.01 steem for your thoughts, or... An observation on steemit from my personal POV.
I attended a live stream with a few of friends that joined steemit a short while back hosted by @ericwilson discussing how we new users felt about the platform.
(OP here: https://steemit.com/dlive/@ericwilson/314d1b36-2718-11e8-8468-0242ac110002)
And of course, after I went to bed my brain decided to actually kick in and start working.
From what I'm seeing on here the basic idea of steemit seems to be news/information driven...with juicer tidbits leading the way getting the most views and upvotes. But the whole system is driven by the upvote. (And full well I understand there is also the community aspect, but everybody wants that upvote too right?) From my understanding there are time constraints with upvotes and comments especially as far as payouts are concerned.
So where I'm going with this is that if it's information that we are passing along, and we have time constraints to obtain upvotes...does that render information obsolete within that time? Once a post is paid out, I don't imagine there are going to be droves of users looking at it because they will want to get in on the fresh material. Are the older bits no longer relevant to steemians? If I wanted to find a particular genre of music on dSound, how does checking out someones old work affect them? An article/post that is over a week old but contains information that doesn't change (a recipe, a workout routine, etc...)
The other thing I notice is the trending/hot hashtags...and a lot of them revolve around steemit/crypto, I understand that's important in a fresh new community such as this, but does that make the platform fold back in on itself? How much amazing stuff is lurking below the radar never to be noticed or upvoted?
Anyway, I'd like to say that I don't want anyone to think I'm shitposting or being absurdly negative about steemit and the community...these are just observations by a n00b with a search for understanding of the system. I plan to stick around and I would like to be a productive member...once I figure out what I'm doing and how I'm doing it. :p
So hopefully none of you think I'm being a dick...and it's still early, so my brain is probably trying it's hardest to defeat me right now. Thanks for hearing me out.
I am going to be addressing this simply from a profit-driven view.
It does seem that there is a "shelf life" for content (no matter what form it takes - written, audio, video, etc), and that "shelf life" is 7 days. It doesn't mean that the content stops being valid, but it DOES decrease (possibly even stop) it's value, both once the 7 days are up and technically, even before (because if it has such a short amount of time to generate profit, it would be inefficient to take the time to produce continuous, consistent high-end content). Thus, what will happen (in my opinion) the majority of time is quick "news updates", as well as simple to produce content that can be generated in a short amount of time (memes, for example), and finally - content that is driven by the very thing that "mints" the money (cryptocurrencies, Steemit, etc).
Now, this isn't to say there isn't high quality content out there, but I am saying is it's going to take a serious amount of digging to find the gems - and it's not their fault. The deck is stacked against them.
Does this make Steemit a less than optimal place to post high-value content? Not at all. It just means that it is going to take even more hard work getting people to see your work, and any profit you earn should be considered - at best - a welcome but fully unexpected surprise. At least, until you have done enough grinding to make your content to be considered "consistently high value" by the people who follow you.
For example, I fully expect and plan on 100% of my content generated on Steemit to be "worthless" from a profit-driven viewpoint, and truthfully, I'm not doing it for the money. My aim is build something (a stable, easy to interact with, high value content generating roleplaying community that uses Steemit as its social media platform) that I feel has the potential to be great. If money follows, awesome. I'll reinvest a lot of it into the above-stated goal and probably use the rest to further a personal goal of my own (published rpg setting).
Sheesh. I don't know if I addressed anything you brought up, but thanks for letting me ramble!