1000 followers - another milestone reached

ksolymosi (67) in steemit • 7 years ago (edited)

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Dear Steemian Community,

I have another important milestone: I have just reached 1000 followers... Well, I am so grateful for the support of all of you. I have joined Steemit last year in August and it was approximately five months later that I posted about reaching 500 followers. Now it took only 2 months to double it and I am really thankful to you all!

Many of you may already know that I am working as a trainer and coach. And there is someone almost every day whom I need to remind on the importance of goal setting. Without these, we do not really have a benchmark, we cannot see if the direction or the pace is good or bad. Zig Ziglar, a famous sales person and motivational speaker said once:

“You need a plan to build a house. To build a life, it is even more important to have a plan or goal.”

Being able to formulate a good, realistic but motivating goal is half of the success. Without this, you may find yourself just wondering around in your life or living according to someone else's goals. Another quote that I like is from W. A. Ward, another inspirational writer (but I think he took the idea from Albert Einstein):

"If you can imagine it, you can achieve it."

That is the point! We have to be brave to set goals, imagine, how we will proceed towards it, imagine what will it be like when we achieve it.

When I started Steemit my first goal was to learn how it works and see if I "get the feeling". I gave myself 30 days for that.

DONE

Next step was to find out something original to contribute to the community and gain some exposure. I found out to run a contest, Daily Brain Games because I have noticed that there are a lot of extremely smart people on this platform, so I thought a bit of a mental training would be nice. I am meeting wonderful people while running this game, real genies who solve the tasks in less than a minute sometimes. @doughtaker is the smartest and fastest ever, he won the most games so far. So this milestone was also achieved.

DONE

After that I wanted to reach 500 followers, obviously, this is done, too.

DONE

After that, I wanted to improve my writing skills and the contents I created so I joined two communities focusing on quality: @steemstem and @steemitbloggers. I am very grateful to them because with their support and guidance I think I could develop a lot. (I don't say I cannot develop any further because one can always do, but the milestone is reached definitely.)

DONE

The next milestone was to reach 1000 followers, which I achieved today... :-)))

DONE

Steem elválasztóvonal.png

Well, you might ask, what's next? Here is my answer:

My upcoming milestones are the following:

reach 2000 SP until 31 July this year.
improve the rules and exposure of Daily Brain Games until 30 April this year.
start another community project until the end of this year.
reach 2000 followers until 31 August, this year.

Challenging, right? (I always try to set both qualitative and quantitative goals, as for me this is most motivating.)

What is your challenging goal for the upcoming period?

steemit milestone goalsetting motivational steemitbloggers

7 years ago by ksolymosi (67)

$26.77

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doughtaker (56) · 7 years ago

Congrats @ksolymosi! That's a well-deserved milestone.

It will be interesting to see how you might evolve the daily brain games. It's pretty clear that you are the current gold standard for daily puzzles on Steemit -- I've seen a few others try to do something similar in a daily format, but none have come close to matching the quality and variety of puzzles that you've put together.

May your success continue, at an even faster pace than what got you here!

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2 votes

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ksolymosi (67) · 7 years ago

Thanks a lot for your support! Well, I am still thinking about the Brain Games, but I think the next step would be to involve more people in trying to solve them. This involves not having the answers visible to everybody (using steemchat or discord maybe).

But I am open to your suggestions if you have any. You are the absolute champion so far, so whatever you suggest will be considered! :-)

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1 vote

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doughtaker (56) · 7 years ago

(You should read my response to @sonofsatoshi first.)

Ok, let's see what I can come up with here... we want to move the answering off-site and increase participation at the same time. That means mechanisms need to be put in place to encourage and prod people along. Got it. Here is my best guess on what to do:

(1) Increase the daily prize pool and number of daily prizes.

You don't necessarily have to boost the prize for first correct answer of the day, but you definitely can't cut the prize and expect that the general public will go out of their way to find you on Discord or Steemit.chat. Also, moving the competition over to Discord/Steemit.chat without changing the prizes will likely result in a drop in participation.

I would suggest this format: two prizes per daily competition -- a big prize for the first correct answer like normal, and a small prize awarded at random amongst all other correct answers within the first 24 hours (or if you don't want to have to crunch numbers on weekends, 72 hours for Friday's puzzle, in which case on Fridays the puzzle should be more difficult than normal).

(2) Add a monthly leaderboard and prize(s).

The goal should be obvious: give everyone something to play for, even if their chances of being first in a daily competition are really low. Participants score 1 point per puzzle answered correctly within the first 24 hours (or optionally, 72 hours for Fridays). At the end of the month, the top player(s) win prize money. In the event of a tie, the first tiebreaker should be the number of puzzles that each participant attempted to solve (i.e. the number of days that they submitted an answer, whether right or wrong), with the second tiebreaker being the number of wins during the month. If there are still tied participants after the tiebreakers, combine the awards associated with their positions and split them equally. Post and update the leaderboard once a week on Mondays, except during the final week of the month, when the leaderboard should be updated daily.

I can't really suggest a format for number of prizes and the size of those awards on the monthly leaderboard -- that you would have to experiment with and see what works.

(3) Use Discord for taking answers.

Discord seems to be most reliable amongst Steemians' popular chat services. I personally prefer the layout of steemit.chat, but it's offline or really, really slow way too often. In a contest that will rely on timestamps for determining the order of submissions, everyone needs a stable platform.

(4) If all else fails, you can always just return to the current format.

We know the current format works, and as Steemit continues to grow, will probably draw in more regular eyeballs.

So there you have it. Think it over, let me know your opinion, pick it apart if you feel the need to.

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1 vote

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ksolymosi (67) · 7 years ago

Wow, thanks a lot for the detailed explanation and the great ideas!

I totally with you on the leaderboard. It was on my list to be introduced together with some regular statistics on the results of the best players.

Also, I was thinking about giving out prizes based on long-term performance, not only based on daily solutions.

Increasing the pool is also inevitable, and I think the idea of giving money to someone sending the first correct answer plus randomly to someone else can also work.

I use Discord more often than steemit.chat, so I am happy to receive answers there.

Concerning @sonofsatoshis's idea of collecting the answers until Friday, I definitely do not want to have a weekly contest. The reason I am posting only one task per day and preferably something that does not require hours of thinking is because I wish to provide some mental stimulation. "Use it or lose it" applies to our brain cells, too - so some exercise has a very positive effect.

I also do not believe in resteems, I never saw any huge changes after my posts were resteemed or after I resteemed the posts of others. A few extra visitors here and there, that's all.

But I believe in community, so I plan to build a community around this contest. As I already have quite a few returning participants.

I also plan to have some "built-in" contests, such as puzzle-writing contests... etc.

So thanks again for the valuable thoughts. I will find time to work out the new rules and the system and return soon with more solid ideas.

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1 vote

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sonofsatoshi (51) · 7 years ago

@doughtaker's proposals are great, I believe. @ksolymosi, I'm getting more excited about the things you are planning to include for the Daily Brain Games in the future, especially the puzzle-writing contest. :) I'm looking forward to the next games and I hope that the community will start growing bigger soon!

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poyim (52) · 7 years ago

I agree with @doughtaker.
The puzzles are superior to the others I’ve found on steemit.

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sonofsatoshi (51) · 7 years ago

Congratulations on your milestone! I am also enjoying the variety of puzzles that you are having every day. I've already seen other brain puzzles on Steemit but your games are the best and it surely deserves more participants.

I have a suggestion for the Daily Brain games. What if you should make it a requirement for us to comment our answers (even if there is already a winner), upvote, and resteem the previous post for us to qualify for the next game? And then you will add the list of players that are qualified to the next game post to make sure that nobody will just upvote and resteem yesterday's post so that they can qualify instantly. It may be a bit time consuming for you, but it's just my suggestion. :)

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1 vote

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ksolymosi (67) · 7 years ago

Thanks a lot for your support! :-)
It's a good idea, I will think about it!

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doughtaker (56) · 7 years ago

Bumping up @sonofsatoshi's comment for visibility.

I disagree with this suggestion. Given @ksolymosi's stated goal of trying to increase participation from the general public, I believe that implementing this would actually decrease the quality of participation, and maybe the quantity too. There are two problems here: (1) the general public as a whole, is probably much lazier than you think, and (2) resteeming simply isn't as effective as what most people think.

There's no good reason for it to happen, but I have seen across multiple established contests, that if there's a requirement that even remotely looks like "work", people will shy away from it. In the case of contests adding requirements to future editions, participation has dropped immediately afterwards. As absurd as this sounds, requiring a resteem to qualify... counts as "work". Adding the comment requirement on top of this would attract mainly copypasta folks who aren't going to really participate -- they might help create the illusion of increased participation, but let me show you from personal experience -- copypasta sucks (make sure to sort those comments by age and then start from the bottom).

As for resteeming itself, here are results of what has happened to quiz/puzzle contests that I regularly or semi-regularly resteemed:

_{Weekly trivia contest with 20+ SBD prize pool... never got that big bump in participation, is now officially on hiatus.}
_{Short quiz several times per week with prize pool based on article payout... never saw a rise in participation, got cancelled.}
_{Short weekly quiz/challenge with prize pool based on article payout... I dunno, participation looked like it went up, but I think my resteeming it may have been the touch of death...}
_{SAT-level math questions for STEEM (sizeable amounts too for the fastest)... participation increased by at least one person, but this contest has been on hiatus for a while (its author also hasn't posted on Steemit too much lately).}

And for non-quiz contests...

_{A weekly rant contest... ok, this one seems to be doing all right, but it also had a sizeable Steemit community behind it. I doubt my resteeming this one had any impact.}
_{A gaming contest run several times a month, with prize pool based on article payout... participation has grown, but definitely not due to my resteeming it (I was, and still am the only native English speaker involved with that small community).}
_{A reading contest... ummm... it's probably better if the results were left unsaid.}

I believe the proper phrase to describe these kinds of results is "lousy track record".

As much as I hate to say this, I think bidbots, when properly timed, are way more effective than resteems in increasing participation. Time the post and the bid so that the bidbot responds right away, get to trending, get more eyeballs. But this method is also the lazy way around and might not increase the quality of participation either.

Enough dismantling from me, I need to actually come up with my own solution to offer... and when I do, feel free to pick it apart if anything looks wrong with it.

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sonofsatoshi (51) · 7 years ago (edited)

:) Those are really good arguments worth considering. I just thought over my suggestions and I agree that making the rules more complicated can have an impact on the interest of the participants.

One other possible solution that I was thinking about is to compile the games into a weekly post. Or still make the regular daily brain games but we can only submit after Friday's game is posted, so that we will all participate to solve all puzzles from Monday to Friday, keep our answers stored in our files, and wait for the last game for the week before posting all of them in one comment.

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doughtaker (56) · 7 years ago

Hmmm.... wouldn't that effectively turn the format into a weekly competition where the person willing to stay up all night on Thursday evening to catch the Friday post the moment it goes up, is the one who ends up winning 2.5 SBD? I don't think that would go over too well with the general public. Plus, there's already an established puzzle contest that runs 2-3 times a month, with 4 puzzles per round, and higher prizes. I don't think that converting this contest into a weekly format to "compete" with, and look similar to, the established one is a good idea.

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ksolymosi (67) · 7 years ago

Thanks a lot for your thoughts, I really appreciate that you support me. I answered to you and @doughtaker in a combined reply. See it above.

Have a nice day!

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putry01 (57) · 7 years ago

congratulations already have 1000 followers, good luck for the future, good post friends

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1 vote

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ksolymosi (67) · 7 years ago

Thanks a lot!

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edupa (50) · 7 years ago

Awesome! Congrats, you deserve :)

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ksolymosi (67) · 7 years ago

Thanks a lot!

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poyim (52) · 7 years ago

Nice. Congrats on reaching 1000 followers and good luck on your next milestone.

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ksolymosi (67) · 7 years ago

Thanks a lot!

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serafimovichev (31) · 7 years ago

You will succeed a without fail. I glad for you.

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ksolymosi (67) · 7 years ago

Thanks!

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maverickfoo (67) · 7 years ago

Congrats, @ksolymosi!

And thanks for reminding us all to set goals too. While I agree that goal setting works for some, sadly for others (like me), we are more motivated by pain. Of course, I do always set goals in a way where if I don't achieve it, I will have to do something terrible, like donating money to a cause I hate! How's that for motivationg, huh?

For me, my challenging goal is to expand the Steemit community outside of Malaysia (where I'm based at). Doing my first Steemit Intro event in Bangkok this sunday, so keeping the fingers crossed that all will go well.

Planning one for Hanoi too in May/June.

Steemit is such an amazing plaxform, and I just want to find ways to expose the opportunity and possibility to others.

Again, congrats!