RE: Time To Make STEEM A Huge Success By Dropping The Focus On "Quality"

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I found it quite necessary to respond to this post by @taskmaster4450 which is questioning the stance to maintain quality on steemit.

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"Do you want massive STEEM success or do you want quality?"

he asked.

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The post can be found here

I read this post on my way to work on the very day it was posted. I tried to leave a reply but was constrained by time. It has been a very hectic week for me. And now that have found time to say my bit, the post is fairly old already, and again, I think I have a lot to say, hence my choice to reference it on a new post.

@taskmaster4450 is of the opinion that achieving both quality and success is a great impossibility for STEEM.

Sorry. You cannot have both. It is a statistical impossibility. If you want massive STEEM success, then it is time to stop espousing the idea that STEEM is a place ONLY for "quality" posts. Essentially, this is a cancer that is running through STEEM that needs to be cut out. From the post

People like @taskmaster4450, with their SP, account age and achievement on steemit have grown to role model status here according to my own rating. Those of us who joined the ecosystem recently look up to them for guidance and indeed, we need them.

Sadly, the impression @taskmaster4450 is creating through the aforementioned post which has enjoyed a long stay on the front page is a sharp contradiction to what we previously learnt and which I presently believe to be a threshold for solid foundation for steemit.com and STEEM ecosystem in general.

This contradiction is coming exactly when some of us are working hard to conform to the standard of quality recommended on this platform. If you will bother to check my past posts, you will notice that at some points, I'm also guilty of making not much of good quality posts.

But I'll forgive myself because testing the waters seems to be of general intuition when we find ourselves in a new environment. I needed to understand how things are done here and also testing some of the HTML and markdown that are readily available.

I sincerely believe that making quality a norm is the greatest decision that forms and will retain steemit decades to come. It is correct to say that steemit is an influencing factor over the price and adoption of STEEM but this must not be misunderstood to mean that STEEM is steemit dependent. Steemit is a community built for people who use the currency called STEEM to meet, interact and learn. In doing so, reward is given for value.

This is like building a particular market place where only dollar is spent. Without that particular market, dollar is still dollar because the use of dollar is not limited to one market place.

Therefore, without steemit, STEEM is still STEEM. In my few days on steemit, I've used SDB and STEEM on several occasions to buy things from people who only have wallets but have never made a post on this platform nor intend to.

There are lots of cryptocurrencies that are ahead of STEEM on Coin Market Cap list, both in adoption, price/token and market capitalization yet most of them have no forum like steemit, they have no place where people upvote posts. And there are other cryptos like Dogecoin that came almost at the same time as Bitcoin but are still in cents.

Why do some of them fly so high while others are still struggling to leave the ground?

It is not about having a forum that is littered with gibberish. It is about consistency and value.

What keeps some of us here is the believe that steemit is a place for knowledge seekers and not the money, after all making money here has increasingly grown tougher. But some of us are still here. It is because we believe that the people we can learn from are here and we hope the quality gets better instead of worse.

@taskmaster4450 went further by citing Facebook and Instagram as good examples of what steemit should be if we want a lot of more people to join the platform.

Again, I politely disagree!

Facebook and Instagram are centralized social interfaces, managed by merchants who furnish and upgrade their server from the generated advert revenue. They want you to post more selfie and engage more friends on their platform because this helps their revenue to grow.

But is it the same here?

Here, money is involved for individuals. If everybody is posting anything and getting a lot of valuable upvotes, many people will quit their job and post as many as 200 times a day; they will post mostly gibberish and get paid for that and price of STEEM will fall to nothing in near future.

Worse is that such activities will require different levels of upgrade on the server when there is no advert revenue to foot that.

Way Forward

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Instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, I frankly expect that people like @taskmaster4450 should be promoting campaigns that have quality retention on the front burner and at the same time, work out measures to refine the "reward" architecture to further accommodate quality from undiscovered users. An example is the new initiative by @scipio through the @steem-ua project that is proposing to dig deeper into discovering quality contents of which @taskmaster4450 has already delegated 250SP, perhaps for benefit sake. A man with money has money to protect.

I was here 3 months ago when @scipio was promoting the idea behind UserAuthority and its possible potency on the overall steemit reward pool. He wrote several articles, including an open letter to @ned requesting that UA algorithm be effectively HardForked.

People like @lextenebris, @itstime, @shaka etc..., raised some concern regarding the presumed viability of UserAuthority project which finally defied the defence by @jaki01, @cryptoctopus etc, I guess it is so because they have not taken quality time to study how the project will revamp the reward system for good. I did. And I understood. As a matter of fact, I delegated 25SP from my meager resources as my little support for the project.

While I believe that it is in the interest of the Steem ecosystem to uphold quality across all applications built on the STEEM blockchain, I equally agree that a lot of areas need to be looked into for improvement or total overhaul. And one of such areas is this reward algorithm which determines front-page-worthy contents.

It really looks like a good marketing strategy but the ugly impact is far heavier than the supposed benefit. It is not every time that the amount earned by a post reflects evenly on the quality of that post. A reasonable chunk of them are good examples of what a front page material should not be.

Take this post by @berniesanders for instance: How many comments can a shit post get?

The post is perfectly empty. The first tag is: commentandshutup, second: leaveagoddamncomment, third: dontsuck, fourth: saysomethingstupid and fifth: gimmeavotetoo.

This post has earned $264.39 from 514 upvotes and has been trending on the front page for days.

It has a total of 287 comments from people who need upvotes from @berniesanders. If commenting on this "shitpost" will earn them some cents, why not? After all, they might have made a thousand quality posts without a berniesanders to appreciate them.

Now this brings us to what should be on the trending page.

Is it quality or influence?

Yes, this post in question has a lot of upvotes that gave it lots of dollars but why make that a yardstick to even approach the trending page? This is certainly not what a knowledge seeker who is visiting this platform for the first time will read and plan to come back except he has a different mission.

I think front page materials should be factored around quality and not how much a post has earned. @berniesanders may just have wanted to while away time with friends, which is normal anyways but see where the post has being for days because of upvotes.

More Incentives

I believe that steemit can be incentivized in more ways than one. In my opinion, replicating AdSense advert mechanism will be a great boost that will benefit every member of this ecosystem. If steemit adopts a system that will allow companies and individuals to advertise their products and services on members' posts, it will give birth to another streak of revenue channel that will be simultaneous to the current reward system.

Now, this will create a natural need for organic followers. If I want people to follow and remain with me, I will endeavor to create contents that will be appealing to them and possibly add useful values.

Conclusion

Looking at STEEM, all I see is great potential. I believe that if their is a crypto that will ever replace fiat, that crypto will be STEEM. Not only is it the fastest to move from one wallet to another, unlike most others, transactions on this blockchain do not attract fees.

@steemitblog, @andrarchy, @timcliff etc.., are doing significantly well to update the wider community on some upcoming, beautiful projects like SMT.

And alhough some witnesses would rather spend their time creating monsters and bringing them to this community, we still have @yabapmatt and a handful of others who are working tirelessly to built useful apps here.

If @ned and his team had wanted to pump the price of STEEM, they would have done that at ease. So, that the price is dragging today is one of the healthy choices, or so I think. STEEM is here to stay and growth has to be natural in lieu of pump and dump approach that besets many.

Let us focus on the long run prospect of STEEM and work towards giving it a global adoption out of "want" and not out of "bait."

Thank you for reading,
@newhyt