RE: Expectations Drive Your Experience - Real Talk
Although I first joined in October of 2016 I didn't really began to post with any frequency until March of the next year. I was mostly posting fiction stories and I realized that occasionally I actually would get a bunch of whale votes.
I didn't know what that meant back then but it gave me incentive to post several times everyday. I've been posting about three times per day since March of 2017. Now I have my own audience but I didn't used to.
I'm surprised today to see the minnows struggling so hard against the upstream because I'm not seeing the same whales give the assistance that they used to give.
I posted three times per day for the first few months between March and July. I got voted up by whales probably three times per week. Most of the people that were in my writing circle were also getting voted up by the same whales. I'm not going to call anyone out by name but people that were around during that era should remember who they were.
It strikes me as much more difficult now. Those whales aren't voting anymore. They're doing all kinds of different things. I still see some of them post although most of them have either left or just aren't upvoting anymore. I wish we could get those whales back but I don't really know what went wrong outside of the fact that we're now doing linear rewards.
When I started in Aug 2016 it was normal to get 0 payout on many posts. Sometimes with 20 or more votes. (It seems we had more activity then)
However, like what you said, I would occasionally get a whale vote. I remember specifically receiving some from BlockTrades, a few from the Curie project and twice from Bernie when the account was huge, and I know there were likely a few others.
I agree, the difficulty level is different now. For a while I gave up and I just posted some not very good content just to put something out.
I think everyone figured out that whether you are giving a vote or money, you are parting with an asset when you vote for others. This is the same problem many sites that have tried to reward content have run into.
It's a challenge, we will see how it turns out.
Well I think as long as people keep being selfish with their assets then we are not going to see that upward momentum happen to the Steem price that we're all hoping for. I've been running a few tests lately to see what kinds of payments people with higher SP give for full page comments, and I'm getting mostly 1% and even $0.01 replies if anything. A fool and his money are soon parted but when it comes to Steem you have to be a fool not to be encouraging the platform to work correctly by giving back to your audience. Also in case anyone reading this is curious you have to have at least a $0.03 vote to get a payout and not be rounded to $0.00.
@jeezzle, awesome comment, and so good to read. I started a few weeks ago, and was totally unaware how it has been changing the past years...