Content producers and 7 years of bad sex
A comment came not long ago questioning why people don't post here in the same way they would at Facebook as it would be much easier to get upvotes from friends and family.
This is true, it would be except they would also have to hold significant value to create value and most people aren't inviting in their friends and family with significant value to build that circle. Also, it means that there is a circle and they already exist, as jerks.
The other component of the comment was that it is difficult to make inroads here unless one has some kind of specialized skill or uniqueness. This is also true but, my argument is that every has their own specific perspective and if they work out and learn how to present it, everyone is potentially interesting to someone.
The problem is that this speaks of a larger issue at hand,which is that people somehow expect earning here should be easy, similar to posting to facebook but getting paid. For some, it might work that way (or looks like it does from the outside) but for most, that approach is very unlikely to get any significant traction. The reason is pretty simple.
Facebook already offer it for free so why would someone pay another person for it? I know that they aren't directly paying from their own wallet but, it is still coming out of a pool they have stake over and the person getting curated is getting paid directly.
I think it is time to put this idea of, Do what you do on other social medias and get paid to bed, 6 feet under as for the most part, it just isn't true. Sure the odd random, short post gets highly upvoted but, if every post an account provides is like that, it isn't going to attract long-term supporters as people have already had enough of that kind of behavior on the other social medias.
This is the same with the challenge posts (that I hate being nominated) as it is kind of like those chain letters that say that unless it gets forwarded to 5 people, it will be seven years of bad sex. This kind of content although currently getting some reward, will begin losing engagement over time as for the most part, it just gets tedious. It becomes content filler. At the moment, it is an okay way to build a new account but it won't last.
At least for me, I want to find content that has some substance to it. I am not saying that it has to be war and Peace length, what I mean is I want something that speaks from heart and experience, new perspectives and ideas, something that I can chew on and even possibly learn something from. And when I say learn, I don't mean rehashed articles or textbook biology lessons, they are useless to me and unless you are a very, very good spinner, transparent.
The bar to earning on content is going to increase massively as mainstreaming happens because as the general public come in, they are likely going to have to actually invest something which means, being more discerning with their voting. They are going to be less likely to upvote someone random picture about visiting a city as no matter how good the picture is, they are now thinking about their future. They can go to Instagram for free, why would they think that it is the way to their investment growing here? This content discernment will attract professional talent in even the smallest niches.
It is obviously more complicated than this but once someone feels invested on the platform they start to engage and once they engage, they start to invest more time, effort and mental power into understanding and once that happens, they learn what it is to be here and how important community, distribution and the importance of who has that distribution is.
That is the Steem hook, Engagement.
Look at how many people take this place seriously and feel that they can actually make a difference here in the future even if they do not hold a lot of stake yet. Watch the people that engage well and the content they produce and you will find that the best content producers and the ones who get quality engagement are also the most knowledgeable about the platform itself and how other people interact with it.
Some are specialized like the developers who understand the code, some specialized in marketing themselves, understanding human nature, observing the interactions or networking. The highest earners here are either early birds, external investors or, specialized in what they do or present in their niche.
As said, this is much like the real world and in the real world, most jobs don't pay someone to post status updates to Facebook, pictures to Instagram or tweets. Sure, there are those jobs too but, it is a tiny fraction of the total users.
Steem people need to stop 'advertising' that this is, Facebook with Money because it is not, it is very very different. Perhaps if there was a comparison, it is like a multiple media publishing house and each post is a submission to the editors as to whether they want to buy the rights or, pass. The curators are the editors remember and when it comes to a publishing house, they don't randomly chose like what happens here. This isn't social media with money, it is something else very, very different and if we plant the right seeds, and tend the garden well, the harvest will be plentiful and be able to feed everyone.
When it comes to content, you are free to post whatever you like as there is no censorship but, you are entitled to no return whether that is on quality provided or effort sunk. You want people to support you, you are going to have to show that you are worth supporting.
Goodnight. Comment replies will likely wait until tomorrow on this one.
Taraz
[ a Steem original ]
Oh, Resteem this otherwise you will have bad sex for 7 years (If you are married, this doesn't affect you). At least my wife is hot though.
thinking this is facebook and treating it as facebook is a mistake that seems pretty common. more common is coming here and wanting to be able to treat this like they should get an income stream without investing any money to seed their account. instant gratification is wanted without any real investment.
ah man telling us that if we dont resteem we will have bad sex for 7 years is nasty, so I had to resteem so I don't get the curse of @tarazkp. Such a pity i couldnt put a comment in the resteem lo.
there are many awesome people engaging on steemit, but the bot activity far out weights the human. If engagement is the hook i fear people will be disappointed when they see the level of bots.
I must borrow this passage from you
"Some are specialized like the developers who understand the code, some specialized in marketing themselves, understanding human nature, observing the interactions or networking. The highest earners here are either early birds, external investors or, specialized in what they do or present in their niche."
I dont get why people think they have a right to great payouts. Just like an actor going to Hollywood shouldn't expect to strike a leading role and get rich and famous over night. I blogged online for a long time before coming to steemit and it took me longer to monetize it. I dont expect to do better on steemit with less effort. I expect to do better with more effort.
I think this is the thing that so many don't get, more effort is required. Too many see a few people earning very highly with minimal input and think that it is possible fora ll. Too many spend their time doing the work they think is right but never exploring what else there is. People spend their time on steemit without realising that there is a whole ecosystem that is not on the chain.
This is the hardest I have ever thrown myself into something yet I have failed to adjust to the code like many others have. You can use a hammer to build a house or tear one down and the code is just a tool. Too many are only seeing the tearing down aspect as the way to use it. Time to try some new ways and see if the long-term potentials can be salvaged. It isn't going to be pretty.
There is a bit of that whole social media vibe here though. I didn't really see it at first, but now that I've started to fall into habits, I do. This isn't like Facebook, (Facebook sucks) this is like Tumblr or LiveJournal or any of those other social blogging services. We do need to make friends and fans. We need followers.
When I got here, I thought I was going to post entirely different things. I thought I was going to possibly do some gaming (which I haven't done in a while) and talk about that, and do posts about programming and science. I definately need to post about science more, but I quickly learned that this is not the place I thought it was, and that I needed to do some experimentation with posts to see what I was going to post.
When I decided to write a bit, and I got an amazing payout from Curie, I thought "You know what? I can do this!" I had almost wanted to cry when I got that. I was so fucking astonished. The next few chapters were put out primarily just because I felt like I had to push myself for the amount that I had gotten from Curie.
But then I realized once again, I was wrong, and people don't reward you for quality content, or effort. Maybe a little. Books don't work well here. People get disinterested. I still want to finish my book though, and actually start another. I'm just a little demotivated right now, because I know I'll probably only get $1 or so. Maybe less.
This place is weird. It's it's own thing. Everyone has their own reasons for upvoting things. Many don't seek out the most amazing content to reward. Hell I can't even get people in chat to link me to any good posts they've seen when my VP is high and I'm worried I don't have the time to curate. I mostly get linked to shit, if anyone links me to anything at all.
I never thought this place was going to be easy, but I never thought it was going to be this hard.
Every time I hear someone complain about Trending here I think about what the Livejournal Top page was like. Is like, I just went and looked at it, because I have no sense of self-preservation. The #1 article on there right now is titled "Tom Hiddleston Takes His Cute Spaniel Puppy, Bobby, For A Walk." I'm not kidding, and it goes downhill from there. I think I'd rather have Haejin.
I don't think it even existed the last time I was there. Or I don't remember it. I'm not even sure if they had communities when I first had an account there. Like almost 20 years ago I think.
They added it a couple years after I started - maybe 2006 or so? Like Trending, everyone who was seriously using the service figured out in about ten seconds that they need never look at it.
We might have just uncovered something we didn't intend to. Steemit is still in beta, and they spent time making a trending page, that has never worked on any platform, rather than building something actually useful to try to find good content. -.-
Meanwhile, LiveJournal took until 2006 to implement a similar feature.
Let's say that you work on your book part time and get a few dollars here or there. perhaps later, you will have a book that has been semi-financed. As far as other content goes, have fun, use it to learn about the platform or whatever you are interested in. I think that the way to engage people is to get them to understand more about the platform. Then they will fight for it.
Semi-financed with a first draft on the blockchain... Means no publisher will likely want to touch it, unless somehow it becomes a super popular series.
But it got me started. That's what I'm most thankful for.
You know, and the money. The money for the first chapter/part was AWESOME.
What I find is that the more I write, the more I can write. I am not saying the writing gets better though :D
I agree with everything you said including that of your wife being hot @tarazkp.
I have thought about this comparison between facebook and steemit and it is not working anymore. My reason being apart from upvotes which is similar to likes, I don't see any other similarities. I may not be looking closely though.
Steemit is more of a blog like blogger or word press than facebook. It is built like a blog despite the audience being members of the community. I see the comparison as a marketing strategy only and it is no longer useful. Steemit is not facebook.
As long as content is king know steemit then it is not facebook. as long as genuine interaction is supposedly more important than random upvotes, steemit is not facebook.
But then again, human behavior on facebook and on steemit don't not differ much because the comparison between the two makes it easy for newbies to think they can do it like they do on facebook.
I think it is time, we live the facebook analogy alone and focus on making the platform stand as an innovation not a better copy of facebook. This also includes apps such as Dtube, dsound, steepshot, which all have comparisons like they are imitations. They are not.
When the marketers of these apps can find a better way to market them without mentioning YouTube, sound cloud, or instagram, we will get somewhere.
To me one of the biggest problems with steemit is what you like to call the circle jerk. There still remains no other way than knowing people to get people to notice your posts, other than having a high amount of up votes, which won't really get your post noticed, but rather call in people who are after easy money.
It also appears steemit noticed that people aren't getting views but still getting up votes so they decided to fix it: removed the view counter. The most stereotypical engineering move ever. It is such a stupid way of fixing the problem that it is almost funny.
I've always regarded steem as a blogging platform despite the ever increasing amount of bs status updates pouring in. However, with steemit they either have no idea how to or are not willing to fix the issue of "findability" of content. Content just seems to disappear into the void and no one ever saw it or heard of it unless people expected to see it appear.
I've been blogging for 1½ years on blogger also and even though I do it in Finnish, I still have thousands of views each month of which about 40% are returning visitors. Therefore, about 60% are always new visitors and I don't need to try to find them. And the worst part is, I've actually wrote more posts on steemit than on blogger...
The counter was broken and needed to be fixed (counted every refresh including from poster) but was better than nothing.
This will change with new front-ends. it isn't actually Steemit's job, there's is to make sure the chain can perform imo.
btw, how come you don't come into steem.chat?
I don't really care for yet another place to keep up with and when I was there in the beginning it was only a place to try to get ones posts up voted. Not sure how it is nowadays.
A place to talk and have a little bit of fun. If interested, hit me up under the same name.
well, I am getting married end of next month so... not resteeming since it apparently would not make a difference...
and I think you make a good point but trying to explain steem to outsiders is so very hard... so using the facebook analogy with money is something they can relate to.
It needs to be refined but its a way to get started and they need to know they will not be rich overnight
No no no.... you must resteem!
They say that if you put a marble in a jar for every time you have sex in the first year, and take one out every time after the first year, you will never run out of marbles. You really should resteem, you really don't want to risk having an empty jar....
Yeah, it is complicated to explain, even when they are already here.
Is the 7 year thing a guarantee? Been married a while and the promise of bad sex vs. no sex seams alluring. Definitely NOT going to resteem. LOL. But seriously, I love the conversation here.
Admittedly I’m a bit thick, so to read your comment about it’s ”so very hard to explain Steem to outsiders” actually gives me hope. Please keep tring.
With all due respect, (a fancy way to say I respect you, but I am going to disagree with you)
In my opinion, this should be an easy and friendly site where people can casually post or make a deep, long article. The payment is selected through the wisdom of the crowd. Most people ignore it, some like it and some dislike it. Let's assume it is upvoted or downvoted by those with strong reactions. At the end of a week, the Authors gets to keep the rewards. That's it. All there is to it.
No good Internet Business wants to reduce engagement. :)
Most of the content creators here are overpaid not underpaid when you compare Steem to any outside monetized paper or internet content provider. They feel underpaid because they are comparing themselves to others here, when they should be considering what they will be getting paid if they leave this arena.
I always enjoy your point of view even when I disagree. :) Cheers.
Almost in bed and on phone but... disagree on the disagree.
Not because you are wrong but because I am not saying that every post need be "worthy" but, if someone's every post is like facebook and they expect engagement and a reward, it isn't going to work for them. Thinking it is or saying that is the way it is is setting them up for failure.
Earning means competition is a factor and that will eventually put quality or the best fake of quality in the top earners. At least organic earners.
.....bed.
Relative wealth is always fun since people always keep raising their living standard and expectations haha. Doesn't matter how good things get humans always of course will look for something better. This is what makes life fun I guess. That things always is getting better. As you say Steemit users are overpaid for sure!
And even with that it's not the currency Token that is the real value. It's just the oil to make things more smooth when building up quality relationships with other humans. The oil works as a sign of: I trust you. Anyone that realize that Time and Attention is the true currency will start rich and abundant and from there you can't go any higher only add quality value and more fun!
Btw, i think it was in Eddie Murphys, RAW.
"I mean no offence, but your sister is a slut"
This is what came to mind :D
Hahaha. That is why I clarified what I meant by All due respect. Because sometimes I am a troll, I have to notify people when I am serious. haha.
At least with me, keep me guessing as i like the challenge. ;)
Yes! I Agree! Do not compare this on FB! But lets admit that Steemit is better than FB or other social media platform. And steemit, once you post after 7 days can not be deleted as it was on blockchain!
Couldn't agree more. I curate for the Steemitworldmap and often see some well written posts full of factual information about a place but no heart or personality. It's just like reading wiki or the official tourist board website which sadly provides little incentive for me to visit the place they're writing about. Even if you're writing about say London or Paris or New York where many people have been before, put your own spin on it, write about it through your eyes and experience and make it your post. That's what makes good content.
BTW, what really caught my eye with this post, wasn't the actual post itself (well, it was at the beginning) but the fact that you've declined payout on all your own comments. It's little things like these that reflects a person's view and value on Steemit.
Many are from wikis unfortunately :/
Most came because they didn't want to risk bad sex ;)
Declining payout is a silly thing really that shouldn't be necessary but so many still claim 'for visibility'. Declining means they can upvote for visibility without taking from the pool. I don't upvote my own comments anyway...
Resteemed.
Not because I'm worried about bad sex or anything horrible like that! :D
It's an important statement. An I agree.
I didn't say it would improve your sex life either :P