Using Memetic Strategy from the Meme-Wars for the benefit of Steemit.
Social network?
While the power of the Steemit blockchain is blowing away peoples minds, many people are complaining. Most of the time ts is about not earning enough, other times its dissappointment that their work done isn't seen.
These problems seem to be connected, since the visibility of articles is very low. An article can not pushed to other people easily: votes are piling up on a post until it finally hits the main paige and is then shot into orbit.
Just to visualize the life cycle of the average post on Steemit I made this article: The Black Forest of unseen Steemit Articles. The post is only visible on the category "New Articles" and 24h later under "Payout articles".
Advertising
So what happens is that people find out they need to get people to the article and end up sharing the link wherever they can. This leads them to go to Facebook, Slack, Twitter and other places where steemit user hang out.
It is clear that there is a need for adertising and sharing the articles.
Virality
Memes are more then just emoticons and pictures with two witty lines on it. They involve customes, word phrases, shapes, color schemes and much more. A meme is a running joke, something that triggers a feeling among an initiated group of people.
If this trigger is efficient, the meme is shared to increase the group of initiated people. With the group, this meme is becoming stronger: it is going viral.
This is an important factor: as the subjected value of a single picture is very low, the effective value increases the more people are pulled into it. Making a meme is little work, but having it go viral and facilitate multiple variations of it symbolizes an avalanche of value. This is why memes are now everywhere.
Vote and Share
But this effect, of good articles being shared and thus increasing their produced value, is not easily donw on Steemit. The articles are seen, liked and forgotten. It is like going through a candy store, every candy is behind a curtain, you like it and put it back behind the curtain for someone else to find. But the thing is that this candy is infinitly being available. Meme-Cady is being reached around for everyone to taste until it gets fade in the mouth and people come up with better, newer tastes.
This is why votign must be equal to sharing. The candy has to be reached around to friends and followers.
Followers
The option for followers does already exists, but there is no effect yet. There needs to be a "friendlist" and a timeline where people can find the good stuff others discovered. There need to be more posibilities to find and share good candy!
The incentive to look for them already exists. If someone finds a new great article, he can share it with his friends, if they like it too they will share it and thus add their votes. This then makes it go viral until it is seen by whales and then also increases in value.
Vote/Reward and future visibility
This needs to be fixed quickly, because right now there are only little over 40,000 people here and articles are already falling into oblivion. What is going to happen if there are 1, 2, 3 or 4 million people?
The biggest problem as I see it is people backing the "favourite horses". There is no incentive to dig for gems!
... only to back the old reliables, when they're fresh. The current system is fucked, quite frankly.
Curators are sitting waiting for whales and celebs, while awesome content falls through the cracks because the author is "untested". As far as I'm concerned there should be LESS reward for voting for someone with good form, and MORE reward for discovering good content from someone untested. - Right now it's like horse racing, but the favourites are the only horses worth backing.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Indeed.
Aditionally the system is very complicated, so it is hard to blame people for their behavior.
A top down solution is highly necessary.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
The sad thing is for users, that the only way to fix these problems is by writing articles. I bet there are already thousands of good ideas out there that show solutions, but nobody sees them.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit