Do any of you remember that do you remember that Vice article Corin Faife wrote?
He said " glance at the homepage shows that a lot of popular content tends towards the amateurish and introspective". I keep thinking about that phrase, is he right?
I read that article twice because that's what good writing compels you to do: read it again.
It's one of the steemit article that I really really enjoyed. I read a good chunk of good stuff, because i follow a lot of low rep /high-quality people and they never never make trending, why?
You can argue all you want that it's a lottery and that it takes time and etc etc, but let's be honest for a second, it's because their articles are hard to read, hard to digest.
It's easier to upvote a cool title and a nice photo. Of course, it is. But to what end?
But the bigger question looms: IS this what steemit wants to be?
It is the place where spending long hours o research and write a good piece gets shit but a word-vomit, with no depth or reason about... love, makes all the money?
You can see that I link @msgivings because well, that's one of the worst examples ever. Now, she has fallen, finally the scrutiny brought her plagiaristic ways to the light but....should we be happy?!
We shouldn't because she won, she just took out 10.000$ yesterday. That's a serious number of times MORE than I made, more than most of YOU made. That's just an insult to good writers, good content creators, good steemit fans! It's also very very bad news for Steemit.
And I must say, I didn't even mind her superficial and stupid subjects. I will upvote something that is well written. FUCK IT!, blow my mind with the writing. I'll upvote even if I despise your opinion, even if i think you re dead wrong. Because for me, writing is MAGIC. Words have POWER. And a good wielder of the gift gets my admiration no matter which side of the truth he fights on.
I upvoted Corin and I have no doubts in my mind why he is a PAID journalist for a TOP site[Vice]. Because he delivers at a level that few can, that's why for him, making 1000$ for a steemit article is not worth the investment unless guaranteed.
Yet when I see who's trending, I see no reason why they're there [ exceptions apply ].
Good writing? no, not even close.
Profound subject? Nah. then what? why?
I'm seriously disappointed but should I really be? Maybe that's what STEEMIT is, or wants to be.
At this moment, Steemit is more Buzzfeed than VICE.
This article by msgivings is garbage and everybody voted on it. Why? I ask again WHY??*
I understand that the controversy of it all brings attention but at what cost??
The message was: "If he cheats on you, might be your fault". That's MEDIEVAL! IS this a message we want trending for 2 days on steemit?!
And maybe, maybe! if you had some smart, interesting, challenging argument but no, not at all. What's more, even msgvings admits in one of the comments " it's just my opinion, funny thing, it changes very day!"
Is that supposed ot be funny?! hahaha.HA! Youknow what this is? This is the very definition of a feeble mind, yet her persona surely thinks it's cute. haha, the silly feeble woman writing silly stuff and being taken so serious but bad, mean, not-fun people.
And why not? he/she is a woman hater who sees woman as nothing more than that. Just look at the pictures she chose, just look at the articles...but she's always trending, always making money..while serious, well researched, good articles die in oblivion.
Isn't this sad?
Maybe it isn't. Why should it be?
But at least make it clear: this is what Steemit is! This is what's rewarded: FLUFF.
This is what we upvote: small-minded nothingness.
At least, some people will be saved the frustration of trying. And I personally know a lot of them who are, after only one month of steemit, burned out. Tired of trying. And try they did....
Are these people haters? quiters? I don't think so, most are really hard-working and believer in Steemit but they too are getting tired of a trending page that DISCOURAGES instead of ENCOURAGES good content and effort.
But if it is so, that Steemit signals that it favors superficial, weak, plagiarist writers, let's cut the bullshit with "good content".
Steemit doesn't want "good content" which means " you don't want good authors" in turn you don't want "quality people" in turn you don't give a fuck, as long as it works, or at least as long as it works.
I know some people will read this and think I'm an elitist. "go read Hemingway and leave us be" one might think. "Can't I write my article in peace?". one might ask.
Yes, you can. Sure you can. Hell, I encourage you to do just that.
But it shouldn't get thousand of rewards. Because while a few will cash out some good money and laugh all the way to the bank, Steemit will be dead because money in itself will not have enough pull for good content creators. PERIOD.
It seems to me, people forget, that the internet exists. I read 10-20 AMAZING articles per day, only one max is on steemit, people out there write. Put their hearts in writing. Research to the bone. Then create a great article.
Can something like this exist on steemit?
I think not at this pace, I think never if this trend continues. Hell, just look at medium front page and those people AREN'T getting paid!
I'm ending this by asking you, the whales, is that the way you see this going? I'm calling for a bit of clarification @dantheman, @ned is that why you upvote all that, all the time. If so, how exactly do you think this Steemit-experiment will ever take off?
BUT:
IF you do have a vision of a place that can nurture, grow, help, encourage and push to the limit the best of content creators.
IF you do want this Steemit to be the homepage of great stuff on the internet.
IF you do dream that one day, "I'm a content creators on Steemit" will be the " I work for VICE" of that day.
THINGS NEED TO CHANGE.
I hope we can all start seriously working on that direction, together. Some initiatives are already on the way: RobinHoodWhale and Project Curie are amazing steps in the right direction but they alone can't do much. We, the dolphins and minnows are trying. but we alone can't do much. We need you all, the whales, on our side. On the side of good content. On the side of real effort.
We need more, we need more faster or else a new @msgivings a new @mrron will be trending again, another nail in the coffin.
I SO SO SO don't want this to be the case.
I know this might be hard to take but.. They upvote friends and what makes THEM the most money either from curation or shill accounts.
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I don't know if that's a conclusion I can reach based only on that...and i'm not sure if it matters. My theory is this, there's more good[whales, dolphins,minnows] of us then bad of them!
Come on
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Sorry folks. I pointed out a few more of these in my last post and they are still trending. Do better. Curation is serious and not being taken seriously.
If you think you can write a script to curate for you, you're wrong.
People take this place seriously. If you don't take their paycheck seriously they will leave. Simple as that.
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you're making a good point. i think many authors after being 'hit' by a whale once they immediately expect for the next hit. This is not wrong. We rely on powerful users to vote good content. Some authors may be on preferred lists. Nothing wrong with that either, as long as all their posts are carefully curated...
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Don't worry @jsteck, the new upgrade and vote slider is totally going to change that. (*sarcasm)
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Her material had turned to drivel. Whales were still voting on it because they get in that habit. I know on our curation team, we had some discussions about her posts and all agreed it was overvalued. That wasn't material we could have supported.
Regarding plagiarism, we're all trying to catch it. I think we all just need to stay vigilant about any possible issues with people who are not posting original content. On Project Curie, we have proven Steemit writers conducting multiple reviews of each of these posts. We miss a few, but not many.
You are right we all need to work hard to reach those people who have not made rewards like this but deserve to do so.
I'm not going to worry about this case any more, though. It's water under the bridge. We try to learn from it and move on.
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Maybe a post or something indicating how the community can help you catch these things. Some of these accounts (actually many of them) were noticed by a number of people who did research before the REST of the community seemed to catch on. That was often thousands of dollars later.
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oh boy. so true!!!!
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Thank you for reading and commenting! For me it's more like a cautionary tale, if we don't pay attention, someone will take advantage and we will all get hurt in the process. Vigilance, attention and rewarding good content good people good community builders even is what will take us to the Steemit we all dream of.
Curie is a huge step in that direction, as I said.
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Thanks for putting this out there. I for one, don't even read the trending pages, because, with some exceptions, its unappealing and rather frustrating. Seeing a shallow article make thousands, while some are begging for pennies, is enough to demotivative anyone.
One thing I think would help is a NON trending tab. We have a way to see all the articles that are taking off, but no real way to see the ones that haven't. I would prefer to read prefer to leaf through potentially quality posts that missed the rocket ship, rather then scroll past the same old un provoking articles on the trending page that have already made more on one article then 50 quality posts that never got a good chance to be viewed will make combined.
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that's your "home". for me most of my followers never take off but I love to encourage good content from them :)
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What does Steemit want to be? It's the crucial question isn't it. Does it want to be a magazine or social media platform? Because they have very different priorities in how to incentivise for the outcome. Maybe it's time to fork into 2 different beasts? One which rewards quality articles and another which rewards engagement? Steemit and Steemus. Is the problem that Steemit it trying to be too many things? Personally I'd love to something that replaces facebook rather than Medium/Reddit.
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Steemit and Steemus :)) I laughed. thanks.
I am not yet for segregation but for smarter curation towards a better overall experience.
time will tell!
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Firstly, great post, Upvoted.
Secondly, thanks for the heads up on Project Curie. Definitely something I can support.
Also, I've been doing quite a bit of work for @steemcleaners recently and can tell you, the articles that never come up as plagiarised are the ones with a lot of personal touch. I think the personal touch is something the community as a whole should reward and encourage; selfies, videos, unique writing styles, and authors who focus on a narrow range of subjects that interest them.
The other point of course, is the presence of vote-betting, which a lot of people are criticising, and I wrote about here.
Most of us are guilty of voting on "sure shots" that we are confident will become popular. The incentive to do this should ideally be fixed, somehow.
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It is, by competition. Not everyone can vote for a sure shot, and there can't be that many sure shots, so the more people are looking for them the harder they are to find (and profitably upvote). As long as they are easy to find that means the "mining difficulty" is low and mining is profitable. Do more of it.
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Gret point right here: as the trending page turns more varied and unexpected so will the "sure shots' probability go down.
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i completely agree with your sure-shots observation, we have too many sureshots as it is right now. And thank you for voting on my article and the comment. It means a lot to me.
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Hear, hear! I completely agree.
I had this experience with my own posts where a silly cat post that took me 10 minutes and was done on a lark, immediately starting trending and ended up being one of my best earners. Yet there were far more interesting posts about my adventures in China. I'm not claiming to be a great writer, I'm just saying that there was better stuff in my catalog to upvote than that.
Meanwhile one of my ghost stories that brings to light an important social issue in China and a way to help solve it goes mostly ignored.
What it does is make me want to write another cat piece cuz the cute kitten pics will earn more. So far, I've resisted.
I have seen your name in my vote roster, @razvanelulmarin, and I thank you for the votes on some of the better pieces.
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Thank you for having the integrity to not write another cat piece, even though I would upvote it. I'll check out your blog. :)
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haha
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Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you!
You're my hero, @razvanelulmarin.
Can we give this post the earnings from the plagiarized posts, because I would be totally behind that.
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hehe. not possible. but thanks!!
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As soon as I saw her articles I thought they were made by a clickfarm because all their articles sound exactly the same! It's not hard to tell when a real woman is writing because we sound like actual human beings!
I've already mentioned steemit to several of my girl-friends who also write this sort of content so as long as people are actually looking for it, I think there will definitely be better stuff than that msgivings garbage. Hopefully the voting reflects it too!
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:) bring your friend over, comment here when she's on please!
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Is it odd that I feel like Steemit has a strong community of creators that eventually expose these questionable accounts? I agree the process needs to happen faster, but thankfully it does happen. I park in Steemitabuse-classic chat often to see what's being investigated, and have brought issues there.
I have high hopes for Project Curie, and I see the bumps in the road right now. I'm all in on whatever keeps this place generating great creators and collaborators, and whatever dips or shakeouts that have to happen just mean a more eventful ride.
This article speaks to a lot of what's up here, and I'm glad you're on it for us
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thank you and YES, the community is great and comments like yours are a sign of it :)
thanks for giving your time and upvotes. Hopefully, as more and more do that, we'll see improvements.
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Good post. All we can do is continue trying to create good content and help each other promote. Power in numbers!
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:) carry on!
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@razvanelulmarin drink some water...
well pointed out ... !
it seems that upvoting is based on popularity ...
so we see this is a problem ..
the sad part is we can't really control the situation that causes this can we? I guess we could only keep trying to come up writing good reads and hope it could dominate the platform one day.
Or we could OFFER a solution a SYSTEM and pass it to the whales for approval?? don't know how it really works here and hope again it would be heard. It's frustrating and sometimes, it's sad to watch people stop writing posts and come to think of it - their posts have helped starting minnows get to swim in this abyss - like @lurker1 ... and the many others , I wonder if he'd ever post again ...
what's a good post? what's trash - that, too is unclear . I've read posts of some teenagers and found out that there are actually teeners here and yet we have no PG13 sort'a censorship in here. or is it even necessary -
right now as am writing my reply, only 99 plus pips seem to have reached your post
so am sighing again, I'll go drink some water, too and have a great Sunday - cheers to the freaking weekend! will be partying it away ...
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:) 99 pips is not a bad number. I'm actually quote happy with it and the number of comments too.
thank you for that and for the suggestion to hydrate :) always a good idea right?
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@razvanelulmarin, yes and calms the heart ;) ... this too shall pass ... I believe
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I look at her blog and see every article over $1000+ for the most part. It started that high and never stopped. How does that happen?
Don't want to seem overly dramatic, but it's discouraging. Why try.
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that's exactly what I mean and why we should FIGHT for changes. We need good people to be encouraged to stay, not REWARDED but encouraged: like, one day, i'll write like X and get rewards. How can anyone aspire to write like msgivings?!
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In Las Vegas they're big into probabilities and statistics. I don't want to say it statistically impossible to start at the beginning and land $1300 on your very first article, it's just highly improbable.
At least with that article it is.
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Is there any policy to make plagiarism a ban-able offense? If not then that is probably the first step.
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there's no "ban" on steemit :)
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Nor will there ever be and still be able to say it is a censor free zone. They can change and limit the visibility of someone but not ban them I'd think.
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Yes, I agree with you. Steemit need to change, there should be no room for plagiarism. Steemit should be a platform for original, good and creative content. It is this type of content that will propel the growth of Steemit.
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with the amount of brainpower available on Steemit, there shouldn't be and yet...
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It will be a sad state of affairs if plagiarism becomes prevalent in steemit. Its creative and original content that drives steemit.
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I agree with both you and @positivesteem Plagiarism has no place here or anywhere. From what I understand, several of the developers actually have bots that vote based on algorithms they've set in place like headers, photos and videos. That's a problem when bots can vote with power.
As for people who are caught blatantly plagiarizing... I think their accounts should be voided and whatever money they didn't STEAL should go into the @null account and redistributed back into the HEALTH of the Steemit community.
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this would be justice but you can't do that :(
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Too bad. The hookers are going to keep doing what they do because they're getting paid until they're caught. Well, maybe the johns need a bit of shaming too.
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@merej99 funny ,... I had exactly the same thought - no voters no vote ..
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"Subjective proof-of-work" is... subjective. That is at the core of Steemit protocole and value. Deal with it. The protocole never specify what type of content should or should not receive high payouts. We all know the rules from the start and what it means.
"Maybe" the mistake of Dan & Ned was to not find a way to select their happyfew whales based on their interests to please a specific niche of users... or maybe not.
Now, I personally have no problem with excessive rewards per se, or even gossip/girly content earning lots of rewards. How much people earn and with what type of content is not my business. If they found their audience good for them. If whales want to upvote them good for them. Their choice, not mine, not yours.
If one is not happy with that, well there is a simple solution (that will please everyone, and will please steem traders particularly): Buy steems, power up, and be a whale. Period. Invest money in Steemit and shape the quality of the content.
That being said, what annoyed me is not the crappy content, it is that a scammer wins. Nothing more. (He/She could have scam with high quality content, it doesn't change anything to the equation, content quality is not relevant here) And I suspect that there is a whale behind that.
That is so simple to game for a whale. Think about it: create fake account, upvote it, boom, the fake account earn few hundreds, which falls into the radar of other people and other whales. Rinse an repeat. With this process a 'dark' whale doesn't even need to cash out, just create fake account nurture it (and get the SBD). Then people who look after their curation reward will do the rest.
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I'm not getting it. High quality content is the intended outcome.
This is not a scam! It is part of the advertised and intended value of SP that authors can vote up their own content. If an author thinks the material is good and will get a following, we want them to buy SP in order to vote it up and promote it (buying SD to used the "Promoted" feature is another option).
The system mechanism is supposed to (and does) ensure that self-promoted content earns only substandard rewards (and possibly none at all if the content is so bad/abusive as to be downvoted). In order to earn good rewards (i.e. sustain a good return-on-investment on the SP that you bought) it is necessary that others vote for it as well.
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In the context, by high quality content I mean content that could have fit the taste of razvanelulmarin,
It is not what I intended to mean :( I'm not talking about self upvoting in that sense. Let me rephrase. I think that if a malicious whale wants to make easy cash without cashing out his whale account, he can simply create a secondary (minion) account with which he will start posting content. Then with his whale account he will upvote his minion account. It is a kind of "pump and dump scheme" adapted to blogging.
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I understand what you are saying. The system is supposed to handle that. I think it is simplest to say that the system apparently worked in this case. People being vigilant, identifying plagiarism, and downvoting it is part of how it supposed to work.
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Wow after reading this I basically just feel like a sucker. Pushing out original content regularly that 90% of the time has value add for readers. Readers literally telling my in the comments my work is undervalued.
Then I see that BS accounts and plagiarism hit for big chunks of money and then peace out, suck those Steem dollars right out of the system. $$$s I invested with my fiat currency.
Definitely not a good moment for moral....but I steem on because I believe hard work is rewarded or again, maybe I'm just a sucker.
If anyone is interested in content where you will learn something feel free to see any of my scaredy cat investing posts.
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Yeah, it is discouraging seeing clickbait posts that basically say the exact same thing as every buzzfeed article out there get thousands of dollars while actual original content is getting cents. Even if the content is not plagiarized, some of it is just utter bs. Maybe people have forgotten what good writing looks like?
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@mscleverclocks no - it's just happening here, too - following the crowd ;)
at least you could see that
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Thanks @razvanelulmarin
For the Expose
Supported ✅👍🆙♨️♨️♨️
Up 🆙✅❤️
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Value is subjective. No such thing as an objectively good article. The market decides that.
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First I'm hearing about @msgivings but I agree her content was total trash.
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heh, hard not to..
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I think that the best thing you need to wait for a reaction.
What I would also do 1st is click on the UNFOLLOW button.
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unfollow who?
reaction from whom?
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From the author caught doing plagiarism
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This post has been linked to from another place on Steem.
About linkback bot.
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