The circlejerk of steemit and why is bad for everybody!

in steem •  8 years ago 

Hi there everybody,

I'm brand new to the platform, just joined yesterday. I can say that I am a believer in the crypto-potential and the idea of rewarding content and good curation with money is awesome.

Unfortunately, it seems to me that for now every other post is about steemit, or about how to make money from steemit, or about concurrency. New posts are coming in very slowly and there really isn't much content except for the aforementioned. Or at least, not a lot of content that gets bumped to the front page. It feels a bit too much like people creating a closed system.

Also, I've noticed that people have good intentions and they really seem to help out and make this work but I am afraid more work is needed and even more curation.

Is there a way of creating separated channels besides the tags? Can we maybe put all but the most popular posts about steemit somewhere else?

I feel that people might get discouraged coming in and only reading about steemit and money. What of the people who aren't really interested about this? What about ppl wanting to make this site a daily stop because they want to read about it?

Maybe all this will normalize soon, but we need, as a community, to attract and reward good content and to make space for it. Or else, how will it ever grow?

These are my thoughts, please share yours.

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The whole point of the platform is that people are paid based on what others like. If you want to see less content about Steem and more about philosophy, for example, stop voting for Steem content and start voting for philosophy content. Or better yet, start creating the content that you want to see! Steem is completely open, so make it what you want it to be!

It is hard to get the new people in to write about the arts though when they come to steem and all they see is posts about steem. Offputting. Makes you think 'am I wasting my time just to be dismissed?'. See some of the comments here. People are allready giving up. You need to be welcoming to outsiders. Encourage them to make steem more diverse.

start creating the content that you want to see!

Sorry only agree to a certain extend. An advice to new steemians:

If you want to write about your garden, plants, pets, life, your ramblings about random, be my guest. But if you want to write in technical areas which clearly is not your expertise but think you can profit from that area, i suggest you do not try. Already spotted people here (don want to mention name) writing things that they are clearly not expert in, spinning something out of nothing, writing totally flowery language and most importantly CRAP, and strangely got a lot of upvotes. I was totally pissed off by that. very insincere article but i upvoted it, hoping he will revise the article with elaboration but he just did not. TOTALLY REGRETTED the upvote.
My gut feel is that real-life experts with real expertise will not come in to blog and share about their experience here after seeing that. But i think their experience will be much more valuable for steemit. In the long-term, it is not good for him because in time to come, everything will be still on blockchain and people will know he is just writing crap. Also not good for steemit because steemit will be known as a place where fake experts write things that are clearly crap.

I dun want to say this because i always try to be nice but this incident made me lose confidence in the platform.....

  ·  8 years ago (edited)

I agree, but there is a slight irony here: Your post is about Steem!

I know! My post would be in the circle jerk section of the platform if my vision comes to pass :P

that was cool.

You joined the day people got paid for the first time! lol

This is a new platform and still in the beta stage. It's quite natural that people are talking about the system itself. What we are doing here is something that nobody else has ever done, so of course people want to learn, teach and speculate how this all will end up.

most things come and go if you have a look at youtube someone starts a trend but it never really lasts and seeing how yesterday was payday everyone was excited about it therefore that would be on the front page. eventually everything will work its way back to normal. There will be more things like this happening. For example a few weeks back it was all about introduction posts.

Not been here for that long. I've been however looking at the new section and it also seems new content is slow to come in. This in combination with the trend phenomenon makes for some boring top pages. That's why I think some way of clearly separating topics would be good. Perhaps also rework the landing page a bit to make it more varied.

Yeah I agree, I try to balance Steem-related posts with original stuff of my own but it's hard for some of us not to dive into Steem-posts because we know a lot about it and want to help others with our knowledge. I'm preparing one myself right now, but it's for important reasons.

On the other hand there are many fluffy posts about Steem/Steemit, some more nakedly wishing for upvotes than others. I hope these type of posts get less votes over time.

I'm not saying they're not important. They are! They just might do better in a section of their own.

  ·  8 years ago (edited)

I think what happens is new people start off writing about a wide variety of things. Then they find out that nobody reads and votes for those types of articles. Then they do some research and find out that the articles that get upvotes are about steem, so that's what they write about. It is a vicious circle.

On Brexit day I did a live blog, but I think it earned about 50 cents and made the front page in the evening (after all the action was over!). I did the live blog only because I was excited and wanted to record that moment in history. But in normal times no-one is going to live-blog an event all day for for cents when they could write an article about steem in 30 minutes and earn a lot of dosh.

I knew I should have copyrighted this complaint two months ago! I see it every day now. =b

We just left beta testing, everyone who was apart of beta testingfrom the beginning has crypto ties, I've brought in 8 people who haven't touched a crypto before, they (if they write) will most certainly be writing about other topics. It's just a matter of time before were a diversified network, just a matter of time. Be patient.

This is however why I've been up voting content I don't really care about, if it was well written with some time put in I've been up voting in an attempt to encourage diversification with a greater range of content substance.

I'm also gonna start making little workout vids and posting them, work on proper form, throw in some nutrition/health info, debunk some fitness myths/product myths. So that will start showing up. I believe it'll take time, im sure I'll make some posts that I put effort into that net me fuck all, but hopefully as more people come we can really create a base of users spanning a variety of topics funding authors of all kinds. "I have a dream" 😂

There is the Recommended for tab but it doesn't seem to be to smart at the moment. It just shows the popular and hot topics form the main page it seems, even though I've been up-voting mostly posts on anything but steem :)

I'm also waiting for the "follow" button to work as well so I can check out specific artists that I enjoy. I think the concept of diversification will take a little time but it'll come. We just need content creators plowing the way for the rest of the world.

I totally agree though I don't even use the recommended section at the moment. I still to hot and new. I'd like to see a few different sections like mentioned below, I'd love one where it's all people or pages or what ever that I enjoy following personally, and then one where it shows me a general timeline of various topics depending on the one I've selected to view.

These discussions are good though they truly do help shape the future of steemit.

I get what you are saying and in some degree, I agree. There IS a lot of very good content, but it takes some work to find. THAT is the problem IMO. The 'hot', 'trending' etc don't really provide an interesting experience as you pointed out. So we're left with the filters, which are a bad option if you are just catching up with general events, or else you are scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. I think a 'front page' with a combination of 'hot & trending' + people you follow + user defined tags might be more compelling as a form of programmed curation.

Yeah, a friend of mine was excited and worked 4 hours on an article about the Phnom Penh Music Scene and got $0.01 and was so pissed off that he doesn't want to come back. He also mentioned that he really didn't like the narrow scope of current content at all.

EDIT: Link to Joe's article if you guys want to give him some love for some diverse content. https://steemit.com/csp/@joewrigley/five-reasons-why-phnom-penh-has-a-cool-music-scene

Post a link in here. I'll up-vote:)

I have noticed the same problem, although now we seem to get a little bit less. I really hope that as the platform grows, we will see a wider variety of topics.

Absolutely agreee!!!! Already feel like puking when i see things related to steem and steemit. Diverse content? yes, about 1 2 weeks ago it was. NOW not at all. might be moving away even

New posts are coming in very slowly

No, new posts are coming in every minute, impossible to keep up already. Just click on "new" instead of "hot" on the left of the top bar.

Upvoted you

I was literally going to write something exactly like this, but first checked to see if anyone felt the same! It seems this was an entire year ago, and not much has changed. I am a singer/actress/comedian, and wanted to post videos of covers and DIY Cosplay blogs etc, but I feel like nothing that artsy is particularly welcome. I keep reading everywhere that Steemit is going to replace current social medias in the future, but how boring would Facebook be, if nearly every post just talked about Facebook and how great the Zuck is? Perhaps I will find my footing better, but I can't help but feel that the monetary aspect of this site (while awesome) limits what people actually post, and also makes comments seem fake and forced. Maybe I will hang around a little bit longer though. We shall see! Thanks for this post!