From Writer to Whale Groupie? - Steemit from a content creator perspective 1
The Steem white paper lays out in considerable depth the complex considerations to make Steem work on a technical and economic level. Less attention is devoted to the perspective of content creators for whom Steem(it) is essentially a black box with incentives for certain behaviours. This is part 1 of a loose series of short posts from a content creator (or writer) perspective that are meant to inspire discussion.
So: Are writers encouraged to turn into "whale groupies"?
As a writer, I get a kick out of my work being read by an audience. If I did not want an audience, I would not post; it's that simple. In addition, I appreciate an income from my writing since it means I can spend less time in a paid day job, and more time with writing.
I therefore approach Steemit with two questions on my mind: How will my posts be seen by as many people as possible? And how will they be upvoted by influential people?
The answer to the second question is to be noticed and liked by one or more "whales". The answer to the first question is to become popular enough to appear in the trending list as the default view of Steemit - which again only works when my posts are noticed and liked by whales.
As a result, I see myself turn into a "whale groupie". Instead of considering my whole potential audience, I start wondering about the whales: Where do they hang out? What topics do they like? What style of writing do they appreciate? When are they online? etc.
What is your opinion: Does this matter? And if so, how can it be avoided?
The curation rewards have gotten really small. People are selling their soul for $0.001 = 1/10 of a cent. I've started upvoting anything well-written. For example, a good rant will not get whale votes... but people relate to a good rant and want to talk about their problems.
Do you think the special role of the first vote needs to be reconsidered, too?
It seems to me that it does not make sense to reward only the first vote since it is grabbed by either the author or a bot anyway. Rather, rewards should decrease from the first vote onwards on some sort of sliding scale by passage of time or number of votes.
I think that might backfire though now since there are probably so many people doing it. A better bet is to put out quality content and get noticed by regular people. It will take longer but as the platform expands so will your profits and your following. This is playing the long game and it will likely give you more longevity than whale attention which is by it's nature fickle.
Yes, that's how the mechanism is intended to work, and that's how it should work in principle.
The problem I see is that the white paper does not try to estimate the time it takes on average for a new quality author to "bubble up" and be noticed and recognised. Yes, it is possible, but what if it takes, on average, two years of constant high quality posting?
The good author will take his/her writing to another platform much sooner. And even if s/he does stick to Steemit, it means that an awful lot of high quality content (and effort) is essentially wasted.
To cut a long story short: the time in which a good new author "bubbles up" needs to be estimated (I presume the existing data should allow this kind of stats?). And if it is too long, certain paramters in the Steemit mechanism need to be tweaked.
Very true. That's why I think they are constantly changing and trying new things. If delegated SP voting can be made to work it should accelerate the process. I totally understand what you are saying though. If I had the computing know how I would put myself forward as a witness with the pledge that I would only manually curate content and try to look for new gems.
For manual curation, it might be helpful to have a different kind of bot: not a "whale bot" as described recently by @dantheman but rather a bot that prefilters content for your manual attention.
As it stands, the signal-to-noise ratio and the volume of the raw feed of new content is such that manual handling is getting tricky unless one can devote oneself to it almost full-time. It could be useful for a "bot" to filter out e.g. simple reposts (without editorial additions) of content from elsewhere on the net, carelessly written filler pieces that just randomly scratch the surface of some well-known issue, thinly-veiled advertising etc.
Interesting question to what extent such pre-filtering could be automated.
I've noticed many people only seem to be voting for "sure things", that is, steemians who consistently make big steem from every post. This is so they'll get a kick back as a curation reward.
So, if you're not already well known, with a hundred it two followers ready to vote you up no matter what you're talking about, it can be hard to be heard...
Hopefully this will change, and more new voices break through and are heard by the masses.
Or maybe this is only my experience, and a couple of others I know personally..
That's exactly the issue - there is no mechanism for new voices to break through. To an extent, Steemit is becoming a victim of its own success in that the increasing rate of new content creation makes it impossible for new voices to be noticed before they scroll down the bottom into oblivion.
Very true. I have been thinking about this and am going to start dedicating a little bit of time every day to the new feed. I'm also going to reduce the amount I upvote highly paid content - I was doing this out of principle if I liked stuff but it really doesn't need my payout and the curation rewards are virtually nil so there is no point. I just don't want people to think I'm ignoring them though.
Despite my best efforts not to i do find myself doing this more and more then reminding myself that my niche crochet, isn't going to get the crypto crowd with all the steempower excited enough to upvote . So i keep reminding myself that my target audience hasn't found steem and that i'm currently arranging the furniture and getting myself ready to welcome them when they do arrive.
That is a rather nice analogy ;)
So essentially you are suggesting to treat Steemit like a "normal" forum where no monetary rewards are to be had, either.
I think that's sensible although it would be easier if the big payouts were less in your face every time you open the site ...
not quite. I wouldn't put as much effort into a regular forum. I view what I'm doing now more as honing my skills and establishing myself as the goto crochet girl. i'll be writing a post on my goals here tomorrow which might explain it better.
Looking forward to it :)