Why Steemit Isn't Growing -- IMO
HOW TO ONBOARD NEW USERS AND KEEP THEM
I spent 10 hours recruiting one new user from facebook this week that I thought deserved a chance to be saved from a shitty platform and I thought would fit in nicely here on steemit due to her ability to think freely and express herself and engage people in a meaningful way. She made an intro post and burnt out her ability to comment in 1 day. Now what?
Of course I can delegate and fix this problem instantly but let's talk about the people that aren't recruited like myself and take away their ability to comment as well as give them a meaningless upvote. Would I have stayed around if I was a new user after hard fork 20 if I wasn't allowed to speak? Who cares about a decentralized platform where you have the right to free speech finally but you are not allowed due to mana? Rc? really? I have been here almost a year and don't understand this, how is a new user going to adapt to this type of set up? Seriously. I am sure someone up there high on the chain has a very good reason for doing this but from the perspective of a new user this is really strange. I was a new user that dumped a shit load of fiat into this system and if I was not allowed to comment there would have been zero investment by me. Is this what we want here? New users having zero interest in investing in the platform? Do we care about what new users think? Do we care about what investors think? If we don't, I think it's time we do--This is a shit show happening when new users can't leave meaningful comments do to lack of mana. This is more absurd than atm fees. Just some food for thought people making decisions-- what are you doing?
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Well said. We are finally seeing more and more senior members like yourself standing up to be counted and demonstrating in simple terms that this platform will NOT grow further unless we have more new members. That is a simple truth.
I am tired of hearing philosophical arguments from some people telling us about taking responsibility for buying our own stakes and 'nothing is free' blah blah blah, but this all very well, but without new numbers, the blockchain dies.
I read a post from someone last week, @themarkymark I think that said there are just around 12000 active users here right now. That is dreadful after 2 years and something needs to be done.
Thanks again for speaking up and best wishes to you. I was recommended to follow you by another member. Seems its going to be a great choice :-)
its nonsense, we have enough creators here, now we need an audience. that's the way I see it. Do we just expect our audience to look at all of our beautiful content here and not comment? I think every member here has at least 100 people they could invite here from other social media platforms, what's the hold up? Nobody would put themselves through this except content creators so none of us are inviting people. It takes so much effort to bring people here and explain to them nonsense they don't want to know and why would anyone spend this time? I am really curious who came up with this brilliant idea, I think their SP should be stripped away. Markymark is a voice of reason for sure, I always listen when he speaks because he knows his stuff, even though he won't admit how smart he really is, just a pancake lover at heart. I hope we can get some common sense going on here, too many brains and not enough common sense in my opinion, I appreciate you putting in your two sense.
It may be stating the obvious, but one does not even need an account to be part of the audience.
sign out and reply to this comment. it doesn't work. I am not talking about spectators, I am talking about a participating audience, people that are not looking to make money posting but might make some here and there from comment upvotes.
I understood you & that's what people do on FB ALL the time.
I always wondered why I don't see people making a lot of money on their articles.
I finally figured out that 90% of use can vote till we are blue in the face & it doesn't even give you a penny.
The penny I just gave you is the FIRST time my vote has counted & that's ONLY b/c of the person who helped me b/c I could no longer comment. He gave me some SP.
it's nice to see some cents isn't it, would like to see more sense around here :)
Now that would have deserved the emoji that ROLLS around on the floor, but alas, I have no clue how to get emojis on here (sigh)
yea, i don't use emoji here unless i copy them from someone leaving them, i can get them on my iphone but not my computer, i am in the discord now if you want to save your mana :)
Point taken.
I'm sure you are right in some ways but I also think that this system will learn and adapt over time. Maybe HF21 will be the thing that turns it around. Regardless I believe that steem is the wave of the future.
the future relies on new users, if they can't even comment and their upvote is worthless how are they going to meet people and engage? let's roll it back to 19 and call it 21. let the wave of the future wash in new users that feel welcome so they stay and engage.
There is no sense trying to bring in oodles of users while still in Beta. Imagine HF20 with 5 million active users... or six million or .... 😎
What does HF20 mean?
So I shouldn't encourage people to come to Steemit?
Well FUCK ME, b/c in the last week FB has been deleting TONS of FB Pages (if you haven't heard) because they are doing the corrupt gov't's DIRTY WORK & trying to censor all of the SMART truth seekers.
So I've been trying to up get people to sign up to Steemit, but how can I do that if it's just too hard??? : (
I certainly can't teach them, I'm still learning myself.
Hard Fork 20. It is steem's way of saying version. HF 20.0, 20.1, etc..
Got it, thanks
Nobody is bring anybody here, it's too much work and it's like an invite with a disclaimer. HF20 with 5 million users, I would like to imagine that. Would have been the same mess but with more people pissed off.
I think you just hit the nail on the head.
The bar needs to be set higher to allow more interaction!
I set up an alt account recently and it would have been hopeless wout me being able to bung it a 15SP delegation from this account.
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Me too mate. I set it up so I could play the DApps without spamming up my feed (not that there is anything worth looking at anyway lol)
1 comment and a couple of likes, game over! There was also meant to be fast account creation, but that comes with no SP. If you wait the normal week or two, you get the loaned 15SP as normal, but again, a problem that was supposedly going to be addressed but hasn't.
I like reading, I'm no good at writing, and right now, there is nothing but dross and posts about Steem! So as a blogging platform, it's not fit for purpose unless you like agreeing with everyone else about Crypto!
Edit that. Actually, you look like an interesting chap :-) Thanks!
get rid of the 13 week power down first of all, this is not a ponzi, or is it? roll it back to HF 19 and back to the drawing board in my opinion, not that it matters what investors say.
You think the price of steem is low now, try it without the 13 week power down. 😎
I am willing to try. Serious investors would shy away from the time it takes to power down and would just hold liquid steem, which would not help the reward pool at all. I am willing to lose the rest of what i have here to find out.
My feeling is that.there are very few serious investors. The only thing to put pressure on the price, in my opinion, is the need to power up to use the system in any constructive way. The inflation built into steem (as well as its DPoS nature) will never make it a traditional investment in my opinion. This thought was covered, somewhat, in an old post of mine. A link to it is included below for your reading pleasure.
https://steemit.com/steem-network/@novacadian/where-is-the-trust-in-proof-of-brain-mining
damn straight I hit the nail on the head, I am glad you noticed that. My point is made and that is good, it's hard enough for new users, now it's pointless. wtf ? lol
If steeminc were saying 'oops mistake there' and in the process of correcting it I'd understand it.
Interestingly I always only ever recommend steem to people with a heavy cautionary note of the massive downsides.
Now I wouldn't recommend it fullstop!
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My understanding is that RC Delegation is the planned fix. It seems like more business for the bot merchants to me, yet we will see.
i agree with him on that and don't disagree with you here. we will have to see if the hf20 improves anything, I don't see any improvement yet
Your observations are as valid as any of us. Even the Devs seemed to have been caught flatfooted when HF20 kicked in.
I think so... that and large dapps like @steemhunt using their SP to onboard new users. I think that's the idea going forward.
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if we don't get to this fullstop mentality how can we grow? the cautionary invites should be avoided and we do this by overcoming the objections. the commenting shortage is where i draw the line, because there is no teachable moment here to over come it. https://discord.gg/xjWxR7j had the invite on paste for another friends i just invited , so why not you come by too :)
@revisesociology - so should I invest all my time on Minds instead?
Just terrible
What's 'Minds'...?
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@revisesociology - here's my link - https://www.minds.com/OurFreeSociety
Judging from your conversation above it seems yr better off here!
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@revisesociology - well one can be on more than one SM platform at the same time LOL
I'm not sure how me duplicating posts/articles on 2 different platforms will fair. SEO wise that's not good, but I don't think it would harm either site much since they have so many members.
But the problem as I read is that there aren't enough people ON Steemit & I'm pretty sure there's a ton more on Minds. At least active people.
https://www.minds.com/8653800 I was there before I came here.
@vladivostok - why did you leave?
just a natural transition, I was doing both for awhile but I followed a friend here that was helping me a lot on minds, I like it but there was just something about it that I didn't like, not sure what really. Are you still there? I still have my account and posted a few times since coming here but not so much, I did pretty decent there for a short time and had fun. its weaned me off facebook really nicely I will say that
I joined last month and as a minnow I find it hard to get my articles noticed, I don't know if this is the norm ? but after writing a 1000 word article it is disappointing that nobody sees apart from the paid bots.
As someone who would like to create interesting articles and not bothered about the financial side it does make you wonder why.
If you don't have a rating of over 50 then it looks like everyone passes you bye, but as a newbie I may have it all wrong and time will tell. If it wasn't for the minnow support project I would have earned very little from my articles, however I enjoy writing them firstly.
Just an observation
This is what I am talking about, if you lose your voice its impossible. Join my discord too, you can promote there and not use RC and my trail will vote you https://discord.gg/xjWxR7j my hope is every new person enjoys doing this enough to suffer, one can always hope.
Thanks for the invite vladivostok, have joined and posted. A great way to find other interesting post.
Without hope we have nothing, Cheers
without hope we are doomed, appreciate the sentiment and glad you joined the ranks :)
@vladivostok - I joined too. t/y
i am happy to see this, its a pretty cool place :)
@waynefoster - what's the minnow support project?
ask me in the #vlady chat chat and we will show you how to sign up for it, it's a cool deal
@vladivostok - I have no idea what a vlady chat chat is. You mean in discord?
On another note, I notice you are posting everything from Dtube, right?
Did you read my blog question about how to post videos directly onto Steemit using some software instead of uploading them to Dtube which is no longer working for most of us?
I'm off in a min. FYI.
Thanks
oh I see more problems than that. One is that nobody has any reason to read posts, while people here are often just creating posts for money. When people do it for money and not because they like it quality is going to go down... So basically we have a ton of sub-par content and nobody with any reason to read it. At least my platform attempts to give people a reason to read it. Maybe in the future I can gameify stuff enough that people do it for fun.
lot's of truth in this comment, I agree. I spend a ton of time curating and usually it's from my post promotion in my discord as well as curating in Onelovedtube...so I do read posts and comments, they are both important, I hope you can help to improve the fun factor with you platform.
I completely agree bro whats the point, someone is benefiting but it sure aint the new guys, and there isnt going to be any mass adoption now anytime soon, i cant keep anyone here either especially now.
Amen to that! Wow. I'm back. I think. Not sure what I've got left, so must conserve my Replies...for now. Thanks for all the great replies on this post. PreeshATE all, ya'll.
thanks lexxi, I guess you figured out who this post was about :)
Agreed
:)
Well, I will throw another juicy bit into the mix. I think the idea is that new people buy 50SP so they can function here. Ok, but I just read a comment that made a lot of sense. Inflation for Steem is set at 8.66% for 2018. So, buying and holding steem is a losing proposition unless the up votes on the content you create can surpass this 8.66%. If you hold 1000SP, you would need about 1700 self up votes to break even. That means you have to post and up vote yourself 4-5 times at 100% every day just to break even :/
What is left for your followers? You only regenerate 20% VP, or 10 votes, per day right?
I make videos and it takes at least 6 hours per concert just to get the foota... Forget it, I'm not even going there....
We need people to buy Steem or we're done.
Your math seems off.
After buying enough SPs to gain minnow status (500 SPs) earlier this year, my total SPs is now about 604SPs, so that is 20% in about 6 or 7 months.
If it is rewards you are after then curation on big paying posts is a good approach.
The following is my voting habits since January....
My math is rough figures but not off. We are talking about 2 different things.
Say you bought 1000 Steem in January, and you did absolutely nothing; no posting, no comments, nothing. How much Steem would you have right now?
My bad.
Not a problem for me at all. We Steemians don't all think about currency creation and it's effect on the currency that already exists; but the investors do. Unfortunately the institutional investor has a bigger influence on Steem than we do, even when they don't own Steem. I watched the price of Steem go up as an entity bought up about $15 million worth of Bitcoin and that means the same could happen when he sells his Bitcoin. ( He may have sold already, I'm not in the habit of watching the market all the time)
Greetings!
My feeling about where goes Bitcoin goes the crypto market does not mean steem being a good investment at this point. It has too much inflation at the moment. Once enough eyes are on the Chain, then big money for advertising purposes may follow. Placement content at the very least paid for in steem for corporate run contests.
Ug. There is a shudder at that thought. Subscription monitored portals might be the future. 😎
1000
If pure liquid steem - maybe ( I do not know)
But SP is different. Have you ever see this:
https://steembottracker.com/steemdash/?account=vladivostok
Every 3 seconds, by doing JUST NOTHING
sp is not different
1000 sp is 1000 steem ...vesting may be different but it's still 1000 steem, thats doesn't change
It is different, as @diginomad pointed out.
You can think about Steem Power as STEEM held in a fund.
VESTS are shares in that fund. If I'm not mistaken, 15% of inflation goes to that fund.
So if you power up 1000 STEEM you get amount of VESTS that is worth 1000 STEEM at this moment. VESTS continue to be worth more STEEM and that's why you see that amount of Steem Power you have increases all the time.
sort of
lets say for sake of argument and these numbers are not accurate for the example
let's say i powered up 100 steem....for 100 sp,,,you had 100 vests for this, if you power down you will still have 100 steem but if you power up again and a year of inflation goes by at 15% and you power up 100 steem again this new 100 sp is now only valued at 85 vests but 100 sp is 100 steem no matter what. this makes sense to me and if i am wrong i am open to better explanations. i think the vests are what determine the voting power, so this is where it might makes some changes
it's a rough road and a steep learning curve for sure, and it's true without investors it won't sustain. This is part of my dislike with the changes in hf20, they just seemed to make it even harder for new users. We need to attract investors and I believe the people here are what make it great, and we find this out by engaging, we can't limit how much someone engages or it becomes less attractive to new people and investors, I appreciate your opinion on this.
I see mass adoption as the only viable solution. There are way too many barriers to Steem. For starters, Steem is expensive to get into. Euro, paysomeone, Dollar, paysomeone, BTC, paysomeone, Steem :/
Put it in reverse and pay 3 more some ones to get your Euros back. Who is getting paid here? Me? Hahaha.
Ok, once you are on Steemit having purchased your 50 SP and powered up, you can now start interacting with people who want quality content but never define what quality content is, uhhm, exactly. On 1 hand, they proclaim the platform should replace FaceBook, but scoff at short one liner posts, and may flag you for having the audacity to force them to read garbage as if there are no other posts to read. Now there is such a thing as the Shit Post Police, although they don't call themselves that, where you can get paid for enforcing unwritten rules by flagging.
Don't get me wrong, I love Steemit and some of the fabulous characters I've met here; but it's set up like an add agency with nothing to market but itself. We want entertainment but won't support those that create it so they leave. We need a way to turn that around.
Dear @vladivostok, I fully share your view that the beginner is very difficult to stay afloat and not lose patience while he adapts to the platform and not understand what was happening... the opportunity to grow from plakton to big fish is very small and people lose interest. A very serious problem in assessing the quality of the material laid out. If you are a beginner and laid out a good material for $ 10,000 real intellectual and unique value, your material here can be estimated at ZERO, as: 1. It simply will not notice in a stream of other messages. 2. It will not be able to evaluate, as it does not entertain anyone. 3. The other upvote even 100 small users will give only 0.1 in the amount and the post will not stay in the top... and drown in the stream.
this is all true, and if you take away the ability to comment and engage, how else can you stand out. comments are golden and if they are limited to people who need them most this does not make sense to me, there would need to be a really good reason to take away this gold from new users. Zolota!!
Alas, I do not see a way to solve these problems...
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