Just one month ago, Steemit was different. There was an air of excitement for the fork and economic changes it brought, the price had turned and was inching upwards. Just one month ago user engagement was incredibly high with nearly every posting having received comments and interaction.
What happened since?
A month ago there was a movement going around with the whales to reward comments, I’m sure many of you received comment rewards, but this movement dwindled until it is now unrecognizable. The comment rewards dropped off, and with it, the comments themselves have disappeared.
A few weeks ago, the view icon appeared. Unfortunately it seems to be one of those double edged sword situations; it is something basic that is a must have for a blogging site, but it also shows that a very few users actually read content and that most votes are bot driven.
The pump stopped and we are now in a state of decline.
All of these mentioned concepts are a contributing factor to the current stalemate or decreases in users/ postings / engagement / price.
Dramatic representation.
Think Tank
I don’t believe this is anywhere close from over for Steemit or the price of Steem. With busy.org just over the horizon, and the new steem economy, there is definitely a potential for this place to explode and become the new social spot of the 21century. But in order for this place to reach its potential, new strategies must be implemented to promote a more welcoming site.
Personally, I think the major contributing factor to active user retention on any social media platform is the engagement within the community. Steemit has the added benefit of being able to make money on a posting, but I feel the engagement trumps the money; people want to feel “worth it” and sometimes you can’t place a dollar figure on that.
When a new user or even a current user makes a post and it only gets a handful of views and maybe 1 comment, whether or not it receives a payout, this can become disappointing. To the outsider, this can look rigged or unfair. Honestly, I think it is somewhat embarrassing to see a post getting rewarded with little views or interaction. This needs to be addressed.
Revive Comment Rewards
I thought this idea was fantastic and I believe it should be continued where it left off or better yet, expanded.
Rewarding comments provides a solution to multiple issues - It will increase the post views and increase community engagement. At bare minimum, it will at least provide the outward appearance that people actually read the postings and are interested enough to make a comment.
Users will have incentives to open a post and make a comment. Sure, some won’t read the posting and just make generic comments but it will still open up the door for more activity. On a second note, I also believe that once a post has one comment, others feel more apt to make their own comment. For some reason it seems that users don’t want to be the first to comment.
Basic Income
This is just a thought that I will quickly skim through. What if every post was rewarded a minimum value? I’m not saying a large amount, but maybe 10cents?
Value is subjective.
Yes it sure is, but not when the voters providing rewards don’t even read the content. You can’t even consider the notion of subjective when a posting has a reward but only has 5views, the only thing that means is some random bot whale came along.
So we know the random bot whale comes and goes, making random posts subjectively better than others… Solution? Basic income
If the random bot whale would set the vote to 1% and upvote every listing, this could work. Or if multiple whales banded together and alternated their voting. This effect would essentially be the same as it is today where the bot whale is randomly voting, but instead of large payouts by a few selected individuals, everyone would benefit.
This would attract users by just knowing that your posting has a floor. Although this could open the door to abuse, maybe the 4 posts per 24hr rule could be more strictly enforced.
This idea of basic income could be started as an experiment and definitely wouldn’t have to last forever. In fact it wouldn’t even be feasible if the user base and content creation were large. Currently though, our user base is small and with large curation groups, this could be achieved with minimal effort and I believe the outcome would surpass expectations.
These are just my thoughts I have had about Steemit lately. I would like to see user base grow into a sustainable and profitable social networking site. I look forward to the future with Steem and enjoy being part of the ride. Please provide any thoughts or ideas you might have for the success of Steemit in a comment.
Thank you for viewing / reading
Please consider following me @generation.easy
bots are the problem....and flags.
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Well i agree, i also dont see the bots going away anytime soon. So, the next step would be to utilize them in a more contructive manner.
I have never used a flag, doesnt seem to have much of a purpose. So i cant argue argue with that
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There's actually no such thing as a flag. Its actually a downvote, and its really the only way to do what youre trying to do.
What you don't get is that the rewards pool is fixed. Non paying posts that have a bunch of votes aren't non paying because there aren't enough votes, theyre non paying because the huge amount of votes behind the top paying, whale supported posts devalue votes. And because the votes are calculated quadratically, the support they get devalues other votes disporportionately. Thats why your vote adds so much money to a top trending post, but almost nothing to a new post.
So someone like old timer, who has a vote worth 1 or 2 cents on a post like this, his vote is actually worth far more on a top paying post. If he went to trending and downvoted the top 10 trending posts, he would probably distribute 50 or 60 bucks to the rest of the posts in contention for the day.
Of course this is never going to happen, because overpaid authors here who get paid mainly for poor quality posts created a myth that there are rules about when you're allowed to downvote.... and they enforced that myth by threatening reprisals to anyone who voted in a way that they don't agree with.
TO put it another way, the money to give everyone 20 cents per post (or whatever) has to come from somewhere. Specifically, it has to come from other, higher paid posts' payouts.
Because of quadratic weighting, just voting for underpaid posts won't have a ton of effect. It would if you just did it for one, but it won't if you do it for all of them (because it will increase the total number of votes cast)
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very well said!
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Damn, that brought some light to the situation. So basic income wouldnt even be possible, unless say, steemsports went away?
And if what you say is true, minnow votes would be better spent downvoting posts, which would increase value for others... that is extreemly backward
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Very complicated for average Joe like me. And thanks for good explanation.
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do you detect a trend?
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No, it couldnt. In fact, it would make the problem worse. Youre misunderstanding how the rewards pool is allocated. At best, this would be a wipe... but because of the quadratic vote weighting, it might even hurt the least paid posts.
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I am a right-brained individual through and through, fortunately I have a spouse who balances the scales--why do I tell you this? Because between your posts of many months ago-which I was spurred to read by your comments in this post-and my husband's ability to further dumb them down for me, I am finally getting a grasp on the technical side of steemit.
It's fortunate that I saw you here since there is no way to comment on your old posts (something I believe should be rectified at some point) and I wanted to thank you. And also tell you, you should not be depriving the community of your knowledge-change a few words and re-post your gold :)
You could probably even make a post entitled "Who wants to get a better handle on...(pick a topic, steem, steempower, vests, quadratic vote weighting..etc.) with one line in the body i.e. If you want a better comprehension of this topic, comment down below, this is a discussion post" Then the next day you could screen shot the comment section of that post and make that your new post. I think you'd make bank (and tell me all about what a brilliant idea I had ;) And help everyone out in the process.
Even if you don't do this, thanks for what you have done, truly.
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why thankyou. I appriciate the kind words. I actually used to post quite a bit, but kind of lost interest in part because of my schedule at work and in part because of concerns about the direction of the platform. that said, at some point maybe ill start posting again about the internals of the system.
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Well this was extremely informative! Thank you @generation.easy and @sigmajin for explaining in a comprehensive way. I've only been here for a few weeks, I actually came at the tail end of more user-engagement, so I feel like I had a front row seat to the peak and fall. I was wondering how the monetary system worked here, but I am definitely more concerned with the sudden lack of energy, the lack of comments etc. I will be following the two of you now and if there's anyone else you can recommend for insight and knowledge about this community I'd appreciate it :)
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Hey, welcome to steemit. Love the user name!
And perfect comment to show how new users see the user engagement fall off.
The real peak came in august, youll probably never see a post valued at 10k again.
Thanks for commenting, a good place to go for info is rocket chat or search for a post.
My advice, stick around for the long run. Lots is coming our way in 2017
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Oh I imagine it wasn't the all-time peak, I was just referring to what was said about the past month :) I have every intention of sticking around, I enjoy being here, it's an innovative place. I do search for posts, though it seems the questions I ask keep coming up in posts from many months ago, so now I've just been keeping my eyes open for current ones. Thanks for the tip about rocket chat!
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on my first read-through, I was about to argue against a post minimum (making the assumption that enough whales would indeed support the project), but maybe it does make some sense.
True enough, but if the SBI (Steemit Basic Income) was based upon a combination of user rep and number of posts, it could cut down on new user abuse. This approach would not draw new users (unless they understood the long term potential), but it would retain current users.
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A sliding scale based on rep sounds reasonable, just that it seems higher rep users already have the auto votes to provide that standard payout.
Im also thinking basic income in the range of 10-20 cents. Nothing of significance should come without effort... anything higher would promote spam.
There would have to be some balance to decrease the potential for abuse.
Thanks for the comment
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You're right. 22 minutes no comments yet. I feel frustration even with my upvotes. I try to support people with voting on posts and comments. But when I see giving only 1 or 2 cents I see no point in doing that. And also have a same feeling with my curation rewards. It's not good.
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Hey 1-2cents is better than nothing.
I would think new users would be pumped up over anything. Your doing more good for the site than you want to believe.
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I really hope you're right on this one.
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That would open the gates to spammers... maybe with added restrictions like minimum views and min comments etc. that would work.... hmm
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Well, @sigmajin clearified that the reward pool isnt designed for this, so the whole basic income wouldnt be realistic and would actually hurt the values of all postings significantly...
But atleast we are discussing ideas, plenty of time to grow steemit!
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Good post and totally agree. This month my posts received very little comments. Don't know whether people just up-vote when in the feed box and don't even bother reading. We need to change something and people need to read the post then vote and then comment
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