Thinking Like a Whale

ABANDON SHIP! (OR DON'T)

Changes are coming to Steemit. It’s inevitable. Who knows if they’ll impact the platform negatively or positively. They’re coming in the form of mass exodus by the disenfranchised, future hardforks, changes in UI. They’re coming whether we want them to or not. Some of the changes are impossible to influence. Others, we have a duty to influence. The most pressing matter at hand is discovering the most effective way we can do so.

As an individual, I don’t know where I stand with @transisto after the whole flagging debacle with Michele Gent. It matters in a way, but I don’t need to know the answer. I’m not after his approval or attention, but I do value the insight he gave. He was willing to speak about this issue when most other whales don’t seem to be. I’ve been one of the most vocal Steemit users about the fact that I think capricious flags are damaging to the platform. However, they certainly opened a dialogue about issues with the infrastructure, and it’s a dialogue I’m more than willing to have. I certainly don’t claim any expertise here. But I’m trying to learn, and hope I can use my skills as a writer to help others learn with me.

BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN PERCEPTIONS AND REALITY

The subheader of this section is taken from the title of a post by @lukestokes. I think it sums up the biggest need of the platform right now, at least as far as the user side. It is very important for people to understand that Steemit is still in beta. Equally important is the fact that—like it or not—investors have different goals and priorities than content creators, and unless that detail registers, many users will continually be frustrated by their experience here.

This leaves us with two user types in the Steemit community. Having them co-exist side by side is like locking cats and dogs together in the same room. There will be skirmishes. There will also be also be a communication gap. Dogs and cats don’t speak the same language. The same is apparently true for investors and creators of Steemit content. Let me try to illustrate this, although be warned that my example is extremely oversimplified.

Pretend that a post earns $300 during its first twenty-four hours. But the post has ten views. Content creators are going to look at this and see success. The author is earning, the post is trending, the piece is well written and relevant, and everyone is motivated to write more and engage more. Great situation, right?

An investor is going to look at these same facts and see a train wreck. $300 is gone from the reward pool, allocated to one user who did not generate adequate view activity or influx of new money into the platform to justify this earning. In their opinion, this post has not earned its keep, like a horse that eats a barn full of hay but never has to pull the plow.

Content creators will scream bloody murder about this line of reasoning. The post is well-written! The author has many fans! Steemit is a social media platform and its value is in the blog! The author has worked their ass off to provide quality content! How dare someone who doesn’t even like to read judge this piece of writing to have no value!?

Investors will say they have no opinion about the quality because they never read the post. They looked at the reward versus view ratio and obtained all the information they needed. Content creators respond with outrage, citing hypocrisy for passing judgment on a post that wasn’t even read. The investor flags the post to return some of the payout to the community reward pool, which they know will increase payout for all users in direct ratio with the value returned. Content creators see the flag as an insult and a condemnation of the author’s hard work. Pretty soon everybody is yelling and nobody is hearing what anyone else is saying, because both sides of the issue are shouting in a completely different language.

Cats and dogs. And that room they share? Now it’s a war zone. Fur goes flying, and blood starts dripping down the walls.

SHORTSIGHTED

For me, neither position depicted here would benefit the platform over the long term. They are both extremes and therefore extremely limiting. If Steemit were simply a crypto hub, then nobody should ever have had the bright idea to attach a blog to the platform and invite the public. If Steemit were simply a publishing tool, why is it connected to a form of currency? There simply has to be a sweet spot somewhere in the middle where both types of user can find value in good content.

I can appreciate that Steemit is in beta. This being the case, perceived lack of interest by the developers in marketing to a mainstream public makes a twisted kind of sense. They know the platform isn’t ready for the big time just yet, so they compartmentalize and focus on building the foundation. Unfortunately, while their heads are buried in code, some of the little fires burning on Steemit are destroying thousands of prime social media acres. Those of us out here walking across the hot coals see the potential for a long-term setback because of this. We’re watching as Steemit’s public-facing persona takes quite a hit.

Outside of its tie-in with crypto, Steemit offers the mainstream very little in its current incarnation. It is only attracting people who already have a stake in Bitcoin or some other form of digital currency. Yet apparently the goal of investors is to draw new money to the blockchain and strengthen the value of their investment. Well…how ya gonna do that if you alienate the very people whose money you’d like to see flowing in?

@beanz recently made an interesting post about the ways curation impacts the community. She points out what should obvious: our content creators would make excellent curators, thereby increasing their value to the investing pool. She cites delegation as an option to give content creators a stronger voice. One commenter called it a “force multiplier.” I’m interested to follow the arguments for and against this idea.

POLICING BY DOWNVOTES

Several influential users on Steemit use the downvote option quite liberally. It’s their attempt to control the market. I am not anti-flag. You’ll never hear me argue that this feature should be eliminated from the Steemit toolkit. But seeing the downvote as a weapon available to exert personal agenda is not thinking like a whale. It’s thinking like a terrorist.

If Steemit guerillas need one surefire way to make sure the platform never succeeds as a social media site and remains a small, private community of circle-jerking, these flag patrols are the number one way to accomplish that. Whether or not I understand the “this is business, not personal” explanations for that flag, I also understand that a great number of professionals were watching when it happened, and there isn’t a chance in hell they will bring any of their money, audience, or creative input to this platform ever again. We’ve forever lost several authors, publishers, and photographers because of that incident.

Perhaps developers are counting on the influence of trend to negate these losses once they market Steemit in the mainstream. And to an extent, the numbers will bear them out. However, treating your current batch of content creators as disposable is not the best business strategy. Capricious flag attacks on the user base equate to bombs on civilian communities. There is way too much collateral damage for the world to ignore.

Top tier users adopt a somewhat indifferent attitude toward flagging. I’ve read comments by several whales and developers that are perhaps meant to be reassuring, but come across as dismissive toward community concerns. Let me see if I can couch this in terms of analogy. I think I have a really good one.

To me, a flag smack for nebulous reasons is a lot like alpha rolling a dog. If a dog is attacking me, I will do anything to stop that behavior, including put a dog on its back or its head or in the ground with several feet of dirt on top of it. If I am at immediate risk of being damaged, I will defend myself vigorously. But if I grab a dog who is not attacking me and flip that dog over onto its back just so I can prove my dominance, I have just proven to that dog that I’m an unstable leader who cannot be trusted, with unpredictable behavior and potential to cause real harm. One of two things is going to happen in the mind of that dog. It is either going to become reciprocally aggressive, or something is going to break in its psyche. Is that really what we want to do to our dogs? Is flagging our best content creators really something we want to do to our users?

The video below shows what it looks like when performed by a “professional,” dog trainer employed by the U.S. government.

A humorous but completely accurate depiction of how it seems from a dog’s perspective:

For more information about alpha rolling, read a fantastic article HERE.

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Many may scoff and say flagging is nothing at all like alpha rolling. I disagree. I think both employ the same unpredictable strong-arm techniques to assert dominance. The end result is certainly the same. The person who got rolled is going to become uncharacteristically aggressive, or they are going to shut down, tune out, pack their heart in a box and either leave or become useless on the platform. None of this is what we need. Instead, let’s find a better system, manage user expectations, and reserve flags for the most egregious offenses a user can commit.