Did Steemit Nerf Payout Algorithms to Make Way for Paid Promotion?
Many seem to be excited about the new update and what it means. It is great to see this new platform evolve, but has it come at the cost of the incentive to write articles for Steemit? You be the judge.
So up until just the other day I've been able to consistently trend posts pulling in around 200 steam dollars give or take. I've found that you seem to get the highest rewards from obtaining upvotes from people who do not already follow you ie, creating organic upvotes that results from content finding its way to new people. Now I find that when my posts hit 20-40 likes, nothing happens. I didn't assume that I was going to maintain the same payout as I grew with followers due to the fact that having a good following alone is not good enough and as mentioned. I was of the idea that to garner high rewards you need to get your content in front of new people that they enjoy. But now my rewards have been reduced by a factor of 10.
As you can see what was once a profitable endeavor has now become a waste of my time. I don't expect every post to bring me x dollars nor do I expect every post to be a winner. What I do expect is to be able to figure out how the system works even if roughly to be able to create content according to the demands of those in the community who do consume the content at a consistent rate. If one has a decent follower base, and the willingness not to just create content for an echo chamber but the interest in making that content attractive to new people that should translate to rewards. Why? Because information is being disseminated across ideological barriers to the benefit of the community incentivizing content producers to make their content attractive to new people.
Now there is an option where you can trade Steem dollars to promote you articles. Do I have anything against promoting content? Certainly not. In fact I welcome the idea. But have the rewards systems been nerfed to incentivize you to promote your articles in the face of reduced rewards? I'm not sure. But here is what I do know. I was able to consistently trend articles and now I'm consistently failing no matter how good or bad the content I put out there is and it isn't because people have stopped upvoting articles.
Did you look at the voters list before jumping to conclusions?
What really happened is that until yesterday, you had @smooth and @smooth.witness (large whale accounts) upvoting every of your posts. But not anymore from today. That's the reason the payout dropped significantly.
Sounds like I lost my incentive to create content then.
Did you have @smooth upvoting every of your posts from the very first posts? Did you make 3-figure or more per post from the first few posts? If not what motivated to start posting and why would this motivation be gone? Content creation is like everything else in life, there are ups and downs. If you quit now, you'll never know when could have been your next trip up. Beside, you have no idea why @smooth isn't upvoting you today. He may have his reasons. Maybe his bot crashed. Or maybe his voting power is too low so he is taking a break.
I'm not really upset about the situation, nor do I have anything negative to say about the votes from the whale. What sucks is I thought I was generating content that was valued by the community only to find out the reason that I made anything on these posts was due to the upvoting power of one individual. Not the combined value of the others voting.
If you still have many upvotes it means your posts are valued by the community. Also the best indicator of a quality post imo is the number of comments ( interest)
200$-300$ per post is hugely overvalued, when/if steem has millions of active users the highest you could expect is maybe 10$ per post but you would probably only get a few dollar on average. If you look at some popular profil like dollarvigilante or stelabelle they also had a decrease in reward, because the whales are doing the right thing which is to diversify payout, if they keep upvoting the same people you have 90% of people that are not coming back, that's exactly what is happening when you look at the stats.
If @smooth's vote had been your only vote, it wouldn't have netted you more than a few bucks. The reason that vote made so much difference is because it snowballed with the many other smaller but no less real upvotes from your other followers. If money isn't your main driver, you should give more weight to number of upvotes and quality and quantity of relevant comments over payout as payout is only indirectly correlated to actual popularity.
Thanks
For The Share
Well. Having followers in steemit is not the same as having followers i.e youtube. In youtube, the followers have a much higher impact on the views (reads).
Why? The reason is very simple: it is a question of interface design.
When you open youtube ( as a website or as an app for your phone/table), the feed with the latest videos of your favorite youtubers is shown. In Steemit, when you open the website, the global trending list is shown, not your favorites.
It made seem an insignificant difference, but I think it is key for the problen you are describing.
In this instance my problem is not a matter of people finding the content, I'm receiving the same level of interaction as before. What has changed is before my articles would trend allowing new people to see them under the appropriate tags and now that doesn't happen. I get 20-40 upvotes make 2$ and some change, and that's it. Last week 40 votes would get my articles somewhere around 100$ and from there the article would perform and garner more upvotes and monetary value or not. Now I get a whole bunch of nothing. I would be surprised if I'm the only person experiencing this.
Hi! Thanks for the article. Is there another article you can direct me to, specifically, that outlines all of the updates? I haven't been on Steem for a few days
Good article. I'm reading, watching and learning...hoping to figure it all out.
This is an issue. I would certainly like to see a little more money going to curators and a little less money going to the top contributors.
Call me a socialist if you want, but that would seem to incentivise better comments and posts, rather than this overemphazis on voting for popular people and getting the whales onboard.