Big Pay out and some lessons learned about stimulating comments vs payoff. About Randowhale

Hi guys and girls,

for the 3 5 SBD prizes on my post on A defence of the "Four Hour Workweek"

I am gladly paying out the following people for their very constructive comments.

@wealthy-easily
@centaurmystic
@somethingsubtle
@anarchospace

Many thanks for your stories and constructive comments! I hope my reward helps you build your steemit career!
(Ok, ok it was one more 5 SBD prize than announced, too hard to choose!)

Why am I being so generous?

I wrote about the New Rules for the new economy written by Kevin Kelly.
If you read that, you'll realise that the rules have changed! Steemit.com will turn out to be an example of how in the new economy, you can't use the old set of rules any more.
Check out the below rules of that article which contain my reasons for being generous (not that I am not a great guy anyway :) )
#2 Increasing returns,
#3 Plentitude not scarcity
#10 Opportunities before inefficiencies

I am learning about these new rules just like we all are and Steemit.com is a great laboratory for me to do apply these new rules and experiment with them.
To succeed, you need to first have a platform that succeeds, so instead of focussing at this stage on earning some SBD for myself, I gladly help other Steemians along in the hope of course to build a dedicated following.

I want to make it a no brainer for you to dedicate your time and attention to my posts, so you can justify it to yourself putting serious time and effort in commenting on my ideas and posts.
Why?
First, my ideas are rough (like anyone else's). My goals for my Steemit.com blog are best described in this post.
Writing my ideas down helps me to think they need to be sharpened against other ideas and other opinions.

Second, I want to build an engaged followership. The number of followers doesn't mean they are true fans!
I want to discover my 1000 true fans, in turn I hope to become one of your true fans and help you spread your ideas! In this link to Kevin Kelly's post you will find the reason why having true fans can be life altering!

Third. Seeing the quality of your comments is a great way for me to decide if it is worth it to follow you. The curation system in Steemit is still very young and too much good stuff get's buried.
I believe commenting on each others posts is a great way too to be found.
Have a great post yourself with similar ideas?
Please reply in mine with a link to yours, if it helps me and my audience discover relevant ideas, great! I will gladly re-steem your post myself

What did I learn so far with promising a 5 SBD reward?

Sustainability of giving prizes

Unfortunately the prizes for the most part were not attracting enough upvotes to self fund the prizes,
I don't mind in this case, since I got some great ideas and opinions through the comments, most the money I distributed was whale luck money anyway I got from a comment on the HF 19.

For future posts though I need to switch the model.
I like the idea of sharing the SBD author rewards with people who add valuable and insightful comments.
They add value to my posts and ultimately to the Steemit.com platform. But I can't keep subsidizing prizes.

I will Share ALL SBD's earned with re-steemers and commenters in July (See below.)
So the prize will vary, Sometimes that will be not much sometimes it will be BIG
Although it should be minimum a few SBD after @randowhale-ing.

Is Steemit.com allowing good content to rise?

Dunno, I have done a small scope experiment and there might be many reasons why it did not take off.
But from observations it seems the upvote system has its problems, it is too easily rigged by automated voting and today there are problems with "winner takes all" effects.
It's great that the dev's are experimenting with the algorithms to find an optimum solution, and some more experiments will be needed to achieve the goals set out in the white paper:

This is from the Steemit white paper:

The challenge faced by Steem is deriving an algorithm for scoring individual contributions
that most community members consider to be a fair assessment of the subjective value of
each contribution. In a perfect world, community members would cooperate to rate each
other's contribution and derive a fair compensation. In the real world, algorithms must be
designed in such a manner that they are resistant to intentional manipulation for profit. Any
widespread abuse of the scoring system could cause community members to lose faith in
the perceived fairness of the economic system

Steem is designed around a relatively simple concept: everyone’s meaningful contribution
to the community should be recognized for the value it adds. When people are recognized
for their meaningful contributions, they continue contributing and the community grows.
Any imbalance in the give and take within a community is unsustainable. Eventually the
givers grow tired of supporting the takers and disengage from the community

Based on my limited experience so far, I'd say there is still a long way to go.

In my case a substantial prize does not provoke more engagement, there are several problems with steemit.com becoming the platform it wants to be.
The way it is set up, it is not generating a positive feedback loop for me (yet) that invites consumers to become producers (prosumers).
What I am trying to hack together is to create my own virtuous cycle where my content provokes interaction through comments and creates re-steeming which I can reward my followers for.

Both Steemit developers and myself will need to experiment more.
From Steemit.com I would really like to see a system that calculates post earnings not just on upvotes but on comments as well:
It would need a hybrid where upvotes still count of course but are weighted by comments that generate sub-comments.
This is a better signal that a conversation is taking place and will be less easy to manipulate. (of course multiple accounts etc. but robo-comments should attract flagging)

Cute cat videos and pictures are not bringing value to the platform and should not get a snowball effect simply because of robo-voting and already established popularity. It is great that an established writer gets this automatic boost, but it should not be the only reason for post earnings, there should be a quality element too.
( my point of view, please correct me if I am wrong)

If there are a lot of upvotes without a relative increase in comments, there is a strong possibility that the system is being gamed and that the content is not truly valuable enough to discuss.
In my opinion the algorithm should favor organic upvoting over pile on effects to achieve long term quality content contributions.
Otherwise the incentive will become too large for established authors to "ride the system" and just self-vote junk content which will gather upvotes regardless of quality.
Ultimately I think it will go against the long term interest of everyone on the platform and will start to pollute the content to the point of putting off new users which will kill growth.

Follower engagement and follower numbers

I have well over 190 followers, which is great, but I am starting to doubt the value of this metric.
Despite several times announcing a decent prize, it did not seem to reach these followers or spark their engagement.
In the end I would prefer to see half the followers and double the comments.

There were posts where there was only commenter won 5 SBD by default.

This leads to several potential conclusions:

• Steemit.com is still growing up, people are playing it like a lottery with the upvoting and commenting focussed on the "classic" Steemit topics of mostly which is where most of the whale upvoting seems to happen.
  but not yet really engaging with comments outside of the steemit focussed content
  I am sure the scope of profitable topics will grow over time, but it will need to break out of this belly button gazing before it can break through to the mainstream.

• the visibility of content of people you are following is too low because of the speed of the feed (the twitter feed problem)
  By the way a much better way to find good content is https://beta.chainbb.com/ It is a forum outlay of the Steem blockchain and has the same content as Steemit.com but much better organised by topics and tags.

Getting visibility and long form content

Picture source: www.glynlowe.com free to share

Sometimes steemit.com seems like this picture... Being "found" in a sea of rubber duckies...
I put a lot of effort in most of my posts so far but they are lacking visibility.
Don't me wrong, I think this platform is great and results are fantastic so far but it feels it has potential for more, and I'd like to realize my blog's full potential.
We are in the hockey stick segment of the growth curve and being established now will have huge pay-off later.

As anyone, I want people to read my content, aside from the money aspect, I need the feedback to improve my writing.
Long term, I do have the ambition to generate enough income from this platform to make it self sustainable.
Meaning that I earn a decent amount per hour dedicated to Steemit.com potentially even generating a majority of my income. That would be the ultimate leverage

So I will keep experimenting to increase visibility to grow my audience and especially to encourage engagement. The follower number does not mean much if those are "empty" followers. They do not help your profile.

Promoting posts with PROMOTION button

I did it 2 times with 1 SBD each as an experiment, no noticeable result.
@Adil did an experiment with 30 SBD, not much results either.
https://steemit.com/steem/@adil/1st-day-promoted-post-test-results

@arabebtc gave a good write up about promoting posts here
https://steemit.com/steemit/@arabebtc/are-steemit-promoting-system-useful

Boosting earnings through @Randowhale ?

Excellent tool SteemVP.com, it allows you to see the stats per upvoter and follower.
Looking at the experiment I did with @Randowhale:
Using it for 8 times, I found that although initially it seems to boost earnings, those drop over time ( got 4% + upvotes which seemed to gain me 6 SBD at the time, but by the time of payout, this almost disappeared.
Total payout for 8 votes was 13.60 SBD .

Even though I got several 4% + upvotes OVERALL I LOST MONEY WITH @RANDOWHALE
That said, it can be useful initially to "seed the pot" and get the snowball rolling. So it has it's use, but don't expect to get rich.
I am still @randowhale -ing this post for the pot-seeding effect .

Solutions?

I want to get that snowball rolling and see how far and big it can go!
So I think it is time for a new experiment:

For the moment, unless you are well established, long form content is putting too many eggs in one basket.
I am going to switch strategies and create more and shorter posts for a while.
(let me know in the comments how you think about that!).

Also I want to keep rewarding commenters so on select posts I will keep sharing my SBD's earned with top commenters.

I can't keep guaranteeing min 5 SBD payouts but I am going to experiment with sharing ALL earnings of certain posts with commenters, regardless of how high the SBD share gets.
That means if you see a "hit" post of mine, you might get a BIG payout for a resteem or a comment!
As a control there will be other posts I will leave "organic" to see the difference in comments and visibility.

I will experiment in July with following format: ALL SBD's earned will be spilt between:
1 follower who resteemed it and let me know in a comment why (best reason wins)

1 follower for best value comment (measured by either (in priority) most sub-comments by other people, most upvotes or comment length) This means that a good question can also win, you don't need to make huge comments to be eligible!

If you follow me and engage, I'll happily share my rewards, keep an eye out for my posts, re-steem and comment and you will have a good chance to do well! I will announce the winners in the post itself through a replay rather than a separate post.

Questions FOR YOU!

Questions for you my followers (eligible for rewards of course :) )

• Do you think rewarding for comments is constructive?
• Do you think I should do something different?
• How else can I increase my visibility? (remember not upvotes but finding more followers who are willing to engage)
• What other incentives would you like me to see experiment with? (willling to try anything as long as it is self sustainable)

This post is about writing on steemit, and has some great resources in the comments for better writing, also ALL SBD's earned to be split amongst re-steemers and commenters.

If you liked the Tim Ferriss Article, I made a follow up you might like which I will apply the new comment reward system on:
This post is about leverage in your life and why it is so important:

Of course ALL the SBD's I earn from THIS post will also go to

1 re-steemer with a good reason in the comments why you re-steemed it
1 commenter who has a constructive (positive or negative) answer to my logic or questions in this post.

I UPVOTE good commenters too!
I am seeding the pot with @randowhale to get a good start!