The Creators Guide to Steem
When I was taking my daily stroll through Steem today I noticed a video resteemed by @theycallmedan from @davidpakman. I was excited to see David posting on Steem one because I follow him on youtube and enjoy his content, but also, David has a huge following of over 700k on Youtube.
He like a lot of the other creators I like have been dealing with being heavily demonetized as well as being suppressed by the google algorithm pushing their suggested video sections more towards corporate media.
I quickly followed David, but when I went to his page I was surprised to see he's been posting on Steem several times a day, for as long back as I scrolled. He was getting very little engagement or support which wasn't surprising to me when I investigated. I wanted to make a post to explain to creators how Steem works and the best way they can make Steem work for them as well as the rest of the community (and the world).
Steem is decentralized and people powered
Steemit, 3speak, etc. These are companies using the Steem blockchain. They aren't the ones distributing rewards to you though, not technically. The creators of the platform may upvote your posts as is the case with 3Speak, but technically it's users accounts. The users are the ones "paying" you.
The users are the owners of the platform as well, as anyone that can upvote your post and have it be worth anything is a stakeholder in the platform, ie they have locked up Steem that gives them the ability to distribute the inflation of Steem relative to the amount they have locked up.
The reason for pointing this out is to highlight that it is more important, I'd argue, than on any other platform, to engage the community on Steem. In most cases where I've seen a large following having creator start posting on Steem, they drop off their content without engaging the community at all. This isn't all that valuable to the Steem community and therefore people tend to not reward it.
Steemians are here consuming content but we're all also investors in Steem
Piggybacking off my last point on value for Steem. One day I hope Steem is big enough and has so many users that this won't matter, that people will just consume content and vote on what they like. That's not where we're at right now though. People are investing with their votes. It may always be this way here. It's new tech so things are being figured out as we go. This is the main point
- People are more likely to vote on content that they feel adds value to Steem.
You may be thinking, "My content is the thing that brings value." But it's actually your following. That might sound shitty, but that's the reality. The reason Youtube pays you anything is because of the eyeballs you draw to their site that then consume ads. We also need eyeballs to grow, then it's up to individual applications built on the Steem blockchain to figure out how to generate revenue from that, but the key thing here is we are happy to help/support you, if you are willing to help us.
I don't mean we expect you to shill Steem, but little things like at the end of your videos when you go through the list of platforms for people to follow you on, include Steem, maybe say a few words to let people know we exist.
Your best bet in leveraging Steem to add to your support is to get your users following you on Steem. If someone like David had half of the people following him create Steem accounts and either buy or earn enough Steem to have a .01 cent upvote, that would be $3500 per post.
It's really not about pumping our bags. This is how we can realistically create a revolution. We need people to actually understand Steem and use it properly to make a viable alternative to the tech monopolies.
If all the creators keep suckling at the tit of big tech, while treating Steem like a bastard step child, the results won't change.
Don't get me wrong, I get it. The people are on Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Steem is tiny, but the creators that have large followings are the ones with the most power to start to slowly change things for the better by
First, learning what Steem is and how it works and what it can do for them and their community and
Second, spreading that knowledge, as you are the ones with a platform and the ability to reach the masses.
Help us help you.
How?
- Spread the word to other creators to participate on Steem.
- Encourage your followers to support you on Steem.
- Make some Steem specific content, that would do the first two by default.
- Learn how Steem works. This is no small task. Steem is complicated. It's just the way it is right now, but it's also incredibly powerful. Learn how to make it work for you.
- Educate others. Steem has the power to completely revolutionize the way media works on the internet. No one has the power to censor you. You can create your own community, your own token, your own economy. The world needs to know what we're sitting on here.
- Engage the community. Participate in the conversations you start here. Upvote people's comments when they engage with your posts. This is something extremely powerful that you can do only on Steem to help grow your community here, don't waste that feature.
If any of my fellow Steemians see a creator, new or old following the pattern I laid out above, point them to this post.
See you all in the next one.
Really glad to see this put down in words. It's something that disappoints me when I see it happening. We want to see these people coming across, but no-one realises they've come across because they don't say anything. Then when you comment on their work they don't respond and you can feel a bit demoralised. On YouTube it doesn't really matter if you don't respond to people, they've still watched and absorbed your material, which is what earns you. Here, as a consumer, I don't feel like spending my upvote on someone who's unresponsive. I prefer a bit more customer service.
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Exactly, once you've already experienced the next generation of social media, you don't want the old version anymore.
You reveal the fundamental difference between the societies expressed by Big Tech and Steem social media. Steem was created to enable engagement and discourse, however undermined by the crass profiteering of the ninjaminers, while the advertising model expressed by Big Tech just attracts followers to monetize.
Steem is able to potentiate individual expression, while being coopted by whales to monetize their stakes, and Big Tech is intended to monetize content, while being infested with individuals seeking to express themselves. It is the communities, such as you are intrinsic to in the farming, decentralized production, and freedom of expression aspects of society you are interested in, that may separate the chaff from the wheat and enable Steem to potentiate social media platforms no longer coopted by stake weighting and the corrupt influence of mere money.
Our values will be more and more reflected by the communites we support, because more and more communities are arising to reflect those values. You and I don't value money above all else, and in some of those communities, those that do will not be welcome. We'll soon see if such communities are even possible using Steem soon, as HF21 is designed to maximize stake weighting far more than it is presently on Steem social media.
Let's hope the communities that reflect our more substantial values aren prevented from prospering by such corruption by mere financial considerations.
Yes, I'm seeing a lot of strength rising in the communities which could potentially sway the balance. It's interesting that it's these types, who while they aren't mainstream, they are potentially building in the way the platform was intended.
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Every time I read these posts I’m not sure if the people who need to be reading these posts even see them 😔
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I know, but at least it's here. Hopefully someone can point them to it.
I know, but at least
It's here. Hopefully someone
Can point them to it.
- midlet
I'm a bot. I detect haiku.
Steem might still be small definitely now but I believe as time goes on, we will expand all across the world. Soon.
Nice post
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People like David with such influence are those we need on steemit more
Why? His audience didn't follow him here, and he didn't significantly raise the number of users here when he began posting here. The mechanics of Steem engagement didn't profit him, and his business model and audience didn't profit Steem.
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You have some misconceptions about Steem. David Pakman and others that produce content on Youtool, Fakebook, and the Big Tech platforms are attracting the eyes of the masses in order to profit from it. The means used to do that isn't engaging and discussing with thousands or millions of people, because that's impossible for one person to do. It's to produce some content that thousands or millions of people will see, and profit from advertising as a result of attracting all those eyeballs.
This method of producing content is different than engaging with followers and discussing matters personally. People that are primarily concerned with economic rewards therefore seek big sheep followings, and tend not to engage with individuals one on one, as Steem potentiates. Content on Big Tech platforms is fundamentally different than content designed to encourage engagement on Steem. It doesn't translate.
While you're correct about holding stake and how that stake provides rewards, you may not grasp that all the Steem that is in existence was mined before Steem social media was created, and most of that stake is still in the wallets of those that mined it. It is those ninjaminers, the whales, that reward or ignore creators on Steem, because they have the stake. They use their stake today, and will increase their ability to after HF21, to extract ~90% of the rewards from the pool. Actual creators are the bastard stepchildren, and massive stakeholders are heirs apparent.
Pakman came here, didn't make much, and doesn't bother with all the work of engagement, because that's not his business model. Liberals tend to collectivize because that's what they believe in, and individualization poorly fits that world view, while dovetailing nicely with Big Tech, because they're liberals too.
Lastly, I do just vote on what I like, and post what I believe. Money is not the most valuable aspect of society, and Steem bases it's votes and flags only on money. This is because the whales designed it that way from the get go, because they cared about money more than the more valuable aspects of society. I don't. Many people don't, and almost all of the people that came to Steem social media have left, because their values weren't reflected by the focus on money.
Communities may change that, if the rampant stake weighting of Steem doesn't prevent their tokens from expressing the values of those communities. HF21 is going to exacerbate all the problems of stake weighting within a week, and we'll see how that effects the communities that have arisen using SE tokens and Palnet already.
We'll soon see if the financial stake weighting on Steem disables those communities from creating more valuable societies than mere economies reflect, or if they can thrive and prosper.
In the video referenced above, David is engaging with his audience by taking calls. You're right that one person can't reply to 10k comments as is present on a creator of Davids scale on YT, but that's not the only way to engage an audience. Most youtube creators find some way, it's a totally normal thing. The problem is they don't take Steem seriously so they just dump their content here without making an actual effort.
Well this is obviously not true, but I'm going to assume you mean a large portion of the stake is in the hands of whales. That's definitely true, and it's also true that most of them have not been good stewards of that stake, but you're ignoring the fact that there are thousands of other people here all with different sized stakes. Their influence is not nothing. You don't need whale votes to be successful, and the more regular people we could sign up and educate about Steem, the more decentralization becomes a tangible reality.
He's literally doing it in the video he posted here. He's just doing it for his YT audience not a Steem audience, which btw is understandable. His YT audience is over 700k people and all of active Steem, if I'm being generous is maybe 15k people, but if he(David) wants a REAL solution, then he has to help us build. He has the ability to drive a huge amount of traffic here. If he did ONE video, that was totally focused on Steem, where he did a quick rundown of what Steem is and told people, follow me on Steem, we could easily get thousands of new signups in a day.
I appreciate your substantive reply. Pakman appeared on some MSP radio interviews, and did attempt to engage on Steem, but gave up. He hasn't not tried it.
No. It is literally true that the whales hold the vast majority of stake. Every bit of Steem in existence was mined, and all of it that has been sold to others or created via inflation is a small percentage of it. I suggest doing some research on the matter, starting from the initial ninjamine that was very offensive to many in the crypto community. Steemd will reveal who has mined stake, and further exploration of who holds stake, such as statistics from @arcange (image below from his post today) will reveal that the vast majority of stake is concentrated in only a few dozen hands. Some of those ninjaminers have thousands of accounts. It's possible that the majority of accounts are owned by whales, in fact.
We have, in the past, got thousands of signups per day. Almost 100% of those new accounts were abandoned due to the rampant profiteering stake weighting enabled the whales to undertake, and the flagging of those that protest such into complete invisibility. Steemit itself is now completely censoring many accounts (almost all held by one person, @fulltimegeek), and although that doesn't prevent information posted by those accounts from remaining on the blockchain, almost no one can see it because Steemit runs the nodes and publishes the APIs many frontends such as Steempeak use, and very few people use frontends or apps that do show such content. Github reveals this fact with the irredeemable's list. You can ascertain these facts for yourself.
This graph shows the distribution of Steem Power cumulated per account level.
The grey portion of each column indicates unused Steem Power by inactive accounts (see above for the definition of inactive).
You can see that whales directly hold most of the Steem today, and once you realize that most of them have many accounts, or 'socks'/bots, most of the dolphins and orcas are also accounts held by the same people that hold the whale accounts. The vast majority of Steem is held by those individuals, through their multiple accounts.
HF21 is going to more than halve author rewards within the week. IMHO, this is a very poor time to be onboarding masses, who will be extremely prone to abandoning Steem in short order as HF21 makes all the reasons user retention is awful far worse.
In a couple weeks the falling price, market cap, and decline in users will prove I am right, or prove I am wrong by not. We'll see if Steem is ready for mass onboarding or not. I'll be very happy if I'm wrong, as I want Steem to fulfill it's potential to change the world. I don't think it will until profiteering based on stake weighting is abandoned, and capital gains becomes the focus of ROI by investors.
We'll see.