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RE: A fundamental change to my witness voting behavior
Thank you. I have a very simple rule for voting - only underappreciated witness that actually work to build social communities. (Key word - underappreciated) Because, hey, Steem was intended to be a social platform. (And yes, vote trading, bid bots and the like are blatantly asocial) At this time, there are only 10 witnesses that qualify for my votes, and that's just fine. I have refused every single attempt at vote trading. I don't care about how I personally benefit, I'll only do what I feel is right for Steem. If you ever dropped out of the top 20, you will have my vote.
Thank you for your integrity, and of course the support!
@liberosist, I'm half of witness team Sircork. He and I both are very involved in charity work on and off platform, so we had common ground to form a team. The reason I'm commenting is your statement:
This has been a big issue for me lately. I'm co-admin of the @thewritersblock with @gmuxx, and I've watched the mounting angst of writers and other creatives as more and more, Steemit seems to lose sight of its original vision. Since most of us have little control over the platform's direction, I've hoped that a grass roots effort by people with a keen interest in evergreen content (fiction, art, etc.) would help retain users who are drifting away. Paulag posted statistics recently that show new user signup was down by half from March to April. I believe this is due to frustration. Do you have any thoughts about how to turn this around?
Something either has to be the best in class, or the most popular in class for it to succeed. Steemit and steem struggle because it tries to be several things and ends up being a shitty spork instead of a really good spoon or fork. If it doesn't offer easy, efficient ROI without incurring huge tax bills then it loses out to better, more hands-off passive investments in the crypto space, and if it's a shitty social media website due to its catering to large investors over small users then it will never grow as a social media platform.
Investors want to free themselves from the tedium of actively managing their investment, more time spent on steemit is less time spent living in the non-steemit world. Most investors do not want to circle-jerk all day with other people who invested in the same thing. They could probably care less who the other investors are. They just want returns. Getting more involved with steem's ecosystem and trying to maximize returns within it often means losing out on free time, which is what most investors actually want.
Sadly there doesn't seem to be a lot of overlap between these large investors and people who love the arts, and I don't think these investors really want people coming here who hope to make income off their art, either. They just want more traders buying up what they're selling.
There is no turning it around from this aspect, it would be easier to just make a whole new website.
Hi @liberosist, maybe you will like to vote for @castellano as a witness:
"@castellano witness, aims to represent the users of the language and the myriad small projects with sustainability potential (but no means to invest) in hopes of creating a bridge between bigger projects and the user base to increase retention and educate steemians and encourage re-investment of their rewards to avoid extraction mining."
https://steemit.com/witness-update/@castellano/castellano-witness-update-april-15
By the way, I vote for you as a witness because I think it is an important task to vote for those unappreciated witnesses who are striving to improve Steem.
I also agree a lot with the opinion of @lukestokes, we need witness that handle very well both the technical and the social stuff.
I also believe that those witnesses who are doing great things for Steem and the community, should improve their marketing strategy, sometimes it is useless to do something good if nobody knows.
Thanks @joedukeg on behalf of the team behind @castellano
Actually that has been my main problem, to find the time to properly market and report our deeds for the community, I have always been a strong believer that results should speak for themselves.
Sadly the only results we have to show are the communities and subprojects built under the tiny @castellano's umbrella.
Hopefully it will be noticed with the help of users like you that take the time to share our deeds where it matters.
I might add that @castellano is a social experiment, where we aim to incite the users being part of the Spanish speaking community to be empowered to create representative committees bridging and helping understand the gaps between: Users, investors, projects and witnesses.
Our main areas of action are:
Educational projects to increase user understanding of the platform and encourage rewards reinvestment to increase the users stake. (like @reveur)
Sustainable projects to bring and retain high quality content creators, encourage reinvestment and investment in the platform. (Like @celfmagazine)
Curation projects that aim to reward properly good content and retain the best users, and are not a drain-to-own-pockets in disguise.
We also aim to create a tribune to enable discussions and share our views.
For that we have a team working hard into summoning the community to be part of it.
I missed the opportunity of a life time to be able to share and explain all of this in last year's steem-fest but the birth of my daughter took precedence.