Who else has two categories of content influencers like Steem?

The question in the title just popped in my mind this morning.

Influencer is a big buzz word these days, but there's also real power behind it with the rise of blogging, vlogging and social media.

^Source

A teenager on social media can be a bigger influencer than a journalist at smaller national TV station, with a show in prime time.

So the world is changing and we are in the middle of this change, and in some ways we are leading it.

The classic way to influence is through message, even when you share your personal example or thoughts, without a direct intention to influence anyone. It's been practiced long before marketing was invented as a science.

So on one end we have authors and their posts with their audience.

Audience of course means first and foremost your followers, but not all of them, only those active and interested to read a certain post. Then, if the author is lucky, it means followers of others who resteem their post, whenever they find it interesting or useful for their own audience. And finally we have the organic readers, who either found your post through SEO, or through sharing on other social media platforms, or if your post reaches the Hot or Trending page of one or more of the interfaces on Steem.

But what else do we have on Steem? We have a reward pool. And it works based on... influence. Who has the most influence on it based on stake (alone, but most often together with many others), decide how the rewards are distributed.

We had and possibly we still have here and there many abuses of the influence on the reward pool. Luckily, it is relatively easy to spot, because it's tracked as votes on the blockchain.

But abuse of influence is not what I want to focus on.

One type of good use of the influence on the reward pool can be the curation guilds. So yes, for the reward pool, curation guilds are influencers. Not through message but through their votes. They have a high stake, mostly delegated to them, but also long curation trails, often including accounts with high stakes.

Here's an interesting aspect. Big chunks of the stake delegated to them is from accounts otherwise inactive, usually if the curation guild offers ROI for the delegation.

I've seen expressed more than once that inactive accounts should not participate in curation and we should find a solution acceptable for them that makes them take that option instead of auto-curating.

At first I thought this may be a solution, but now I realize that would also mean crippling most curation guilds, because they would have a much lower delegated stake, making them smaller influencers on the rewards pool. Do we want that? I'm not sure the effects would be beneficial.

There is a combined influence effect that is sometimes used, both through message and stake. Here are two examples:

• contests where @ blocktrades is a sponsor, usually posted by @ anomadsoul; obviously blocktrades' vote is worth a lot, so many will be interested to take the challenges
• @ oracle-d used to have some call to actions, where proof-of-action was rewarded, a role now successfully taken by @ theycallmedan

There are numerous other contents and / or lotteries on Steem -- I used to hold a regular one. The message of this type of content asks you to do something in exchange for a (potential) reward. So steemians understood fairly quickly we have two categories of content influencers, even if maybe they didn't call them like that.