Working the Steemit Attention Economy, or Why you (probably) won't read this post

The best way to use Steemit is not as a tactical tool for profit, but for finding your 'magic circle' and co-constructing with it.

In the deluge of posts that come out on this site every minute, quality content gets drowned out with the rest for the simple reason that there is very little way of knowing what is quality content. I know because I am currently one of those people not actually clicking through very much in the feeds. Why? Because most of the content is low quality and the chance that even a good headline will actually contain a post worth my time is very low.

If this was all there was to it I would worry a bit that the so called community aspect of Steemit would ultimately be at risk of the 'conversation with oneself in a public place' phenomenon that is indicative of a lot of blogging sites, where people are ultimately individually oriented and the real game is to get everyone else to pay attention to you so that you can grow bigger and more influential than others. This is the 'celebrity' model that is One-talks-to-many. Journalism, most authorship, Instagram, and most blogs follow this model. If you wish to follow this model on Steemit without having a pre-existing following then I say good luck to you, I hope you're a strong swimmer.

I think a better way to do Steemit and the antidote to this celebrity model is to instead try and cultivate a 'magic circle'. A magic circle is not a following or being a follower although it involves both, but is simply a focused group of peers that you form by having similar interests and interact with continously for the purposes of co-creation towards a shared conviction or interest of some kind. The key question of course becomes: How do I find these people with similar interests, whose output I can't wait to engage with?

Unfortunately I don't think there's any easy answer to that. I think first of all you need to know yourself and your interests or else you'll slosh around aimlessly on the sea of crap posts without focus.

And ultimately, I think I and my fellow new Steemers will simply have to go through the slog of wading through bad content in the feeds until those few good people with interesting perspectives show up.

Unfortunately, most Steeming right now seem to be more focused on 'winning' the attention economy zero-sum game of getting eyeballs and upvotes to ones individual posts. I think, and hope, that this is very old-hat and kind of goes against the Steemit ethos, which I think is more toward the forming of these personal magic circles first, and the monetization and attention from passive followers a distant second. Until I find such a group for myself, and there are no guarantees I will, posting on this site will keep having that stale and unsocial feeling of a conversation in my own head.

photo credit: India.com