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RE: My HF21 after thoughts and impressions of new steem trending page
As an investor, what I want to see when I look at activity, popular activity, on a social media platform is a diversity of ideas and opinions.
Go to the front ends. there are gateways in trending to those too.
That is exactly the opposite of what I should be doing.
If I look at what purports to be a general purpose social media platform without a up front declared subject focus, and I see that everything that is considered "popular" on that platform strikes the same note and that note is the platform itself, I know it's imploding. I know that. The most important thing that they have to talk about is themselves. And that's just from looking at the headlines. If you actually start looking at the content, it all has the same monotone delivery of how awesome everything is and how much money you can make, and here is 1 More Way you can make money.
That is not a social network. That is not a social media platform. That's an echo chamber which is looking to implode at any moment.
If I then come around and look at the New page and see that there is a lot of very minor activity which is not masturbatory but none of it ever seems to get traction, none of it ever seems to get attention, and none of it ever seems to get rewarded – I know what's going on. I know this is not a place to put my money. The contrast makes it worse.
Now to be fair, this is not a new development. This has described the Steem blockchain roughly since the beginning, with some variation in the times that it was running high in value. When the token is valued high, people feel like they have the elbow room to spread their SP out across multiple lower bets because they feel assured they're going to make their basic with the safe ones and other kinds of content can then flourish under that banner.
In times when the token is valued low, like right now, nobody wants to risk a bad bet. No one can afford to. Anybody that could afford to take their money out of the platform and wasn't socially intimidated by the people who kept screaming that removing your money because you need it is a betrayal of everything holy – all those people are gone. They took their money out. They are doing other things. Some of them probably pay better.
This is a terrible time to believe that an investor would want to come by, see Trending, and think "this is a place we want to put our money." But that was true last week and last month and last year. Hell, you could probably make a good argument that bid bot activity at least forced some synthetic diversity onto places like Trending because people would chase the bots, trying to get their vote in before the bot closed the deal. It wasn't real valuation of quality, but at least it was breaking up the monotony a little.
It remains to be seen how effective the current rewards curve is going to be at breaking the bid bot power but I have no doubt in my mind what it's going to do to diversity of creators and pressure on curators to become a monoculture. That is is clear to me as the nearby star.
It's a common problem here.
Looking out for investors warps your mind. Distracts from creating a good product first.
Look what all the investor focus has brought us. Bid bots. "They expect ROI", I hear. Nice 20% ROI on a 90% loss.
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I think the obsession with investors has a broader toxic effect on the community, because first and foremost, it tells those who are involved, who are actually doing things, that they are less important than people who haven't done things or people who have done one thing (bring money) – and that affects everyone negatively.
Investors want a real thing to invest in, for the most part. They want a profit, reasonably enough. They want to get on board with something that's going to grow and provide them money later. If you focus on just trying to lure investors with hooks until they bite instead of building something, a technology, a community, something that sustains itself on content, what you end up with is a lot of really stupid investors who may have brought a lot of money but they've paid for nothing.
Nobody walks away from that relationship happy.
steemit.com is a front end... the first and most popular especially when people are coming through search engines ... so the point the trending page there needs to reflect the diversity of content is well made.
That will not just be reached by upvoting or downvoting...a redesign of the landing page to show excerpts of trending of a range of topics would help accomplish that.
In the top 10 or so there is a gaming post, a travel vlog, an artist and another travel post. In the top20, thre are a few more artists, a travel post and a photography post. Considering this is 2 days after HF21, 6 hours after HF22, that isn't too bad, is it?
It's a start .. only a start... When I see comments like.. "It's looking good now" .. It tells me that they see the job of downvoting shit off the page as the job.. that is a good start.. now.. curate and upvote varied, good content onto the page. Then it will start to look like a vibrant community to attract attention .. the right kind of attention.
A long way to go for sure, that was just the obvious entry point.