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RE: My HF21 after thoughts and impressions of new steem trending page
I didn't care for the Trending Tab before and I won't change my habits. I'd rather give my votes to a post that has 0 upvotes than to any of those trending authors.
High five dude. maybe all the curators have turned to the dark side and would rather flag now than reward.
Some downvoting. Far more upvoting.
And it is a bit silly to have so much Steemit only content on trending but hopefully at some point an organic variety will show. For some reason though, people drool all over steem posts, even yours today!
I will flag this post myself if it makes trending
Then troll yourself!
If it makes trending organically, you earned it, it's yours, have it. This entertainment industry stuff is a confusing world. Even the most famous folks around go home and wonder why the hell people like their stuff so much. Accept it, roll with it, don't let it get to your head, and never sell yourself short.
That's easy to explain, however.
A vote is not a signal that you like content. You would prefer that it was. I would prefer that it was. I think most of us involved with this particular post would prefer that it was. But that is not what it is.
An upvote is a bet that someone after you is going to upvote that post. That's all it is. If you are correct, you receive a curation payout, not because the content was good or because you enjoyed it, but because you could accurately predict what a large number of other people were going to do. Moreover, the creator gets a very token amount if a lot of people decide that they think other people are going to vote for that content. (And in fact, the creator gets less now under hard fork 22 than they did under HF 20.) That means that it is far more valuable to simply find what other people are going to vote for than it is to create content that other people are going to vote for.
So what happens when everybody is trying to decide what everybody else is going to vote for? Well, you see exactly what we have – a pressure toward unifying the topics and subjects that are being voted for. It's as inevitable as the tides. But because the whole point is to guess what other people are going to vote for to the real exclusion of caring about the content in terms of how much you enjoy it or like it, and every body is experiencing the same pressure, everybody starts voting for the same kind of content. The easiest, cheapest, most quickly discernible content they can find. Inevitably, that is masturbatory content. It's easy to search, it's easy to tag, and it's easy to produce. On top of that, you get a consolidation among creators. Since there's no real way to get income from doing any other kind of creation, you get more of the same stuff being made, and since everybody wants to vote with everybody else, you get more the same stuff being voted for.
It is a direct, straight line expectation given the axioms of the system.
I wish it wasn't.
I vote for content I like.
I've been here three years. Have you seen my blog? I do whatever the hell I want and for three years I've avoided following the herd. I'm doing fine, plus it would be difficult to copy me. Happy with the results most days.
This platform is what we make of it. We all have our own way of seeing it. I can't say I subscribe to your vision.