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RE: Steemit - The Billion Dollar Social Media Giant Replacing Reddit & Facebook

in #steemit6 years ago (edited)

Hi David, I really appreciate your excellent videos. Great to see you on Steemit now as well.

Maybe at some point you can also do a more in depth video summarizing the challenges with Steemit. I think the idea of a crypto-based platform for social media is great, but the incentive system on Steemit has very much to be desired. I appreciate that you are very common sense focused in your crypto analyses and we need some more visible Steemit community members to raise the flag on the issues on Steemit as well.

I'll give you just a few examples beyond what you touched upon very briefly as issues in your video:

  1. Distributed value only comes from large whales that monopolize the rewards pool. This means that there are lots of Steemit factions and Steemit "circle jerks" where people hover around key whales to get fed through upvotes. This can't be the right way to drive good content.

  2. Whale downvoting is a mess. This can really become censorship. Lots of whales have started to hate on @haejin because he makes too much with his extremely popular TA analysis. (Check out this example) It's about as childish and ridiculous as I've seen and has really become a small war on Steemit. People really try not to get on the wrong side of certain whales for fear of literally being destroyed by them through downvotes.

  3. Tools for the searching and tracking of good content and similar content is basically non-existent. This means that as a small fish, you are never found on Steemit. It becomes a game of fishing for whales to get recognized. This is tedious and ridiculous as a mechanism for rewarding excellent content.

  4. External reader views / views in general have no influence on votes (neither do the number of subscribers), meaning that it is all up to individual whales to give any real value to the minnows and support excellent content. This trickle down approach just isn't enough to support the many good content developers. Therefore many, including myself, get tempted to just walk away.

  5. I hear lots of bitching about bots on Steemit by whales, but the only reason bots are so wildly popular is because the system is incredibly poor in allocating value in the current system. The consequence is that people realize they can get real value from paying for upvotes. This wouldn't happen nearly as heavily if the other incentivation mechanisms weren't so poorly designed.

  6. Content aggregation is also a valuable service since the search and content tracking on Steemit sucks so badly. Someone making a lot of Steem from providing this was one of the issues that you mentioned in your video. Since it it so difficult to track all the good content, people upvote just being provided good content. Again this is a problem of the Steemit structure and search capabilities. Another issue is that there is no differentiation in valuation approaches in Steemit for original content creation versus the value of being a content aggregator.

Anyway, these are just a few of the issues that I can think of off the top of my head. There are many more.

Honestly, I've really struggled with Steemit as a platform because of these issues. I definitely appreciate it as an alternative to total crap like Facebook, but would very much appreciate seeing you also doing some more insightful analysis on Steemit challenges. Hopefully this might create more impetus to correct some of the problems on Steemit as well.

Again, welcome onboard!

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Great comment. The reward system is so powerful yet could also be its undoing. Such a complex game.

Thanks a lot! Since I never got a response from David on it, I decided I'd write a full blown post on it. Hopefully you like the longer post on the topic here too

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