What Are The Positives and Negatives About Steemit?
For this week we have chosen to ask a rather challenging question in hope that the community will develop a healthy discussion.
Steemit as of now is a platform where people can write posts and earn rewards. It has been in beta for over a year now and it seems that users have developed some concerns in regards to scalability, user interface and rewards.
We would like to hear your opinion about some issues, any issues that you might be of your concern for that matter. What are the positives about Steemit from your point of view? What are the negatives and how they can be improved? What do you like the most about the platform and what is the one thing you could leave out?
The winner of our second post is @guttormf, for his strong engagement and thoughtful comments. He will receive 25% of the $32.82 we received as authors, which is $6.84. We would also like to thank @oldman28, @ogochukwu, @mattclarke, @geneticmemory, @lisamodular, and @motley, and all other commenters who contributed to the debate.
Negative: Little horizontal communication, information is being lost in the mass noise, quite high barriers to entry – to keep up ( due to decentralisation nature?) maybe be lots could be learned from twitter algorithms creating self-sufficient clusters.
Also improved navigation of actual content as well as integration of all the steem blockchain projects within each other, not as they seem now as stand alone, especially with all the new ones coming out.
UPD: Actually, on second thought – reading thru the content, discussions, finding the right followers and clustering around like minded people, makes it rather more human and allows to have a personal journey. AI and algorithms might help mass adoption, but with like most things going mainstream, there is a risk of losing the truthfulness. So balance is key, to achieve it, the communication is a real virtue and must-have for community to prosper without losing ourself.
Positive: All issues have the potential to be heard and therefore solved by this community and keep flourishing.
Positives: Incentivizes quality content, encourages community building.
Negatives: Curation does not work correctly, centralization of voting rewards.
Thoughts & Suggestions:
Beginners will run into a wall that is the learning curve called Steemit. The site is poorly designed with its topics. Go to YouTube. The main focus is on the search bar as well as trending. It encourages exploration. Go Steemit. The main focus is on your home page. This does not encourage exploration.
Curation is broken. Why have a 30 minute delay before the rewards are split favorably for curation? This encourages the votes to focus on the whales rather than the unknown. I can curate content on the new stream but you won't maximize return until after 30 minutes and by then its long gone!
Also in terms of curation, why not reward the early voters of a piece of content? Why not give them a small bonus. A finders fee? But bots could abuse this and users would be incentivized to upvote themselves more.
Sure, that's why we implement this fix and prohibit self-upvoting until the value of the post/comment exceeds that of the self-upvote. Thus, whales can't self upvote until the community verifies their post is worthy. This will also eliminate self upvoting abuse in the comments.
As for bots hunting for early curation rewards, I'm not sure how to combat that. But the downside of that is that new users will get immediate upvotes and encourage them to keep putting the effort in rather than resort to begging and spamming. The only issue is that they ignore quality, but most bots today do the same so not as big of an issue if done properly.
I'm seeing a lot of spam. Makes me not want to go to "New" anymore to find anything worthwhile. That makes engagement for the site harder to achieve.
I shouldn't see any posts that aren't in my native language. There should be a preference for this, with exceptions being multilingual postings that fit the filter. I'm not about to learn Mandarin or Cantonese any time soon, yet Chinese postings make up large portion of what I see in "New", for example.
I'd like any post I make be a potential earner.
Aging out after 7 days is an arbitrary window that doesn't incentivize someone to create. Why post a multi-part story when after a week no one can contribute to the author's motivation?
It circles back to the bot question, no doubt. I'm sure if you lifted the 7-day restriction then a whole army of self-voters would go insane milking the rewards pool like hungry leeches.
Solve the bot problem, some obvious fixes, voting after 'n' seconds a post is live (too fast for a human to read, its a bot!), sensing multiple comments that use the EXACT SAME PHRASE over and over.
I'm sure there are other clever ways to do this. Also consider a small fee to post, something that would hurt a spammer but let newbies float unscathed. Something similar to the "bandwidth" restriction, but tied to a token that can't be easily duped to enable spam campaigns.
Steemit has lots of promise, but if the bot problem isn't solved it will drown in a sea of auto-posted chaos.
We could reduce the posting frequency to once every twenty or thirty seconds. This would reduce the amount of bot responses. We could also tie this built in limitation with reputation and thus encouraging beginners to take time in developing their posts and punish spammers for pushing trash. Lets say that you have no limitations at 25 or above (other than the few second delay mentioned above), and those below have to wait extended periods of time and sit in timeout, with the timeout being longer the further below 25 you are. The max timeout would be a day or something like that.
Positives:
Amazing ability to up-vote and help those in need
Great opportunity for anyone to earn if they work hard even just by expressing their feelings and sharing their life honestly, such as those with illness, despair
Opportunities to make new friends
On the blockchain, private and not corporate owned!
Some amazing kind, caring souls here. :)
Negatives:
Pretty big and a lot of spam / only wanting money posts, so hard to see and find the good posts
Quality posts not seen in 7 days, but could give great value later aren't rewarded, why is there a 7 day cut off? I've voted for older posts, so was that a waste of vote?
Hard to connect to people when no 'about me information' and Introduction posts disappear down the feed.
I find the tagging confusing, seems all sorts shows up and 'AskSteem' is a separate link which isn't user friendly to use.
No way to message and chat, chat rooms can be overwhelming when you don't know anyone or how they work!
Thanks for your great post and asking these questions
I think Steemit is a very strong platform with many people who strongly believe in it. Leaving it's code open source has allowed man users who are developers work on apps and websites in conjunction with Steemit and has really made the platform stronger overall.
As with anything, there are some problems but again, the strong user base helps to solve these problems. Examples include @cheetah which helps search the Web to ensure that all works are original, @sherlockholmes and many others that help protect the reward pool from spammers and scammers.
The best additional I can foresee is the addition of community to Steemit. If you think about the platform in its current form, it has 1 large window, through which all users must get the content they desire. The addition of communities will essentially give multiple smaller windows, which are more specific to the views desires. A more pinpoint viewing will help with scalability greatly, I believe.
Just some thoughts from a guy on the Internet really, but isn't that all of us...? Thanks for starting this discussion @nobox !
Negative: Too many bots. Posts older than 7 days can't earn rewards.
Positive: Community. Content creators earn rewards.
I thought posts earned reward indefinate. So should i repost id want to revive them
Positive: I am here because I like to share information and have conversations and steemit will allow me to do that. So I'll be staying for a bit.
Negative: Very hard for new comers to get traction. One of my posts dissappeared from the new section in less than 15 min and I didn't see a lot of new post to push it down. Also search engine could use some help.
Positive: This is so new and novel that few if any people actually understand its potential.
Negative: This is so new and novel that few if any people actually understand its potential.
well said Matt
Give people the ability to choose for them self if they can or cant see posts and comments from people in the negative rep.
I think it is a very good platform and idea. The one thing I keep hearing over and over is how it is compared to Reddit and how its organized better. Maybe I'm just used to the Reddit platform, but I don't necessarily think that it is organized any better. However, I do believe that Steemit does have a lot of potential, and as more and more people begin to learn about it, the better it will become.