What about initiatives like utopian? By encouraging high quality moderated content (specifically open source stuff) with the SP they got from ned, they've contributed to the community. Not taken from it. I think we need 10 utopians on the steem blockchain. One for books and stories, one for articles and science stuff, one for personal blogs and one for art... you get my idea. I don't care about cryptocurrency stuff, but it'll still be there in the trending section for the tag "writing". It isn't on utopian.
It's a battle on 2 fronts: reducing the payouts on spam, voting circles and scammers on one side, and creating an interface and reasonable incentive for quality content creators on the other. It's nothing simple, but worth seeing how it develops.
Not powering down just yet. :)
I agree that creating initiatives like utopian would work if implemented correctly which there are curation groups doing just that, it just comes to people getting together. I think that if curation trails got extremely popular with support then things would work, and if we kept Uncle Sanders and Steem cleaners around to handle spam, plagiarism, etc then we would ultimately benefit as a community, but for this to work we would need the whales on board and not all of them want to cooperate with eachother, let alone dolphins, minnows, and little reds.
Curation groups still rely on the same platform where finding quality content is, and I've said this before, like finding a needle in a haystack of shitposts. Utopian only displays utopian posts that are moderated and rewarding according the platform moderators' perception of contribution.
What I am trying to say is that developers contributing through utopian don't need to know about some girl's pretty selfie. And the girls uploading mostly selfies usually care little about open source development. And so, these two types of content just shouldn't be under the same "roof", especially not one as badly designed as steemit.com Something more redditlike would have been easier on us all, I believe.