Visited one of my Old Blogs Today, and had a Realization About Steemit — Some Perspective

in #blog6 years ago

I did something unusual today. 

I had been thinking about how almost all my social content these days is created here on Steemit, so I decided to visit one of my other old blogs-- and did the almost unthinkable: I wrote a blog post somewhere else!

Sunset
Northern winter sunset

It was a bit of an experiment, in a sense, a sort of private "testing the waters" of the allegations (or "complaints?") I often bump into where fellow Steemians lament that their posts don't get read, and sometimes they end up with three times more "votes" than actual "page reads."

Now, before I go any further, allow me to add a frame of reference here: Steemit is not "my first rodeo;" I've been blogging for 20 years. My blogs are supported by a network social sites and notification systems built up over almost as much time.

People Seem Less Inclined to "Trust" Sites They are not Familiar With

Many of us are probably guilty of thinking of Steemit as "The Center of the Universe" but we're still pretty small fry.

blossoms
Cherry blossoms

Now granted, the blog I made a post to is "old and established," but I haven't been very active with it in the past year. And yet? Within two hours of posting, it had already been viewed 470 times. My guess is that by this time tomorrow, it will have been viewed 2,000+ times.

For comparison, I have fairly few posts here on Steemit that get viewed even 100 times. 

The noteworthy thing is that posting about a Blogger post to Facebook and twitter — to the SAME group of people — gets far more reads than posting a Steemit post to the same outlets. From which I can only surmise that there must be a lower "trust factor" when it comes to content posted on web sites people are not familiar with. 

Of course, that's just guessing.

Either way, though, it seems like we have LONG way to go, yet! Steemit is not a "household name," except in specialty circles.

Who Looks at Our Posts?

The Steemit user interface is incredibly simplistic compared to most blog host sites.

One of the things we really don't have here is Visitor Logs. Granted, visitor logs are probably only used by about the 2% of bloggers occupying the top of the blogosphere. But it's cool to know where your readers come from. 

GrapeHyacinths
Grape Hyacinths

Yes, of course we can use a blockchain explorer to see who voted and commented on our posts, but that doesn't include people who simply read, and who found our posts from Google, Bing or somewhere else.

"Who cares? I just care about upvotes and followers!"

::: Sigh :::

That does seem to be the pervasive and dominant attitude around here. It's a bit sad, though.

The reason it's sad is that being 100% bogged down in "economics" rather than content is precisely the hurdle that will likely stand between Steemit and large scale adoption by a more "general" audience. 

Since my very first post comment here, I have been trying to get people to understand the subtle — but very important — difference between approaching this community from a "creating content and getting rewarded" perspective rather than a "posting TO get rewarded" perspective.

They may sound like the same thing, but they are not.

Azalea
Azalea in bloom

In one, the content "leads," in the other the rewards "lead."

In case it's still not clear, let me offer an "outside life" analogy as an illustration. Here's a generally true statement:

"Doctors make a lot of money."

Most people will probably nod and recognize the truth in that.

Now, we can approach this "fact" from two angles:

EITHER we can really want to be a doctor and excel at healing people, as a RESULT of which we make a lot of money...

OR we can become a doctor in order TO make a lot of money... but not really care about healing people. Sure, we know how to practice medicine, but it's secondary to becoming RICH!

If something is wrong with you, which doctor would you rather see?

Now, let's bring it back to Steemit. What do you think will create a more interesting community: Focusing on the content, or focusing on the money?

The Steemit Interface is Feature Poor

So anyway, I created my post on my other blog. 

In doing so I have to admit that in its current format, the Steemit user interface is sadly lacking in the sorts of features demanded by a mainstream social media audience. 

Where are my photo albums?

Yellow
Some incredibly bright yellow shrub getting ready to bloom

Where's my ability to sort my followers into groups?

Where are my keyword analysis tools? 

Where is my social media promotional integration? 

Where are my traffic stats analysis tools?

Now I also recognize that there will be some voices that will speak up and say "Yeah, but you can use this and that app for that!"

Which brings us to my next observation: Steemit is very "developer friendly" but it's really not "content creator friendly.

That's not a problem in and of itself; it's merely "a state of affairs." But it DOES work as a limiter on the potential reach of Steemit. 

The average social media/social content user doesn't WANT to use half a dozen "helper apps" to make social media site do something. They want everything in one place, drag and drop, plug and play, easy to use and intuitive, off you go!

We don't have that here. 

If we want a snowball in hell's chance of getting even... let's say... ten million users, we need some serious upgrading!

Here's Where Steemit Kills Everywhere Else!

Don't get me wrong, I still think Steemit is awesome, and I'm not deserting or anything. I'm just bringing some "outside perspective" home.

Where Steemit totally dominates is in the categories of "community" and "engagement."

Mountains
It may be spring, but the snow is not far away!

Even in the relatively short time it has taken me to write this post, my "other" blog post has moved from 470 to 655 page views. But guess what?

So far, all those people have managed to leave me only one solitary comment-- on a post that is no less engaging to its target audience than anything I post here... which routinely gets 20-50+ comments, per post!

And that's where we stand head and shoulders above anything else out there!

Now, I'm not going to bring "rewards" into the picture, because — quite frankly — I think rewards are a little "derailed" at the moment. That is, there's a substantial "disconnect" between content and the rewards content earns. I'd love to think that my 3,800 "followers" would think these 1,200-odd words interesting enough to vote into into the "hot" or "trending" feeds, but that's very unlikely... since whether or not this post is "good" or "interesting" has very little to do with whether it earns Steemit rewards.

My point here is mostly that we do have a lot of work to do before ANYone's dreams of "Steemit as a mass-market commodity" have any chance of coming true.

Well, that's about it for random observations at the moment; I now return to my usual "programming."

What about YOU? Do you keep any other blogs, aside from Steemit? If you DO, have those other venues "suffered" since you started here? Do you think we are missing some basic features before we can hope to "go mainstream" here? Do you maintain other social media accounts (Facebook, twitter, Instagram, etc), and do you use them to support your blogging? What would you MOST like to see as a new feature on Steemit? Leave a comment-- share your experiences-- be part of the conversation!

Animated banner created by @zord189

(As usual, all text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is original content, created expressly for Steemit)
Created at 180329 22:29 PDT

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Yeah, this is pretty much spot on. I have been blogging for a while and certainly got way more page views on my other blogs. I have let them go completely fallow, even though everything you say about Steemit's limitations are of course totally true. There is a part of me that thinks Steemit, Inc is intentionally keeping steemit.com crappy precisely to encourage developers of 3rd party apps and web front ends - if anyone with any kind of programming/developing knowledge can think to themselves "I can do better", that is a powerful incentive to do it. I don't really believe this, deep down, but you have to admit there is very little evidence to the contrary to argue against this. The website is terrible and lacking rudimentary functionality that could be added by a few developers working part time for a few weeks. Content discovery is the biggest one for me. I don't care so much that I have to use HTML to format my blog posts, I use HTML to format my blog posts even on blogger. But that I can't filter posts with any kind of advanced search tools, or save favorite users to receive notifications when they post, is terrible. At this point I think it is more likely that a 3rd party app or website is going to be the one who provides a workable version of Steem, I have very little faith that steemit.com is going to be it.

Nice to see you @carlgnash; thanks for the pretty accurate summary.

Reading between the lines of a LOT of posts, I seem more and more of a subtext emerge that Steemit is awesome for developers, not so much for content creators. Steemit is a bit like someone building a bigger and bigger apartment building with more and more rooms, adding more and more rec room features, but not actually doing anything to see whether the teneants are happy... let alone GETTING tenants. "But it's awesome if you're in the construction business!"

I don't think STINC much cares about this as a platform for content. They have visions of sugarplums... ehrmm... SMT dollar signs dancing in their eyes and everything else has become pretty secondary; tertiary, even.

As a fellow curator and content "consumer" I agree that this place totally ROTS. I can only keep up with my favorite people because I have my own set of bookmark folders (that have NOTHING to do with Steemit) to check on them-- manually. At the very LEAST, I wish we had the ability to sort followers into "groups" like you can on Facebook and Twitter. The content itself? "Discovering" content is always an adventure... mostly, I find it via "intelligent" comments on the posts of people I already read. Alas, that doesn't give newcomers much of a chance... although I occasionally force myself to refresh the #introduceyourself feed for an hour or two.

Interesting you say that RE finding people through comments - that has become one of my primary curation strategies (I am a top curator for @curie). Finding clusters of "good people" amidst the sea of spam and just plain old crap posting. As soon as I see an intelligent commenter I check out their blog and more importantly look at their feed - real people tend to follow real people who resteem good posts. But it takes a lot of work. I also use SQL query (and paid subscription to @arcange's SteemSQL database) to curate and keep up with favorite posters and that is very efficient, but costs me 10 SBD a month.

BTW if you haven't already, check out @thefreshfive . It is a dailycuration effort focused on the #introduceyourself tag, bringing you 5 recently introduced Steemians daily. I know the folks behind this effort and they are awesome, and I support it with upvotes for the daily posting and upvotes for the featured newcomers with my @r-bot curation account. It is an easy way to bring a steady stream of newcomers into your awareness without any effort :) LOL Much love - Carl

My wordpress blog has had literally millions of views - BUT - it's never earned me a cent...

http://www.frot.co.nz/design/blog/

I guess that IS one of the cool things about Steemit-- we get a few dimes here and there. Even though several of my blogs are "monetized," even the busiest one (about 40K views a month) only ends up getting me about $300-400 a year from a combination of Google Adsense and Amazon links. When I was really working on blogging, that meant I was making a stellar 50c an hour, woo-hoo!

I like your concept, though-- interesting blog.

In my view the most obvious function steemit needs to provide is to allow users full control of how posts and replies are ordered. 100% stake weighted order is grossly incorrect and embarrassing.

With a little innovation steemit can give users full control of the content they are exposed to and in what order. this is something that centralized organizations have never and will never do.

For many, money leads as the extrinsic motivator, with content as as secondary focus, dropping intrinsic motivation under extrinsic. I've talked about similar things as you in the past. We see eye to eye on much.

The features are lacking indeed. A simple tab for seeing new comments was suggested over a year ago, it's not there even though it's simply to add... Steemit inc. doesn't seem to really care about doing things that will improve user retention... like functions for increasing interaction. Messaging system was also suggested... but nope... don't add that to the site even if it can't be on the blockchain... Making a one-stop-market for all functionality is needed for onboarding mainstream users, but that isn't a focus at all at all at all...

So many people here don't care about content. For them it's all about their stake and doing short-sighted things that they think will increase their stake. Money leads. So many times I've read 'popular' people talk about how content and quality doesn't matter. They really don't get it at all. Money has blinded them.

Can we just appreciate how objective this piece is? Thanks for sharing your experience with us ( and using beautiful photos) while at it. I love Steemit alot but I still find myself making content for other media. I love Steemit for the engagement is genuine and alot but still, there are some people that you may want to target who are elsewhere. I think it is all about finding a balance.

I admit that I have mostly kept some of my other social connects "alive" with an eye towards using them as a "recruiting platform" for Steemit. At least, that was my intention a year ago. I'm not so sure, anymore... Steemit is a very cool venue, but things are very slow in developing into something that would have more mass market appeal, and I'm not going to stake my reputation on something that's still a bit dodgy.

I am also kinda going through the same. Like I need to be sure first before going 100% in. I think in a few months/ one year one would be in a position to make that decision. And it was wise to not abandon everything else.

Thanks for this piece.
I once started a blog last year https://gcnstories.blogspot.com where i was putting up inspirational writeups and story episodes. But at a point i got tired of the blog because I applied for Google AdSense severally with my posts being original but my application was always being turned down for reasons they keep repeating over and over.
I left blogging because i was in dare need of source of income to handle some needs as a student. Then i learnt about bitcoin trading, it was in the course of learning trading that i met @lordidama1 who introduced me to the steem platform and it has being interesting since January I joined the platform.
The rewards for the mean time but I still enjoy writing and visiting other people's blog to read and keep myself busy and also to stay out of boredom since i don't have a girlfriend and am not married

I really love photo "Northern Winter sunset"

Being new to social media I have no experience trying to blog for an audience. The path I am trying to take is to post what is real for me. With more experience I hope to do that in a way that viewers find interesting enough to come back. LOL, if I get a look in the first place. But that will come with time.
It is impressive the amount of feed back you get from your posts.

I appreciate your perspective. This is my first attempt at blogging.
Thanks for sharing your experiences.

I so agree with you. The feature I miss most is "notifications." It's what set Facebook apart from MySpace years ago. Who wants to have to check every tab of their page to see if anything happened?

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