Steemit Activity Skyrocketing: Good or Bad for Content Quality?
There has been a discussion on whether skyrocketing numbers of Steemit activity might result in lower-quality content. My guesstimate is it might in the short-term, but it should improve again soon after. So in the medium term to longer term, we all will be able to view the kind of quality content we are looking for.
Here are my reasons:
Simply take a look at the two major dump sites ;) in social media calling themselves Facebook and Twitter plus YouTube for video content and the kind of garbage that's on all three of them on top of the quality content you really come to these sites for in the first place...
Sheer volume, these days, means lower quality (sad but true because of general writing ability and levels of education in today's mass-media influenced society).
No need to despair though -- because this can mostly be solved by better search tools for Steemit. "Simple" as that...
I am aware of asksteem and similar tools. I am also aware of search being a whole different matter with blockindex-stored content here. All I'm saying is that users need to use all the Steemit search tools available or in the process of being added in order to blank out the low-quality content and find what you really want to read. Then the low-quality posts will automatically receive fewer votes, will be siphoned out and ultimately go away.
This means that Steemit content quality might take some kind of a hit in the short term but will improve along with the entire distributed application and overall Steemit ecosystem evolving and maturing. Reasonable User Behaviour will lead to automatically favouring good-quality content and overall high levels of Steemit content quality for all of us.
Steemit has an excellent system of validating quality content. So while quantity of crappy material might present a certain level of pain-in-the-ass for curating new stuff, on the long run it might only add to the quality of the content. Keep in mind that Reddit has an astonishing amount of low quality content yet if you don't want to see it you can avoid it completely.
you're spot on -- this is what I had in mind. Reddit's example is another good reason for Steemit to have decent search and similar ways to skip low-quality content you don't want to see.