Correcting Bloomberg's Wrong Interpretation Of Things: Steem Doesn't Have A Content Quality Problem!
People often said that the content has been of pretty low quality. So many users are just trying to earn a quick buck. What's your plan to improve the quality on the platform, on the content side?
This was the second question addressed by the presenter of 'Bloomberg Markets' during their recent interview with Steemit, Inc's CEO Ned Scott.
The truth is that the quality of content submitted to the Steem blockchain isn't low. It's only the evaluation mechanism as well as the way of sorting and displaying the published content that could be improved. Actually there are uncountable bloggers and vloggers who share tons of high-quality posts with their Steem community through the different applications built on the blockchain on a daily basis.
I think you could've defended the quality of content in your own network a bit more, @ned :-)
You replied then, that Steem's mission was to enable users to inform the community where to find quality - by evaluating the content objectively and bringing the one with the highest quality to the top. You furthermore acknowledged that this mission hasn't been fully accomplished so far. Well my question is: What is 'the top'? How do we measure 'quality'?
The fact that the media is highlighting content quality issues is somehow a sign that the problem might be bigger than we actually want to believe.
It's all there, we only need to bring it to the front!
Steemit Inc's CEO Ned Scott during his recent interview on 'Bloomberg'
Let's take some actions!
I think we've gone in circles around the very same issues long enough now.
Since months the majority of (established) community members is demanding solutions to fix the design problems of Steem. There have been hundreds of discussions about the corrupted rewards distribution, the overtaking greed, self-voting, excessive vote buying, etc.
Sometimes it happens in a polite manner and sometimes not. Many people who were not even participating in the dialogues, have suffered from side effects of the resulting flag wars.
The mood on Steem has changed on a dime.
Shouldn't be fixing these issues become our no. 1 priority before everything else?
Ned, you've told us that Smart Media Tokens will be able to address these mistakes
Yet, as far as I've understood the whitepaper, SMTs are new tokens with their related eco-systems that are built on top of the Steem blockchain, but they won't neither have any influence on the design of Steem as the underlying basis nor on Steemit.com as a social dApp built on Steem.
Am I right?
Wouldn't we actually need a hardfork of Steem in order to fix the problems we have at grass-roots level? Or is it even an idea to abandon Steemit.com completely and only focus on SMTs as new profit centers?
The next hardfork (HF 20) won't address the above mentioned problems either. It's rather supposed to improve scalability.
'Growth is great' stated the latest article about HF20 submitted by @steemitblog. Do you mean growth or retention?
It's been repeated during the Bloomberg interview again: Shortly there will be 1 million accounts created on the Steem blockchain.
Is this really a number we are able to play with, knowing that the number of active accounts is even decreasing?
Active accounts transacting on the Steem blockchain - source: @penguinpablo
Why call for the 'masses' if we can't hold a small tribe?
Besides 'Steem to the moon', it's a popular saying in this community that 'Steem will bring the masses'.
Are we sure that we really want them to onboard now?
Steem doesn't have any difficulties in getting more people on this blockchain, but it definitely has a problem in retaining them.
Before we talk about 'onboarding the masses' we should talk about expectation management and user experience.
It's as if you sent a birthday party invitation to millions of people without having prepared the infrastructure needed to host them.
Let's talk about how many cake we need to feed them all, let's talk about the music that makes them feel comfortable and even animates them to dance.
What we need in the Steem eco-system is a framework that will correspond to the expectations of the majority of users. You can't ever make them all happy, but you can start listening carefully to their repeated claims and brainstorm about solutions.
If we ignore the signs, there will come a point in time when we can't turn back.
What's your point of view? Let me know - the comment section is yours :-)
Much love,
Marly -
PS: Did I really write a blog post about Steem again? Crazy shit! :-)
Thanks for your valuable time!
This blog was launched at the end of July 2016
aiming to provide stories for open-minded
people who enjoy living on the edge of their lives,
stepping out of comfort zones, going on adventure,
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Welcome to the too-much-energy-blog!
Please also check my vlogs on dlive.io/@surfermarly
Original content. Quote found on yamasaki.me.
Great post, Marly. I couldn't agree more when you said,
Also, when he said
I do not believe objectivity can ever be totally achieved, because let's face it we are all subjective to varying degrees at different times.
The real quality content often gets buried in the system here due to a real lack of visibility (probably the number one fault of steem), the way the system is structured, and Ned probably failed to defend that fact because he doesn't see much of the quality. That is, in my view, because of the very faults of the system itself and also in part because up until a week ago he had gone 2 full months without a single comment and 6 months without a single post. It's one thing for a CEO to manage his business with many things going on, but another when a CEO completely abandon's his own platform and it's users for such a long period of time.
Here's the interview, BTW:
I noticed @Ned state at 4:35 said,
This is simply a misleading statement, because a larger and larger portion of rewards paid out is in SP, which has nothing even close to liquidity. SP takes 13 weeks to pull out all but 5 steem and that 5 steem it will not allow us to pull out is a real issue as the value of steem goes up.
I honestly worry, Marly, that we may be close to, as you said,
This is why I have an eye also on @Dan, the technical creator of the steem blockchain and steemit, as he rolls out EOS and his stated plans to create a sort of steem II platform with an eye on fixing the many issues of this first try. Also Minds.com looks to be giving steemit real competition too. A little competition always helps us all in the end.
Great comment, @positivesynergy! Thanks for taking the time to put it all together.
I've never really understood why the CEO of decentralized social media network prefers using Twitter instead of his own platform in order to communicate. Maybe he's tired of Steemit.com and that's why all eyes are put on SMTs as the new profit centre.
If this was the case, they'd make one important mistake: steemit.com as per default will always be the no. 1 gateway app to Steem. It's been the first app built on the Steem blockchain, it's got reached a top alexa ranking. If they really give up on Steemit.com, then everything else will fail as well. That's at least my perspective.
Is there anybody not having an eye on @eosio? :-)
I assumed he's looking for retweets to get the word out, instead of preaching to the converted, here.
The best of 60,000 users is never going to be the same quality as the best of 600 million users.
Maybe scaling should be a priority after all.
Well currently there are 940,000 dead accounts and 60,000 active accounts. Is that what we call scaling and growth...? :-) It's actually just an inflated number.
In fairness, 3 of those are mine. Registered for later use, and I know several others who've done the same.
But I prefer to use active users for this very reason. If we can get more people onboard, the best of the best will be better :)
From my point of view we shouldn't focus on getting as much people as possible on board, but keeping those that are coming. Let's say all of these 60,000 have an average of 4 accounts, then we're still far away from 1 million.
The problem is not the acquisition, it's onboarding, education, expectation management and working on an improved user experience.
If you earn money on Steem you don't care about a user interface from 1980 or a design (algorithm) that keeps other users away. But if you're new and that design is all you've got, then it matters.
It's absolutely logical that the number of active users is decreasing at this point in time. Everything else would be a miracle. If we don't change the design and make Steem more attractive, it will go down to a couple of thousands - those who're here since the very beginning since they're the only ones profiting from the eco-system.
Guess why the top witnesses don't say anything in public about the current issues? They're comfortably sitting on their monthly income - so why should they change a thing? :-)
They're only earning steem, though. I'm sure they don't want a return to 7c steem any more than the rest of us.
I'm glad they're being paid in the same currency I'm hodling; means they help me by helping themselves.
Let's see how they will help us to fix the issues.
I don't think there are 940,000 dead accounts. Active accounts refers to how many accounts actually did something on a given day, like post, upvote, etc. The 60,000 accounts active one day are not all the same accounts that are active on another day. I think weekly or monthly active users would give a better picture.
Great point, @surfermarly. His use of twitter over his own platform would appear to say a lot about his own faith in the platform itself, as well as the people who use it. I suppose he's trying to promote it, as he was doing on Bloomberg, but in my view, as the saying "if you build it they will come' could be retooled to say, "if you fix it, they will both come and stay".
As with the many problems it has, it seems most come and go because they see it's flaws and that the hype is in many ways just hype. Then there are those fools like me (LOL) who invest here, only to find out that to pull the funds back out takes like forever in a time of how blockchain technology is growing and changing so fast. Those people who come and go do far more than any Bloomberg broadcast or twitter tweet to folks who to a large degree are very skeptical to begin with. When a CEO of a company he owns 51% ignores his company's investors and customers, you have to wonder if he is considering going the way of Facebook, especially given the way he first replied to the question near the end about Facebook.
At 4:47 She asked,
And his reply after several seconds of thinking was,
So the real question I have is... is Ned using Bloomberg and Twitter to promote the sale of steemit all together to Facebook and/or for some sort of partnership? That sure is what it sounded like he was implying. Please have a listen and let me know your perception of that Q&A given. You gotta wonder...
Well that reminds me of the following quote which is so absolutely true:
Who needs a platform with 940,000 dead accounts? You can't sell them to anybody.
With regards to 51%: Have you seen the following video? There's one point where Ned says that Steemit.com is a centralized app built on a decentralized blockchain. I wonder why the CEO of a company that is part of the crypto market underlines the fact that his flagship is actually not decentralized? Does that make sense? Many people are only here for the decentralized idea, so why challenge that?
When I asked Ned Scott at Steemfest² what his vision for 2018 was, he replied:
Maybe that vision is a bit too big for them. Maybe they should successfully implement the idea in one eco-system before they start to sell it to others...? Who would want to invest in a SMT after having had a look at steemit.com?
I agree, Marly. That's quite revealing in and of itself that he said that. When I first started seeing the issues here, I researched and discovered it is a for-profit corporation with a CEO who controls 51%. That to me in and of itself says a lot - that it doesn't seem very decentralized. Most of the top decentralized cryptos are run by non-profit foundations for that very purpose of making them as decentralized as possible. I always liked the way Jed McCaleb, who basically co-created ripple, before breaking off to co-create Stellar says, "imagine the internet if it were created and run by one for profit corporation. It wouldn't be anything like it is today."
These are very wise words.
Maybe that’s one of the reasons why Steem has never been a top cryptocurrency.
I've had a bad enough day without seeing this. Powering down will be agonizingly slow! FTS and the greed of bastards that think they will live forever.
There must be a lack of morality in these people! It must be! How can you put your greed above thousands that trust you through the promises you have made.
Again poor will take the hit like it's always the case!
The rich never change. They just learn new ways to bullshit people. My biggest question is whether it is money that turn them into this or is it only a certain kind of person lacking empathy and morality that end up in those positions? The latter a perfect explanation of the flawed system!
The whole steem project seems almost to be a social engineering experiment. Take for example the Steem White Paper (https://steem.io/SteemWhitePaper.pdf), which interestingly appears to have been rewritten in August 2017 after Dan's departure as CTO. If you look under the "Voting on Distribution of Currency" heading, under the subheading of "Voting Abuse" you find this really stage "The Story of the Crab Bucket" that states the following:
Then it states:
It sounds to me in many ways like social engineering and/or socialism where human jealousy and greed traps them into in a worst-case dog-eat-dog scenario.
And then there is the whole @Dan thing. @GuiltyParties told me it was Dan who nuked @BernieSanders to that -16 rep he has and he also told me other times that Dan has been doing a lot of downvotes on others too. So last night before leaving I did a search and found that to be true too, with posts just on Dan's downvotes. That puts a little doubt on his whole idea of making a sort of steem II on EOS that fixes the problems, if he starts abusing the same fault in the system that he so resonantly pointed out Ned and others were doing.
I recall Bill Ottman, co-founder of Minds, said several times in interviews how research has been done on such cases as that girl who felt cheated by YouTube and went into their offices shooting, which shows that mistreatment and abuse on social media platforms creates violent behavior. Thus, the bot wars and downvote wars of steemit.
Well said!!!
Thank you @knircky :-)
And special thanks for the resteem!!
👌💪💪💪💪
Oh Marly how this hits home in a lot of my sadness lately. I saw the interview and Steem Inc has always been harping that SMT will be the answer as if it going to be a panacea to all the ills in the platform but I still don't see it.
I am more interested with Hivemind and Communities as I truly hope it will fix a lot of issues we have.
I had to roll my eyes on the interview though when they kept referring to Steem as a Facebook disruptor when in fact it is so different from Facebook. Oh well I had the same notions before I started here as well.
Steem Inc needs to start listening to the people. @dragosrua initiated this challenge and one of the topics he had was what are the 3 things that needs to be done to make Steemit better.
Reading through it has some very interesting thoughts from the users.
I had the feeling that Steem Inc created the platform and then left everyone to their own in a wild, wild west kind of situation.
Lots of valuable thoughts here, thank you very much for stopping by @maverickinvictus!
I completely agree with you that Hivemind could bring more benefits to the Steem community than SMTs. Yet, how much do we know about the feature that was already supposed to be implemented in Q3/2017? It's a big promise, but there have been made so many promises (only thinking about the marketing team that appeared, made some big promises about a campaign and then disappeared again), that we logically start to mistrust at some point in time.
I've stopped reading and commenting announcement posts since they're just big air bubbles.
Obviously, it's always good to keep the ball rolling and talk about the potential of the platform, even though this might not lead to any changes. I haven't checked @dragosrua's challenge, but will do. Thanks for the hint!
Wild wild west - that's a precise allegory :-D Well even in the wilderness things keep growing, so let's see what the rest of 2018 brings.
It can hardly get worse, so we actually haven't much to lose :-)
As Far as Trending goes, I'd say we have a quality control problem. For the most part, the highest stakeholders are in control of what reaches Trending, and they are the Bidbots.
Only 1 employs a Whitelist, and not too much of what is boosted up their via Smartsteem is heavily criticised. So that leaves the Blacklist, or no list.
Clearly no list, as a holder of such power to change the top page of Steemit, is very poor. The Blacklist not much better.
They are the quality controllers of what content appears to the the world, and should be doing a lot more.
Cheers!
Great that you mentioned the whitelist! There is no doubt that bid bots control the whole system as it is designed today.
What do you think would happen if we got rid off the Trending Page tomorrow?
I think it will soon become of even less importance to the Steemian as we move to communities.
It may then be up to Steemit if they wish to present what remains to the world.
I think communities will find a way to disallow (external) bid-bot content to appear on their own trending pages, and may use their own 'community' bot to 'organise' the best content that suits their agenda.
However, there will still be an externally facing 'Trending', and if not, perhaps a worse scenario where low grade content is boosted to no-one, purely for the returns, as the round become less busy.
That's what this post was about :)
https://steemit.com/steem/@abh12345/who-will-create-the-content-for-the-bid-bots-to-promote-in-the-future
Nice post!
Talking about alt accounts, I've seen a lot of established users creating a second account in order to upvote themselves and increase their return.
It's easy to track them since they usually send the SBD of both accounts to the very same exchange address. Then they publish some good looking anti-selfishness posts via their main account in order to maintain their clean image.
That's actually quite bold - or should I say dumb?
I've stopped digging too deep into the blockchain data, since you always end up being very frustrated and disappointed.
The circle is very well protected. They can actually do whatever they want and it will never affect their reputation or return.
That's also why I'm posting 99% about surfing and other fun stuff - and not about Steem anymore...:-) Too many grey ones on my head, haha!
Sounds like a healthy sampling of both to me! :D
Yeah I can't help but dig, it's my nature and my previous line of work. I should post more about life, as I can certainly say the same about the greys!
Bots are a curse. Bid bots or promo bots. They all are a curse. My conclusion.
PS: I'm highly inactive and whenever I come back, I see the same things persisting.
„It's as if you sent a birthday party invitation to millions of people without having prepared the infrastructure needed to host them.“
YYYESSSS!!!! Nailed perfectly!!!
Thank youuuu!
You know I like drawing allegories :-)
I love this analogy - so true!!
And eek - you're a surfer? Me too. Just about to head out now - it's winter in Victoria and getting cold, and there's a big swell around!
Hey @riverflows!
Nice to meet you. We can't ever have enough surfers in this network :-))
I'll be in Bali at the end of the month, hoping to catch some nice waves, too. At my own place it's too windy right now. I'd need to to a windsurf class one day in order to be prepared for these conditions...
Enjoy your weekend, and I'll be following your blog now :-)
Hey we will be in Bali in July. Windy here too.. and getting cold! Xx
Oh nice! It'll be my first time there so I'm quite excited :-)
Ah yes, you're based in Australia - right? So winter time is coming... Get some hot coffee though! :-)
Yes, in Australia... where are you? Youll looovvve Bali. Wherabouts are you going? Xx 🗻🏝🌊
Steemit seems to be an experiment in Game Theory.
Unfortunately, with close to 1 million users, it's more of a game of Whac-a-Mole. But it will be a never ending game that I don't know if the steemit team can keep up with.
Every time that a fork has happened, there has been a short grace period before users figured out to game the system again using the new rules.
For example, some have recommended that witnesses be given more power to help battle the bots and the spammers. So ... if that happened, the bot owners would become witnesses etc etc.
Steemit seems to be a fantastic representation of society. Noone wants to be governed, yet without government, the many ideals of what a "good society" oppose each other.
If there were an easy solution, I imagine that society would have adopted it in the real world. Until them, we will continue to have Communism, Democracy, Dictatorship, Republics, Anarchy etc etc And each form of system will all believe that they are the "best"
These are very wise words.
That's true.
The big question is if we'll be able to create something that is even better than real world?
PS: We're not 1 mio users, we're 1 mio accounts and less than 60,000 active users :-)
One of the major problems is the way all formats of content are aggregated into one feed. This might be less of a problem now dmania is no more but the quantity of crap I have to wade through to find nice new stuff is tiresome. If there were a way we could apply filters it would be much better, especially where I like to hang out in the 'new' feed.
We all need to be harsher with our flags. Steemcleaners have a battle royale flagging the single plagiarised pic brigade and @themarymark works like crazy battling circle jerkers but it shouldnt be left to these people alone to battle the bollocks. The community should be self-policing and we must all take responsibilty.
Encourage people who work hard on content (even if its not necessarily great) and discourage the quick buck merchants. It's not difficult.
Even us lowly types can make a difference! Another point is we should all use the share function and blather fb and twitter in Steem..make people notice.
In a nutshell. Use the flag Luke.
tags?
No because I want to determine the content format, but they can be a help but messy
Its not just the garbage I have to wade through in my feed, but the sheer number of garbage spam comments that fill up some users posts is staggering. One or two word responses, the "awesome job" comments, the single .gif postings......it's troubling.
"The community should be self-policing and we must all take responsibilty.
Encourage people who work hard on content (even if its not necessarily great) and discourage the quick buck merchants. It's not difficult." This has got to be the ethos of STEEMIT if the content creators want it to succeed.
I'm a bit guilty of this myself. sometimes I just want to share a photo, and not do a whole blog about the food I'm eating, this tree I'm carving or this herb i'm foraging for. I think a good mix of high-quality blog posts with a few "instagram-like" photos or videos is a good mix for most people. I'd like to see more content that isn't just crypto analysis too.
yesss i'm with you on that. There are many times when I also want to just bang a couple of lines of thought down and use this thing more like traditional social media. I usually do it under the pretence of attempting win a photocomp lol...
Steemit is all things to all people...a full blown blog or a social media platform and it needs to get filters in place to allow people to use it as they wish to....as long as its original and honest.
Nicely said. And this is one of its biggest assets actually.
Re: garbage spam comments... How about a mechanism to block a particular user from dropping comments in your own posts? Each blogger could weed out those accounts leaving spam or useless comments.
Thanks for your great addings @nathen007! You're right: participating in such an environment requires accountability of all members. Yet, I firmly believe that:
Change can only be made my changing the algorithm.
You can't force people to behave in a certain manner, be fair, publish good content, flag low quality and spam. But you can make it more attractive to them to behave accordingly. It's all about the incentives. Currently it's attractive to buy votes and publish shit :-)
i personally think it is time to fork steemit or start a whole new blockchain because the current power of the whales and other abusers is so high it would destroy the platform if you chose to change something unfavorable to them.
SMT may alleviate the struggle because it gives the SMT creators more leeway to control the content reaching their applications. alas i wish my technical skills were good enough to really be of use a a developer but until then i hope the comunity works things out.
A caveat i got from this interview is that the main stream media is taking notice of STEEMIT. I dont doubt that they themselves are nterested inhow to leverage clients vis cryptocurrency.
Interesting to see that there are only 60,000 active STEEM users...
Nice analysis. There are plenty of users that create quality content but fail to make it to the trending page. Cheers @surfermarly. I still hope more people hop on board. I love the infrastructure, it's like the wild wild west of social media
Haha, you're the second one in the same thread who calls it wild wild west :-)
I guess these kind of things happen for a reason!
I'm glad you enjoyed the read. Usually I don't like to write about Steemit, because it's as if you were talking about the same things over and over again and nothing ever happened. Well on the positive side, we can earn Steem for the very same stuff over and over again, haha :-D
Enjoy your weekend @jeffjagoe