I’m not a content creator - A late night freewrite

justineh (71) in freewrite • 5 years ago

And I never have been.

I’m not here to share my blog and make some money.

I don’t plan out posts or have goals for reaching an audience. Hell I don’t even proof read. When I make a post it’s generally random thoughts or something I feel I need to set the record straight on.. I’m blunt to the core. I am not a content creator.

I believed in Steem due to the potential I saw and how the social aspects were the Trojan horse for crypto.

It’s what’s missing.

So no I’m not on Steem because I’m a content creator, I’m here because I think it could be revolutionary.

I manually curate those content creators, every single day for almost two years, because I think they can add value. I think the right ones can draw an audience.. and we need an audience.

No I am not a content creator, but I see the value in them.

I see the value in the community, I see the value in what this ecosystem can offer...

But I gotta say the lately it’s getting harder and harder to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

I see such potential... but we just can’t seem to get our shit together.

I had a big plan.. how I could try to help, we needed to get our name out there.. we need to show them what STEEM is and what it has to offer. They won’t know about us unless we tell them.

I had a plan.. I was going to show them how Steem was the onboarding tool the crypto world had been dreaming of. The bridge to crypto - How it could onboard the masses. As a place that normies could explore and experiment with crypto in a fun place that also educated them on the whole blockchain space. It could be the bridge.

I am not a content creator.. but I was going to try to be one to show them what is possible.

A podcast, YouTube channel with “blockchain for normies” content.. going to all the conferences to continue the connections and foot in the door I established at the Bitcoin is conference. I had been working twitter, and had good responses.

I had already spent 1000’s promoting Steem on my own, but this time I was going to jump outside of the echo chamber with full force.

I had a whole proposal typed up for a true Steem ambassadors program, to help other community members do the same. One I spoke of to Steemit inc back in April, one I have mentioned repeatedly.. not just a meetup party, a program that would empower and educate our community to showcase Steem in their area.. give them the tools they needed. Help ensure Steem is represented all over the world. Get us known.. make them know we are here. With oversight and accountability to ensure it didn’t end up being just another Steem scam. I had big plans.

I was trying a new technique... speak their language and not just yell “yay Steem”... then they would listen to what I had to say, and it was working.

But then I forgot that Steem is a social platform and I post here .. and sometimes trolls follow me, and people dislike me for what I’ve “done” or what they think I’ve done, or perhaps because the tone of my text is apparently triggering .. and people who I bring here have to see all that too.

I could ignore it for a bit, but at some point it makes a person not really want to showcase a place where that is what is seen. And I found myself deleting my links from my social profiles.. and speaking Of Steem less. Perhaps that’s my fault... if I just smiled and nodded, I probably wouldn’t have any trolls in the first place. Damnit why can’t I just learn to smile and nod.

How do I sell them Steem when I’m embarrassed of what I see here lately.

So here I am, not a content creator, and now I don’t even know how to showcase this place I believed in so much. Now, clearly this is all based on the choices and actions I’ve made.. and that’s fair, as clearly based on some comments I’ve read lately - I’ve left not the best impression.

I’ve been thinking about leadership a lot lately (probably the post I should be making instead of this shit I can’t even believe I’m going to post) .. and just racking my brain how to make this place seen.. and now I’m wondering if this place is even a place we want seen lately.

When twitter is more fun than Steem, we aren’t doing it right.

I don’t know how to make it fun, I’ve never been the fun person.. I’m just the do random stuff in the background no one knows about and talk too much and be too bluntly honest where you piss everyone off person.

We need to make it fun. This is growth spurt (a painful one perhaps), but we need to have fun again.

So I’m not a content creator, I never have been.. my role here was always to work behind the scenes to make the valuable content creators seen... and try to make this place be seen by those not here yet.

As while fighting with each other fills the days I guess, I think we need to focus outside of our echo chamber if we ever want to see the price go up.. and therefore see this platform reach its full potential.

No matter how great your project is, if no one hears about it, it won’t be successful.

#Marketing matters... “build it and they will come” does not work in the tech world.

Paid shills who sound like idiots aren’t the answer either...

Random tweet shows what’s been on my mind a lot I guess.

I’m not a content creator.. but I really believe in those of you who are. And I’d like for others outside of our own walls to know you are here.

I guess I’m just not sure how to do that anymore.

Maybe I’ll figure it out in the morning over coffee...

Night.

freewrite randomthoughts messinmyhead palnet marketing

5 years ago by justineh (71)

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yanirauseche (70) · 5 years ago

Hi @Justineh It seems to me that every Steem user should do his part if he really cares about this platform.

They could do for example:

Bring the followers of traditional social networks to join Steem by telling them how great it is.
Talk about the use of the Decentralized Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies.

It is important that people educate themselves first about this new technology and that they are simultaneously on the platform.

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1 vote

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carolkean (66) · 5 years ago

I've invited other creators, young guys who are tech-savvy as well as middle-aged women like me, and only one of them stayed - but, wow, did she ever catch on to Steemit and make a big splash! (@rhondak). Now thanks to Steemfest she has met her soul mate ... and her life today is so much better than she would have imagined possible, in her pre-Steemit days. For all the bad stuff that happens, GOOD things happen too. I continue to encourage people to join Steemit (hello @mvkean!) - but recruiting and persuading just doesn't seem to be my strong point. Thanks to all of you who are good at that!

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1 vote

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noloafing (53) · 5 years ago

I don't like the thought that if I care for something I should actively promote it.

I love a particular small coffee roaster, but I don't spend my own money buying them ads or writing content to help them get more business.

Then there is the idea that you can love the platform, but not the users. I try to enjoy Steem, but then I leave because it seems the great content I'm interested in is very hard to find.

When I was a very wary twitter adopter there was no group saying all use users need to promote the platform. It was just a fun corner of the web that I could mingle with cool people.

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1 vote

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yanirauseche (70) · 5 years ago

Yes of course, there is freedom to do what everyone wants.

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1 vote

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emmasumner (56) · 5 years ago

💛

Posted using Partiko iOS

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1 vote

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kingscrown (81) · 5 years ago

u are behind scenes master of puppets :)

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1 vote

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deepwaters (55) · 5 years ago

I think that like you, there are MANY silent supporters of STEEM and its revolutionary potential. I am glad that this is place for you to vent out your thoughts. Content intentionally or not, it is good writing.
See you around.

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steemitboard (66) · 5 years ago

Congratulations @justineh! You have completed the following achievement on the Steem blockchain and have been rewarded with new badge(s) :

You made more than 1500 comments. Your next target is to reach 2000 comments.

_{You can view your badges on your Steem Board and compare to others on the Steem Ranking}
_{If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word STOP}

To support your work, I also upvoted your post!

Do not miss the last post from @steemitboard:

SteemFest⁴ - Meet the Steemians Contest

Vote for @Steemitboard as a witness to get one more award and increased upvotes!

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geekgirl (72) · 5 years ago (edited)

Yes you are! Ignore and filter out the noise, focus on what matters most. Don’t waste your time on trolls. Bring back your vlogs. And stop working behind the scenes for free. :)

P.S. Really, ignore the trolls. Your strength is at marketing, explaining complex in simplest terms. If you cross-post vlogs on steem and youtube, I see great benefit for Steem. But do what what matters most for you.

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1 vote

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raycoms (70) · 5 years ago

I thought a lot about this lately, and I think one of the easiest ways to make it more fun it to disable the visibility of downvotes.

I don't think it should be necessary for Steemit and the other frontends to show the downvotes a user received. Since most users on this platform actually don't understands why downvotes are important (and they are essential to balance the reward pool) we should simply not show the regular joe that he got any downvotes. Just show who upvoted you and how much money your post is currently making.

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noloafing (53) · 5 years ago

I would argue that we should remove how much an article made, the number of likes/dislikes etc.

These are some of the social proof "tactics" that don't really add much to the platform but do add to the anxiety.

Make it simple, allow anyone to upvote/downvote but only showing them to the author. Currently when someone stars downvoting everyone starts.

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raycoms (70) · 5 years ago

I agree, the value should be a less central aspect of the post (maybe it could be hidden for the normal user). And who up/downvoted a certain content should not be displayed on the frontend at all.

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veryspider (68) · 5 years ago

take a breather, justine and realize that you've done like.... idonno, like a kansas-sized worth of stuff more than most people on this platform

(im not sure if kansas is a big state or not since my american knowledge is wazoo :D)

but anyway, you're great, you're not perfect, but you're damn great

also twitter is more fun than steemit, a-yup ¯\.(ツ)./¯

.
.
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_{the ones who know you and what you do......... know that you try very hard <3 and even in your imperfections and even despite all of your flaws, and all of your stumbles and your snarky moments, you're still goddamn awesome <3}

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carolkean (66) · 5 years ago

Ditto that - only TEXAS is the state known for BIG, just fyi. :)
Kansas is where Dorothy wanted to go home to. And thank you @veryspider for all your @curie time, and all else that you do. Typically anyone who does a lot for one project is also doing lots for other projects.
@justineh, others have already assured you that you ARE a creator, not just a behind-the-scenes supporter and promoter. I'm all too aware of how toxic, demoralizing, and mentally draining the negative feedback (troll attack) or LACK of feedback (being overlooked) and all the politicking can be. So I've just hunkered down and made it a policy to do less, to volunteer less, though I still manage to spend a ludicrous amount of my time at Steemit.
You really nail it, every paragraph, so I'll pick just one to highlight:

But then I forgot that Steem is a social platform and I post here .. and sometimes trolls follow me, and people dislike me for what I’ve “done” or what they think I’ve done, or perhaps because the tone of my text is apparently triggering .. and people who I bring here have to see all that too.

I've persuaded some fellow authors to try Steemit, and they all left. Already published authors don't have time for all this - they're busy writing. In solitude.

THANK YOU for all you do here and take heart - all the comments on this post should be a sign you've been doing better than you think! Time to shift the narrative and tell yourself you're doing great, and anyone who disagrees can go find someone else to criticize.

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jdkennedy (52) · 5 years ago

We need folks like you who aren’t afraid to say what needs to be said, especially if nobody will say it. Sure it would be great if we can have a real discussion about the issues in an intelligent manner, but it seems too many people out there don’t know what that means, so they resort to the negativity we too often see. I once called the anonymity of the web the source of feeling key-bold: people feel bolder behind the keyboard.

Keep doing what you are doing. I fear the trolls will always be there, but so will the good that is still the greater part of Steem!

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ocupation (68) · 5 years ago

I think we'll start seeing traction as soon as we start creating national based communities. Most of people who i talk to have problem starting due to a bad English and unfortunately there is not much i/we can do about it.

And yeah, the social aspect is undermined sine there is financial incentive for doing something. Nevertheless I'm still firmly convinced that eventually people will start coming and more importantly stay around.

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chekohler (70) · 5 years ago

This place is all so new and there are so many complexities to building a decentralised platform but the reason I stay is because I think we're failing forward. Just because we air our shit out in the open it seems bad but trust me all tech companies are a shit show behind the scenes. If you ever had access to Facebooks internal intranet you'd cringe inside.

I'm not a content creator either, don't think I ever will be. I'm more of a banterer and my blog is a place where I share my learnings and thoughts that are not "fit" for other places. lol No one on Facebook or Insta want to hear about my wackadoo theories but here some do lol, I guess its why I continue

As for growing the platform yes marketing, yes communities, yes SMT"s, yes better UX, yes easier sign-ups we get it, they are all good ideas and should be done. But you know what many people are missing about it? It's time! BTC took 10 years to be the powerhouse it is today, all the other centralised social media sites with massive backing and multiple seed rounds took a minimum of 10 years to hit peak so I say take a beat and enjoy the ride

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niallon11 (68) · 5 years ago

I think communities will offer some better solutions to what we are going through at the moment. Right now you have a small group of people with little in common all squeezed into the same space.
People tend to connect of media due to shared interests which we don't really have here apart from steem. To make it more fun i wold like to have a lot of people writing about the sports and interests that i have in ireland. Things 99% of STEEM have never heard of. I want to read interesting articles and debate on those.

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enjar (69) · 5 years ago

As a content creator, I feel I can only do so much with the limited information I have.

Past few months my content has been dropping in search rankings from the best I can tell by just brute-forcing checking manually. My Steemit URLs are getting replaced by Steempeak. This just tells you we have a major switch going on in what frontend users are enjoying consuming content on.

I myself made the switch a while back to using Steempeak more often. The downside I have so much build up all trying send traffic to my Steemit URLs. I still promote Steemit over Steempeak for now. At some point, I feel I’ll need to spend a couple of weekends switching over a lot of internal and external links and other stuff going on.

It’s hard to target the outside world when I am running mostly blind over here in what is or is not working. What I’m ranking for and a bunch of other stuff. That has been the major issue and for whatever reason we seem to have very few Steem pages in the top 100 for topics that we should 10000% have without even trying. Heck even when I show up in top search results I’ll have 2 to 4 different frontends up there as well and then they all vanish for around a week before Google will show the front end that won out.

keyword overview.png
I took this screenshot the other day regarding a post I wrote two weeks ago. While the full URLs are not showing. I, in fact, had those two slots as both Steempeak and Steemit. They have even switched around with Steemit being up there and then both going missing for a week. That is also as I suspect going be a decent search term for that game as it grows bigger if I can hold onto it. Which I have quite the plan in doing so.

This is not the first time I’ve written something with the intent to rank well in search results and try to bring views in. I’m also no expert on SEO and what is working or not is 100% just a guess on my end since I don’t have a clue on page views, ranking, traffic sources, and other stuff.

Without manually searching for such terms using the tool I did I would not even know. It’s also not practical for me having to manually search for 100’s to 1k’s of terms to try and work out what I can better improve by editing old posts or making new ones better in-depth regarding a gap and targeting

The best metrics I have right now are how my Tweets are performing. That only tells me so much. The above is regarding my latest post. It will take years to grow out my Twitter account but I do what I can. That is only one of quite a few things to get the outside world to notice.

I also have so much I need to work out and learn myself. If we had an army of people just trying and sharing a little more to the outside world. Makes me wonder what could be done.

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noloafing (53) · 5 years ago

This is a good example of a fundamental challenge Steemit has, discovery.

It's hard to do good search within any front end I've come across and if I am using steempeak, I would rather just get sent there when I search Google vs having to manually change the URL.

It's hard to explain any of this to normies, and it's frustrating to those of us that want to use Steemit as a social platform.

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enjar (69) · 5 years ago

That it is. I have even gone as far as making an index of my own content as there no easier way to go about things.

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1 vote

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teamhumble (74) · 5 years ago

focus on the fun part. nothing else. you'll be solid.

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arcange (73) · 5 years ago (edited)

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winstonalden (64) · 5 years ago

I agree with this. We need to bring back fun.

But we also need to get people writing about subjects other than Steem and cryptocurrency. The reason I get tired and tend to forget about this place is... it's like if you turned on the TV and every program was about the history of television.

So yeah, let's get people having fun: using this platform instead of just talking about it.

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owasco (67) · 5 years ago

I have one idea, well one idea and one complaint. I'll start with the complaint - it's too complicated for a newbie! It has taken me well over a year of working almost very single day to learn the necessary skills. Now I am not only a great content creator, I'm expected to be a great proofreader, great editor, great photographer (working on it), great lay out artist (working on it), great self-promoter (working on it), great community member (working on it), great curator (always been good at that - I love supporting other artists!).

Here's a conversation I had with someone who was somewhat impressed that a recent brilliant story of mine had earned nearly 10 STU

"Well, that's not dollars, that's STU. I don't earn that much. Hang on and let me calculate how much actually ends up in my wallet. First, I halve that $10 to $5. The upvoters get the other half - I'll explain that in a second. Then I multiply by the value of SBD to USD and get 3.5. Then I divide by the value of STEEM to USD and get 24.14. So I earn 24.14 steem on that post. Which does happen to be around $3.50. Today. But that fluctuates with the value of both STEEM and SBD. Yeah, that's a very high paying post for me that took around seven hours to write, proofread, edit, format, provide an image that I took myself, edit the image so it pops, layout, publish, and promote it wherever and however I could. Of course you won't make that much as a beginner, I've been doing this for well over a year now so I know the ropes. But it's worth it!"

I didn't have a chance to get to the upvote curve, delegation, resource credits, tokens, front ends, tips, minnowhood, whales, curators etc before this person said "no thanks"

I do not know why I stayed, except that I managed to meet some fantastic fellow writers and am officially addicted to writing. Until I joined steem I could be heard saying "I can't write."

Which brings me to my idea:

Make it more simple. One has to be a math-minded tech-savvy gambler to make it in this place. It only appeals to an elite class.

Thanks for letting me get all of that off my chest!

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