Unpopular Opinions, Casual Posting and Moving Forward.
Hey Everyone,
Have you ever wanted to make a quick post and make a point, ask a question, or just share something you found interesting?
I remember making a few posts about nothing, but being concerned I would get called out by the Quality Control group on Steem and now Hive. That's not social media, that some weird type of writers guild. The problem with that is not that many people are want to be authors.
On Steem I have always been an advocate of not stressing out users and letting them post casual content and having curation be the solution for sorting it out. This is difficult due to autovoters, differences of opinion and other factors.
I made my first post on Hive and totally admit, I didn't put any effort into it.. Just a little test to see if all the autovoters were working. They were... So, were the Quality Control groups. It was downvoted down to zero. If quality content is your goal, that was fair. What if we just want some casual users though.
I got to thinking since most of the groups who were into large downvotes ended up over there, we could use this time to make Steem the "fun" platform.
If you want to write cute little essays, and shakespeare level posts and think enough other people want to read it and do that... Maybe you would gavitate towards that.
I've probably said a million times, I am not a want to be author and I never wanted to be.
I like business, I like markets and I like marketing. When I say marketing most people think of advertising, but marketing usually starts with understanding your market space.
3 billion people a day turn to social media to read or write mostly casual posts and leave the "Quality Content" to a handful. I've always been concerned that our focus on Quality actually takes the fun out of Steem.
If we want all of our users to focus on Quality Content we just eliminated a huge part of that.
While I am opposed to completely removing downvotes, I am onboard and support the idea that we want and need casual users, casual content and more activity.
I don't want people to stress if their content is good enough, I want people to transact.
How do we support that? Lot's of people curating, and when I say curating I mean giving all sorts of casual content small votes. Which by the way is a great strategy for curation rewards as well.
I wrote yesterday about having 8 weeks left to decide if we can save Steem and whether or not I have any interest in Hive.
Let's spend these 8 weeks encouraging people to post and engage!
The monetary aspect of Steem makes the difference between blogging platform and casual anything-goes-social media more explicit, and at the same time the people who invented the proof of work concept didn't understand communication and entertainment at all. I think it is simply a design error. On a blog or on Medium you would never see anyone just posting a meme without doing a bit of writing craft to make it work in the context.
Using the term work in proof-of-work does kick the ball onto the blogging half of the football field where people actually work for their Steem, but Ned and Dan obviously was aiming at something like Facebook. As there are no other ways of communicating than writing blogposts (or go elsewhere like Discord) the platform is simply too primitive to take care of what it should. Maybe a shitpost option could be added so the auto voters stop voting on silly things... It would take some redesign in any case.
https://medium.com/@paulmerrill/the-shortest-medium-post-d6bb2486fc0a
Writing craft of the coquette sort :)
I think even for people who are inclined to be "authors", having space for more causal social stuff is useful. When social media works well you get to know people as people. So even if you follow someone because you think they have interesting insights about X, Y, or Z you might also be interested in little details about their life, or their thoughts about other things, or what they think is funny, etc.
I used to be active on Google+, and at one point they introduced a feature called "Collections" which were like categories that each person would create for their own content. You could subscribe to just an individual collection without following everything a person wrote, or if you followed a person you could unsubscribe from particular collections. This gave you control over what would show up in your feed, e.g. "I'm interested in what this guy has to say about video games, but I don't really care about what music he listens to". I found that it helped me feel less daunted by the "expectations" that "my audience" had for the kinds of thing I posted about. If it was far enough afield from my "normal" posts I could just create a new Collection for it and people could opt out if they wanted. That psychological difference made me feel more open about posting stuff and made it easier to post more, and feeling less straitjacketed made it more pleasant to interact with the platform.
What a thoughtful and insightful view.
Yeah, some days I want to really make a point and think about things...
Sometimes I want to just make a quick crack! :) The autovotes generally stop me from feeling free to joke around a bit.
LET'S MAKE STEEM the FUN PLACE!
I like where this is going. I think communities was suppose to solve that but I think they are still being discovered. I like this thought you have.😀
Oh my God!
Thank you for giving voice to my feelings.
Yes to my most intimate feelings regarding the "High Criticism" in Steemit.
Quality content is very subjective. I like it when people K.I.S.S - Keep it simple and sweet. Anything that does not arrest my attention in the first few seconds do not get read. I also leave when I have to ask myself, what is his point?
Some posts come to a page, when it could be summed up in a paragraph. Some might think those are quality posts. I do not agree. Of course, there are exceptions, like when explanations and elaborations are needed. That is okay.
I always post in the farting community and nobody engages, I am ready to quit
lol, yeah... maybe pick Boogers for a while see if that gets more engagement
maybe I'll start the Booger Community next !
great idea! something like the color of your boogers today post.. lol then next one is the biggest boogers of the week contest and win 100 steem for the winner. lol
If you quit farting, you're gonna feel very ill...
Alright whatsup. You have always been the voice of reason. I chanted Whatsup for president but you never took it serious. Now here you go again making good suggestions.
I dont want to comment on the DV. They have completely become something different from what they were supposed to be.
But I love the casual posting idea. I was always thumbs up for it. Somehow everything turned into a moshpit for quality posts. When that brought in really long text boards of posts then people wanted shorter posts. When memes came in it was again to no no no lets go back to long posts. WTF. Quality posts, as subjective as they are, have their own space and community. Writing communities, elitist communities and what not.
Why not just have casual fun on the blockchain, be yourself and make a few genuine cents out of it. Isnt being yourself the best?
You cant have a small, elitist, unwelcoming attitude to the masses, coz the masses aint about qualiy, and expct gold.
SO I love your idea. Lets have casual posts, let people who love casual posts interact with them, lets have quality posts, they dont interfere at each other...especially coz we have communities now and everything will go on its merry way, and best case scenario DV get their original use case back.
Totally agree, and let's be kinder where we disagree and use our voices to discuss differences. Such novel ideas.
Maybe even celebrate differences!
I haven't posted much in a while, so my opinion may not count, but...
That is something that you get fussed at for not going over to H... and then you post and get downvoted to nothing. What a welcome ! LOL.... jeepers.
I think it is nice to be able to do some of every kind of post. Sometimes I have had a decent amount of photos and content and sometimes I just wanted to make a quickie. It's not really a "free" atmosphere/vibe if you can't feel free to do both and it be ok. That being said, I am small enough I don't really have auto votes, so That is not something I have to consider.
I have not gone over yet. I don't have a reason, I just haven't, but most of the folks that interacted with me have gone, so it is too quiet now. Still haven't made a final plan though.
Yeah the autovotes are an issue for casual posting.
Honestly I think both platforms are weaker now.
Well your account value popped up over there :-O
agreed.. your view on this is what drives my weekly shitpost.. although I haven't done one here for a while now..
I like your weekly shit post
I am one of the 'quality content defenders', but at the same time I have nothing against 'casual users' - they just shouldn't expect to earn 50 dollars per short post (especially as it's very easy to make a lot of minimal posts per day.
If I see that anybody puts much effort in an article I may grant him a 100 % upvote as a sign to appreciate these efforts, and also because the topic, the information he gives me is interesting and/or addresses my sense for aesthetics.
'Casual users' can play an essential role for the progress of STEEM but that doesn't automatically mean that I should reward their posts as much as I reward my preferred authors.
For me it's alright that different kinds of users coexist.
And, as we are talking about it, personally I really don't like autovotes, the way to upvote content without reading it. In my eyes that's no real human interaction. The only person I auto upvote is my wife, @kobold-djawa, but even that I regret from time to time ...
maybe we the community should set a threshold for casual content rewards and quality content reward? for example, a photo and with less than 100 words should not be rewarded more than 5$ for example and Quality content not more than 40$ for example, ; so the reward pool not being take out much from and can be distributed more evenly to all users poster/curators..
I think such a rule would be too strict and not flexible enough. Imagine for example that a great artist posted exactly one really fantastic image. Should he only earn five dollars?
Another idea is to implement 'diminishing returns' in way that after the first published article every further post of the same author made within 24 hours would have a lower probability to earn the same amount of money as the previous one (upvotes on posts of the same author within 24 hours would have less and less effect; similar like your voting power exhausts with every upvote you grant).
Authors who invest much time in single posts were not affected because anyway they cannot produce many posts within a short period of time.
However, most important in my opinion is that the big stakeholders focus on rewarding quality content.
Furthermore there must be a way to curb abuse like for example @haejin / @ranchorelaxo is doing it by producing ten minimlistic 'posts' per day and then giving them 100 % upvotes.
This should be included in the threshold special criteria for an artist and photographer with their original works, maybe they put special tag like original artwork/photography for example, then community with proof of brain will make their own decision whether to agree or disagree on the post reward based on that factor.
This is a great idea if the developer or anyone with technical skills can implement that,but need support by most of the big stakeholders and community top witnesses, as steem blockchain is DPOS. Any great idea will not be heard and implemented unless you have a big stake or have enough support from big stakeholders here.
I think those big stakeholders have their own definitions for contents they see good for their own eyes/brain/emotional level satisfaction too. Unless they all delegate to this one curation accounts that only focus on quality content based on this specific Standard Operation Procedure of what Quality content should be and worth big reward/upvote without question.
For @haejin case, I think he is not that heavy abuser compares to some account that purely milking here; they use likwid to liquidate their reward post instantly and send all their steem reward to exchange and sell it for other cryptos, I just hope they won't crash steem price to zero in doing that,but some have clearly stated their desire to see steem price crash to zero/worthless.. Also, @haejin @ranchorelaxo do not power down their account and only use the usual 7 days 50/50 rewards liquid steem to transfer into the exchange; I think he will not have the desire to crash steem price to zero or worthless, because why would he let that happen?
I think that should be the key anyway when it comes to evaluation and rewarding of posts ... I am not convinced that additional rules are necessary here, but I am also not completely against them ... lets wait and see what other community members think.
True. I like to throw in ideas so that others may discuss them.
Nevertheless, they should recognize (as I did), that actions which contribute to long term success of the blockchain (by attracting and retaining new users) are more beneficial in the long run than methods like circle-voting etc. which lead to a maximal short term profit.
Of course they can convey responsibility to curation services, but not everybody does that. I also only delegated a part of my STEEM power and prefer to vote myself with the bigger part of it.
He is purely milking here with ten heavily rewarded copy and paste posts every single day!
What's the sense of being a social media platform if everybody rewards only himself? Imagine everybody started doing that? Should I do that, too? Fortunately, I just can't because it's against my principles.
In HIVE he stopped because other whales kept flagging him, which I really appreciate (oh yes, not everything is bad on HIVE but good here on STEEM - or reversed).
To stop people like @haejin there is one of the reasons why my curation rewards on HIVE are significantly higher than here on STEEM (because the remaining rewards pool for honest users is bigger).
Of course that doesn't mean I would defend HIVE witnesses or users who are also milking STEEM and cash out everything,
Thanks for sharing your thought @jaki01 the world made of many kinds, and so does steem users I guess, and this one whale might just kind of anti-social on social media platform.. hehee