My 1,000th Post: Why SteemIt Sucks! (what can we do to improve it?)
I've been here long enough now, posted plenty of blogs, tonnes of comments, and spent enough time on the platform to start forming some opinions. You may not agree with all of these, but I am sure you will agree with some, and may have some of your own piss-off's. It's important to voice these concerns, make them public, discuss them, and over time we can improve them. We want SteemIt to grow, we do!, we are all invested in it together, we need to continue with the positives and look to fix the negatives.
You know what really grinds my gears?
1. Self curation is plain wrong.
HF19 was exciting, I got excited, you got excited, it was great...but now that the euphoria is dying down a real flaw is beginning to emerge. If self-voting is profitable, then why would others vote for you, why vote for curation, for posts and comments you like? There is no incentive, which is why we are seeing more and more users especially those with more firepower, mostly self-voting. @jerrybanfield posted a comprehensive video on self-voting, discussing how you can double your account every 181 days, he also commented that it won't last. It needs to stop, it is unhealthy for the platform, it ruins curation and the whole point of SteemIt, it completely stops the spreading of wealth to new people, and will accelerate the pace people quit...what's the point of participating if you can't get votes.
2. Commenting robots/spam.
This is an increasing problem, it's increasing because it is profitable to robo-spam comments, either via just copy/paste or using an actual robot "Hi, great blog, you are really amazing, I followed you, follow-me plz, I f'ing love you".
I admit, I photoshopped that one a bit, but comments like these are all over the place, and if you go look at the users histories they are getting upvotes, earning money on their comments, they are getting paid...which means it won't stop. What can you do? Well first of all please don't vote for them, don't give them an incentive, you can flag if you want. But the problem is more systemic, and we will need a fix that addresses it from the ground up. Should we be keeping a list of the culprits, shaming them publicly, I don't know, but I do know something needs to be done.
3. The incentive system is easily manipulated.
This is a more general complaint, and I don't know what the solution is. I can think of dozens of ways to game this platform, although I am reluctant to say them as I don't want to give ideas to people who would actually use them. Most of them involve multi-accounting or 'colluding' with friends, some of which is against ToS but that isn't going to stop many people. If you are willing to be unscrupulous you can earn a lot of money on here, which is a problem, there is no real mechanism to get rid of bad behaviour. Sure you can flag users posts and comments, but that only takes you so far, and what stops them from dumping their Steem to a fresh account and starting over? Also...flags use vote power? And what about a bunch of people deciding to flag someone just to screw them over....sigh...
4. Quality content isn't (usually) upvoted, whales are upvoted.
Go look at the trending section, now go look at the hot section...almost all the posts are written by high rep/high steem accounts, yeah...whales! I realize this is sort of the point, and I don't begrudge whales all the glory and Steem they have, after all, we all aspire to be rich one day as well. And...much of this content is very very good, don't get me wrong. But what does grind my gears is some of the terrible content that does really really well, the way the voting system is set-up people pile-on, even if they shouldn't, ie. if a whale already voted other whales should almost be avoiding that post as their curation will be severely diminished. If you have a vote worth $10+ you can probably post anything and do very well on it, you could start a series about poo, just take a picture of a poo everyday and post it in #photography #poo and you will do well, in fact, you could probably post the same image every day and still do fine. Where is the incentive to post interesting content if you make just as much posting poo?
all images sourced from Pixabay
Thanks for reading my complaints. Disagree? Agree? Have more complaints to add to the list? I want to hear from you, let's make SteemIt better together! I have lots of positive takeways as well, but we'll save those for next time. Cheers @moneybags
I basically agree with everything you said, but I would like to take this opportunity to take the edge off your criticism of self-voting...
I state that it is okay and, perhaps, even constructive to upvote yourself when you make a good post and get zero response. I've made hundreds of posts on Steemit where I took up to as much as an hour or more of research, formulation and refining of a comment only to earn $0.00. In this case, I believe it is okay to upvote yourself and perhaps you are morally obligated to do so unless you consider your own efforts to be worthless tripe.
In general, I've seen a slight improvement in the upvoting problem lately, but Steemit has a long way to go in this area.
My best understanding of upvoting success on Steemit can be summed up by Pappa-Pepper's article:
I appreciate the feedback. I think your depth of commenting is not the norm on this platform, and agree that good content deserves reward, if it is your own or not. But my guess is you do good comments because you enjoy good conversation, adding value etc... In a world without self-votes it seems to me that perhaps others would hand out votes more freely to others, and you might be rewarded in that manner. Also, as long as it exists, it only makes sense that you would allocate at least some portion to self-voting, others are doing it kind of forces you to, I think 100% is too much though, and that is the incentive right now to just only vote your own stuff. Cheers
I agree that not enough quality content gets upvoted because they don't even have a chance to see the light of day!
I just spent several hours scrolling through new posts and there's only that much scrolling I can do in a few hours! Occasionally, I find something that looks interesting and I get really excited, but when I Google it, I find out it's just copy and paste!
But there are the rare times when I truly hit upon a diamond!
Although I want to help discover new authors and offer encouragement, sometimes it just seems easier to follow the established authors and upvote their posts.
If anyone has good suggestions on how to identify good posts, please do share! I feel like I must be doing something wrong because my efficiency is very low...
You are one of the few doing good work, manual content curation, ie. searching for gems is really really challenging. I do a daily publication and I wanted to add some top undiscovered posts, but found a similar problem...either its copy/paste or its just too hard to find. I've seen some work being done that includes word count, but that is a bandaid and skips a lot of non-text content, which is some of the best we have on the site, art/photos/poems/music etc... I hope there is a method out there somewhere as well. Cheers
Good one Moneybags, ya need to jump on that poo posting :)
Hah, yeah...I think it only works for whales...I actually wanted to test it before I posted this, but just don't have the firepower to get people to follow along
wow...a thousand posts.
I'm impressed.
Hehe, Still a long ways to go! 12612 posts
I agree with all of your points.
I've found all the great posts and accounts as a result of Google searches, including this one.
How will people stick to Steemit, if they can't find any decent content via trending and hot tabs? I don't even mention the new and promoted tabs.
What I observed in my first three days is that people don't act here naturally as they would in other social networks, such as Facebook. They avoid upvoting to avoid losing their voting power.
The fact that you can't resteem an older post doesn't make sense either. This is internet. You should be able to resteem something however old it is.
One more thing. Be careful whose post you flag. If they turn out to be a whale, they can kill your account.
all valid points.. I agree.. it's an interesting thing to watch unfold indeed.. I think I might have to start using the #poo tag from now on
Hi, great blog, you are really amazing, I followed you, follow-me plz, I f'ing love you
Great post bro. Thanks for sharing. Keep it up!
I'm a newbie to this but I tend to agree with what you have written after a couple weeks of reading posts here. A lot of posts come off as trying too hard. I want more genuine original content.
Heh, yeah! More genuine content, and specifically an easier way to find that content would be nice. Cheers
It is way too easy to abuse the self-voting system. It's great that many users aren't abusing it, but in the long run it seems like a big weakness that anybody can just start voting for themselves nonstop if they want.
I don't really know what solution can be done that would fix it, though.
Seems like the simple solution is just don't allow self-voting, there are some pretty obvious workarounds, but this would be at least a partial fix.
Although all of your points are valid, I agree with the last one more than others...I see some stuff that is posted by Whls that is plain Poo but gets $$$$$s because, well, becoz they are whls...
Good for them. My only problem is lot of great content gets thrown into abyss because no one notices it within the 7 days or whatever the time frame is...
Some users have gone out of their way to help curate some content that doesn't get pushed to the top with votes, but the problem is deeper, perhaps there is no solution, but I have a feeling there is a better way. Cheers
Let's hope for it!!
This is driven by blockchain/technology - if there is no 'solution', well, then we are dealing with broader/bigger/worse limitation than a site that is controlled by 'ad revenue' driven FBs or similar!?
I agree with the underlying criticism that you have and understand that it stems from your desire to improve the platform, which is admirable. After all, steemit is inextricably tied to steem, and if the perception of steemit as a platform is poor, then that may correspondingly reflect in a diminished market value for steem.
I've only been on this platform for a few weeks and it's quite apparent to me that quality content is not regularly seeing the light of day. I'm not sure why that is but it is something that will need to be addressed in the final version once this beta pilot expires.
Whale accounts are cool and all but ultimately if a newcomer's content isn't afforded an opportunity to gain visibility due to consistently trending whale posts, the platform will essentially highlight only a select few viewpoints/interests. I do hope that it gets better with time and constructive feedback for improvements should be encouraged by all.