Steemit Digital Sweatshop
Many successful Steemit posts are well written and thoughtful. But many are not. Their value is questionable at best. I'm sure everyone has taken a look at some of the 10000+ dollar posts and had that reaction. So that made me wonder if Steemit is an efficient market.
How much money would I need to pay the average internet blogger to post this type of material if I were standing in a room full of bloggers? I'm going to be generous and say that it would probably be around 50 to 100 bucks. Competition would force it lower. This is a far cry from the 10,000 dollar posts we've seen. So I suppose the first question I could ask would be, is there enough competition now to accurately evaluate content?
I think the answer to that question is definitely no. It's early days, subscribers will only increase. And speculative interest is not guaranteed to increase along with it. But what would Steemit look like if there were the appropriate amount of competition. Many of you might be familiar with the Amazon Mechanical Turk. The service basically allows users who sign up to earn money doing HITs (Human Intelliegence Tasks). These tasks are usually things that are difficult to automate. They consist of anything from filling out surveys to translating documents. Most are fairly simple tasks and pay very little. Even the translation doesn't pay much. The reason for this is competition. With a bit of practice and a lot of time anyone can do it. If you intend to make a living like this it is a huge grind. Honestly you're much better off finding a real job. Right now Steemit is feeding off the pile of speculative bitcoins that were shoved its way by greedy alt coin enthusiasts. What happens when the hype dies down? Will Steemit turn into a digital sweat shop? What happens when the rest of the world decides to join us. They all join for free just to compete for a slice of Steem.
Bitcoin gave Steemit a 300 million dollar value from speculation. But it has another, more basic value that was built into its system. When users buy from Steemit they are buying a currency which Steemit will then accept in exchange for influence. This is how it is given its basic value. Influence within Steemit grants you more voting rights and a larger share of "company". This works in much the same way a fiat currency does. A government mandates the use of a new currency and then says it will accept that currency as payment for taxes. That gives it value. The question I have is, without the speculation by bitcoin users, how much is that influence/shares actually worth to Steemit users? Steemit users are not using their influence to sell anything yet. They could in the future. Perhaps they need to be thinking about doing this now.
In my experience the things that make a lot of money are the things that are the most difficult to do. Right now the only thing Steemit is doing is shouting, loudly into the void. When I can use my Steemit to buy something that I can not get for free elsewhere, then I will consider Steemit to have value. We can do better than just functioning as a glorified algorithm that spits out mildly interesting blog posts. Get to work on that Steemit. I believe in you!
First order of business. Kill the Amazon Mechanical Turk!
https://www.reddit.com/r/HITsWorthTurkingFor/ HITs worth Steeming for?
Steemit just started. The content will gradually find its compass and its way. Patience...
Steemit is not a currency. Steemit is not the crypto-platform. It is only a website that interfaces with the blockchain. It is the mount Gox equivalent of bitcoin.
Yes, you can create a room full of bloggers just like you can create a pool of bitcoin miners. This would the create an unbalanced centralized currency right? Why hasn't this been the case for other cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin? Visa could swoop in and own 99% of all of the bitcoins and then tell everyone you can only use bitcoin through Visa. This could happen, but then they would be buying a useless currency. If I invest in it with the intent of creating instability through breaking the principles of the currency then I will destroy the value I put into the currency which will mean I will be paying to see it's demise.
I was actually thinking about having pools of posters earlier today to increase small cuts of the pull and dull the large cuts. This could happen just like it does with other cryptocurrencies and mining. But the more crap someone posts or spews the less we will see it and the less profitable it is. If they spew create content and deserve to be up voted. It would mean someone is better at sharing their opinion than I am and will reduce my cut of the great content pie. But if there is great content from bloggers, then huge news outlets could perhaps use steemit as a source in their posts. Which would mean we would be given a lot of views and our steem would go up in value.
The room full of bloggers example was my way of explaining how the supply of actual blog content is not that scarce and therefore not that valuable. And it becomes even less valuable with competition. Since we have massive competition on the internet, prices will be driven down to the absolute lowest point. That price point is probably in the single digits, certainly not thousands of dollars. I think that's what we can expect in the future.
I love the idea of posting pools. That might be necessary someday. Much like it is in mining. If you pool your Steem Power together and then post articles produced from your posting pool users and upvote with the full power of the pool you could actually compete and get paid even if you were a small fish. I dunno how the payout structure would work. Probably based on how much Steem Power you provided and bonus if your article gets used. It would be a good way to focus efforts. You could be going up against billion dollar companies with billions in Steem Power.
But you also have to realize that content is not exact or clearly defined. Mining is simple from a pattern perspective, you complete hashing algorithms and get rewarded for it. With content, if people up vote someone baking cupcakes today will not be what makes it to the front page tomorrow. And if there is a flood of content like you suggest, it will constantly have to evolve to keep the voters interested. If everything is the same, voters will not up vote it. Take example some of these people copying articles... there are some article references that do $10,000, but now there seems to be a lot less. I have seem people bulk posting these types of articles and they are getting fractions of pennies from you or me who up votes him.
True, its not as clearly defined as mining. But it does allow you to coordinate your efforts. Instead of spreading out your votes the entire bulk of the groups steem power would go behind each post and upvote. That would give it a bigger chance of succeeding and not being lost in the fray.
Interesting, I thought you were implying you could create $10,000 content if you create enough $.01 content. Well it could be reality. Thanks for sharing your views on the platform. Cheers!
You are talking about pools I am referring to the sweat shop of posters. If that was a thing you could do the same thing on youtube, the issue with that is even if you did that you cannot predict what people will want. Minecraft let's play? No one anticipated PewDiePie to become a success, Markiplayer? Leafyishere? I don't know a lot of famous you tubers, but the idea is it isn't a formula, it might be once you are popular, but I am sure if there was a sweatshop way of doing it and making huge pools of money then companies can already do that with so many platforms. Cheers!
Oh, I misunderstood you. Ya I agree that wouldn't be the best way to create content that worked. What I meant by sweat shop was just that everyone got paid pennies for posting. Even if they were amazing articles. Not necessarily that they were forced to work in a shop churning out crap all day like actual sweatshops. But who knows.
nice post ツ
Nice :D Upvoted
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