Steemit 2-Month Review

Source: Pixabay

A newbies take on the platform

I've only been on the steemit platform for about two months so I'm a bit of a newbie here. Although there are many things left for me to learn about the platform and the community, I believe that the perspective of a newcomer is of value for the direction of this platform. Why? Quite simply because you need a bunch more newbies to join and feel the platform is usable to get mainstream adoption, and once you get fully invested in something it's incredibly easy to forget what your original reservations about it were! Some of this might come off a little negative, I want to be clear that as a blockchain enthusiast I love the concept and genuinely want this platform to succeed. That being said, we need to be realistic about what could prevent a newbie from joining and sticking with the platform if we want it to grow. So, here we go, 3 obstacles for expanding the steemit platform.

1 - Content Filtering

Let's start with a softball that some development could likely knock out of the park fairly easily. One of the first things I noticed as I started browsing through content was that the main trending/new/hot/promoted pages seemed like a whole cluster to me. It's a genuinely wonderful thing that steemit garners such diversity. Unfortunately, too much diversity without the right filter controls can be overwhelming for someone joining the community. One of my first thoughts was, "it would be great if I could at least start by filtering by English language posts only so I'm starting with what I'm capable of reading." Another thing I noticed was that the categories were somewhat helpful, but since they're dynamic and you can tag whatever you like, it took me a little time to determine which tags were used most often (crypto vs cryptocurrency for example).

Source: Pixabay

Following Helps, More Options Are Needed
Other than that, once you figure out who makes content you enjoy you can follow them and mostly keep an eye on the users you follow. The issue with this strategy is even after you figure out what content you like, you can't separate users that you follow into any sort of groupings if they tend to post different sorts of content, and if you follow too many people you can end up with a very messy feed. It would be great to have favorites within your followers and be able to at least toggle between all the users you follow (i.e. you have an interest in what they post) and your favorite users (i.e. the few people that you want to read the content of first). Eventually, as the platform expands, it may be necessary to have additional options such as multiple folders that you can toggle between.

Long Term Recommendations
Another option is something like Facebook does where you can snooze or stop seeing users in your news feed and algorithms pick up on the users you spend the most time reviewing and show them statistically more if the overall traffic in your feed has gotten too busy. A wonderful long term addition would be to use machine learning to provide a recommended post section that analyzes your content consumption patterns and shows more content like it (outside of just your followed users).

2 - Whale Wars

I'm only at the tip of the iceberg on understanding all the whale wars going on here. From a newcomers perspective, when I see these giant whale/bot wars my gut reaction is that one of two things must be true.

1. There is a culture problem here and a free market system should self-regulate without all this fuss
   • In other words, if we just stopped with the BS whale wars and worked on reaching outside the community to get more users everything would be fine. If this is the case, we should push for this in any way possible so we can all profit!
2. the architecture of this site is unsustainable
   • What I mean by that is if certain accounts can amass so much power that through multiple accounts/bots, steempower, reputation, and vests they can grow their power indefinitely until the whole platform falls apart due to the imbalance and everyone leaves and the market crashes, then the platform is not adequate and should be allowed to fail.

My Observations Currently
I'm not sure which of those two options is the truth, but I can tell you what is currently happening that does not appear to be healthy. There is no good outcome that involves a handful of whales mercilessly swinging their metaphorical genitalia all over the place in some sort of measuring contest whilst smacking nearby minnows into reputation hell (try not to literally picture that). This outcome is certainly supported by the platform currently, my argument is it's not sustainable and causes more harm over time than even letting the system fail. I would imagine that paradigm would lead to a handful of whales sitting around yelling at each other while the price of STEEM drops lower and lower and all the minnows give up and search for a new platform.

Source: Pixabay

If there is a problem and a programmatic change cannot be implemented, I'd rather see whales stop trying to regulate each other and if someone is able to topple steemit, a new platform SHOULD be built anyway. I know this might not be a popular opinion, but from an outsiders point of view, when I come in here and see finger pointing and flagging and fighting within the community it just leaves a bad taste and makes me very skeptical of the future here. Also, perhaps it's my "rip off the band-aid" kind of personality but I prefer to not waste my time if the end result is going to be ruin anyway but I'm hopeful that is not the case here.

Collateral Damage
Another unfortunate result of a whale war is collateral damage. A minnow can come into this platform, excited to see if they can make a buck posting good content, write a comment on the wrong persons post, and get downvoted into oblivion. It happens and it's ridiculous. Many users join this platform from countries with impoverished economic status, where getting a few bucks on a solid post can make a huge difference to them. It's bad when a community that has the capacity for that kind of good is busy screwing people like this over for essentially no reason other than some kind of association with a whale that they dislike. Some of the users that I've seen get destroyed with downvotes have posted completely non-controversial, low-reward comments that clearly didn't deserve to be targeted. Doing this is morally reprehensible no matter how you try to justify it. I think we all know which parties I'm referring to here... but I don't really want to say names. From what I've observed, these individuals can be quite spiteful, petty, and unfortunately effective at destroying reputations.

Think about the above point of collateral damage a little further, it hurts more than just the people being downvoted, it also hurts the entire platform for these reasons.

• Newbies see this activity and lose interest in steemit and don't bother diving in and making great content (content which could draw more users)
• Those who get destroyed may leave the platform and not provide good content that would have brought more users to the platform
• Those who either witness this or experience this are less likely to recommend this platform to their friends, also slowing potential growth

3 - Bot Culture

Source: Pixabay

I figured this would theoretically be a good platform in which to post a few well thought out pieces per week and you could earn some decent STEEM or SBD to either invest back into the platform or convert to other cryptos/fiat. After my couple months here it seems like you have to be incredibly active to get anything of value. The only real value I've brought to my account has been through @originalworks writing contests which have been a blessing for me. I'd probably still have 25 reputation and near 0 value upvotes with only a few followers if those contests didn't exist.

What Will Keep Newbies Away
I'm 100% for the idea that someone should have to work to make it big on this platform, but if the barriers are too high to even collect a small amount at first while learning the platform, widespread adoption isn't going to happen. Most people are not going to join this platform and put a bunch of work into their first article, find they only have $0.01 with 3 minnow upvotes, and proceed to passionately make more content. Your average person is just going to think it's not even worth their time and stop bothering with the platform. This isn't to say you won't get some great new users, but generally speaking people are on some level weighing out the opportunity cost of their time, and if they perceive their time as being worth $0.01 on this platform they're going to do something that creates more value in their life.

Our Bot Overlords
So, what does that have to do with bots? What I'm getting at is it seems like to get noticed, one of the best ways is to invest some STEEM, convert to steam power, and then delegate to bots. I'm testing out @minnowbooster now which seems neat... but I just don't see this whole idea that bots need to be delegated to if you want your presence known to be a big starter for your average person joining the platform. I know that @minnowbooster is literally intended for promoting little accounts and it's within the norm in this community for me to use it, but I can't help but feel uncomfortable as I buy upvotes with the hopes that maybe a larger player sees my post. I hate clicking over to my newly posted material and seeing 10 little upvotes that I bought and only 3 views in the first 5-10 minutes. That being said, @minnowbooster is not what I would consider to be a disruptive bot. Since it's niche is to help newbies I don't necessarily see it as a bad actor here (I just wish it wasn't necessary), if I'm wrong and it is bad, please let me know and I'll stop using it. The bots that larger players on this platform use to launch their posts immediately to trending/hot every time are the real culprits.

I imagine what it would be like to try and get my brother involved on this platform. He'd be happy to post a couple things here and there if rewards were associated, but if I start showing him how to set up some bots to get him upvotes when he posts, he's going to say nevermind and not bother with steemit. I believe that the average person that we need to join for mainstream adoption will think that way as well. The real value proposition of steemit should be providing quality content for rewards, not providing any sort of content and playing an intricate game to mathematically accrue rewards above content that's better than yours.

Wrapping it all up

So, the good news is I'm new enough to see what the hurdles are for further adoption to try and share with the community. The bad news is, I'm still not 100% sure how to go about solving these (mostly the bottom two issues). I'm hoping that I can get some decent conversation started about this, I'd like to hear if people think these criticisms are fair, and if so what kind of actions can be taken. From a platform perspective, are all these issues fixable? Is something like the whale issue just so out of control that the platform is going to die in a major bloodbath? Could bots ever be made obsolete or at least scaled down in impact? What I'd like to know is if what I'm seeing can reasonably be fixed within the constraints of the platform and if any of the witnesses are pushing for any of these things actively. I appreciate any ideas/feedback/conversation that users are willing to share on this matter.

Remember, if the goal is to get more people on the platform, the benefits of spending time here are in direct competition with all other activities that the general public could spend their valuable time on. We need to make this platform more appealing than as many other competitors as possible to expand the platform.