As a new user I've been careful watching the culture here to understand how one gets their content noticed. I don't see any easy way, particularly if you are writing to a niche topic.
In my opinion the challenge is to build the audience, the user base. If I wanted my content to be seen, but not be paid, then YouTube is much more effective, but I'd like to be both. If not for YouTube's recent behavior toward the small creators I'd probably have simply stayed there.
The bad behavior of investor users, in my opinion, limit the audience growth here. I mean, the signal to noise ratio is very small, so getting to real content involves wading through so much garbage.
Back to YouTube... the reason for their changes in 2016, which basically removed small creators, was to improve the overall content quality. It didn't exactly work... there still are dozens of low content posts, but they are much better edited because the producers need to make professional quality work.
My conclusion is that here, survival is about both producing quality content, using the economic tools such as bots to promote videos, using curation tools, such as flags to kill plagerized content, and hopefully builda userbase that will appreciate the content.
Yea, I think the discovery aspects are most missing on Steemit. Its very difficult to find the best people to follow on certain topics or to discover taste makers. I hope communities will help, but Steemit is still pretty myopic around payout, and there aren't great systems to branch out from that.
I'm starting to get the big picture of Steemit, I think. This is all just transient. In the long run, years out, the noise is going to get cut down and the value is going to come from external links to the real content. The economics of the present day is about paying to have valued content added. I try to imagine how Wikipedia would have evolved had there been pay for those that contributed. To this extent, I'm not too worried about all the weeds in the garden, since this will be taken care of over time.
You may be more of an optimist than myself. It doesn't take much for weeds to overtake a beautiful garden.
We shall see with time, and I hope you are right!
Thanks for the read and comment.
I don't know if I'm an optimist, but I'm trying to understand what Steemit is about. As it is, people just seem to post lots of random "stuff" most of which is low quality. If this is all that Steemit is, then it might as well not exist. (I don't like reading most of what is on this site.) However, if we pay for curation, possibly collection, and at some point start hiding the garbage, we could have some very nice content.
I'm imagining Steemit kind of like the room full of monkeys and a typewriter that given enough time will produce Shakespeare.
In the case of Steemit, we (sort of) have a means to train the monkeys. We also have slightly more talented monkeys that are trained to curate content. Lastly, we have developers and possibly machine learning tools, that will develop algorithms to clean up some of the mess left by letting the monkeys bang on the typewriter.
Is that optimistic? Maybe? Perhaps delusional. :)
I should mention that my research is in the use of machine learning and informatics methods to study materials science and engineering. I take low quality, busy, noisy, messy data and use algorithms to find order and understanding. From my perspective, there are likely some real gems that can be refined from this mess of content.
I think that this hits the nail on the head. It is why I'm on Steemit. I wish I could promote this comment so its read outside this post. I'll write a post tomorrow referencing this discussion. Thank you @somethingsubtle for the post and great conversation!