The real Steemit issue: Content vs. Money [Updated Version]

Disclaimer: I'm a little bit upset. First off, I'm upset about the quality of this video, as it was a live video on DLive and the crappy internet connection made it into something that I would recommend listening to as a podcast instead of watching. Secondly, for my first experience with DLive, I have very mixed feelings. I was expecting that my live streaming would be converted into a video on DLive (just like Facebook and YouTube). Instead it disappeared. I did get the option to download it, but the link from my steemit post now links to an error/offline message. Didn't see an option how it would convert to an video. I've contacted DLive about it, no answer so far. I've tried manually uploading the video, but then it would be posted a new post, but it would be separate from the original. I'm not much of a tech person. I rather put out content then spend hours learning how to set up the stream through obs and figuring out why the video 'disappeared'. I'm just uploading it on DTube and will edit the original post to refer to this one. I'm powering up this post because I believe it this situation it is the right thing to do.

Without further ado, the video and the text providing the context for the video.

---

The reward pool rape

The topic of reward pool rape has been trending recently. The most prominent discussion around it has been brought up in the case BerniesAnders vs Haejin. Now, to fully grasp the impact of what going on, you have to understand whats going on. Haejin is a self made crypto analyst that posts up to 10 times a day. As there is no limit to how often one should post on this platform, it should be noted that he earns over $200 per post on average, banking thousands of dollars as one of the top earners on this platform. BerniesAnders is a whale that for some is the conscience of the community. When you see Bernies’ reputation, it is easy to see that not everybody is a fan. However, I think he gets punished for being one of the few that actually speaks up when there is a disagreement. This disagreement often surround the perception of quality of a post. If you look a Haejin’s post, you can almost compare them to very well written horoscope predictions. They are quite broad and written in such a way, being wrong is not very easy. Now looking from the outside, they definitely aren’t spam, but not all worth $200. A lot of his supporters have claimed that he has made them money, and until the recent market correction, he was mostly correct in prediction, also because… the market just kept going up, which make it really hard to objective rate the quality of the content as well.

Now, the Bernies vs Haejin case is the most high profile case, but there are way more cases that are considered reward pool rape. I haven’t found a clear article about how the reward pool exactly works and couldn’t find a detailed explanation in the white paper either. However, different articles I’ve read do state that there is a certain amount of rewards available and if accounts take a big portion of the total sum, there is less for everyone else. This can be especially frustrating when Steemians see their hard work result in a drop of up to 50% of the reward when the payout comes around. Also of course, knowing that someone takes home over 5% of the total reward pool.

Creators vs Investors

Now, the is a bigger picture issue that is strongly connect to this issue, which is the notion of creators vs investors. One part of the Steemit community is on Steemit to create content. Another part of the Steemit community is here to invest. This creates a subconscious split within the community. The creators group often wants nothing to do with maximen profit by buying in thousands of dollars worth of Steam Power, using voting bots to get on trending or upping the rewards in general and constant trading between Steem, SBD and other currencies. Unfortunately, that is exactly what the investors are on Steemit for. They use the website to make money first and create content based on making money.

I’ve seen a lot of smaller creators get completely frustrated about crappy postings getting much more traffic and rewards than high quality posts that they are producing. Aside from the creators issue (which I will address next), they can’t comprehend how poor content can be rewarded so heavily. This of course is managed by the investors, who don’t mind paying several bots to up vote their content and invest in Steem Power to in some cases, even up vote themselves. Now here comes the tricky part. It is hard to ‘punish’ people who actually put their own money in a platform, like those who invest and buy STEEM to accumulate Steem Power. Also, bots, especially the most popular one often have a negative ROI and return less reward then originally invested. Especially when even more people use the platform. On the other side, uncontrolled investing in Steem Power and bots leads to further saturation of the market resulting in more issues with the reward pool.

The creators issue

The is another issue which might be more of a problem for the creators as well. With Steemit attracting creators to make money on their platform, there is one thing seriously lacking… the consumers. Of course, as a creator you consume as well, but when we are all in creator mode, we focus on creating first and consuming second, resulting into valuable content which gets way too little exposure. Of course, like many I post my blogs on other channels for more exposure, but for any consumer that has little knowledge of Steemit and the blockchain, Steemit is not exactly a Social Media platform with a low threshold to join.

This makes it important to be seen. Even for Steemians that don’t believe in paying for up votes, to get exposure, you need at least a bit of knowledge about platforms and tools like discord, which might not be difficult, but creates another threshold that shouldn’t be ignored. As the younger generation in general has an entrepreneurial mindset and focuses on personal branding, distribution of content and traffic towards their content, some people just want to put out quality texts and pictures. Of course, like always, you have to listen to your audience, this case an audience that creates as well, which bring content creation to a whole other level.

---

▶️ DTube
▶️ IPFS