Newbie lovers, please stop ignoring older minnows
Dear Steemians, I was writing this all down in my morning blog and by the end, I decided it needs its own post.
So I saw this new project here on Steemit where a bot is going to downvote self-votes on comments (if I'm getting this right). Now I know this might make me a target for disapproval, but I'm going to admit to you guys that I self-vote on my comments sometimes. Not the simple 'Thank you' comments, but the longer ones. You know why? Because I'm getting more and more frustrated with this place and many times, I am basically the only way I can still earn something.
This is what happens when I leave things alone and simply promote my posts in the appropriate chat channels. Would you like to compare those payouts to the payouts some newbies are getting recently, which regularly manage to climb up into the hundreds? I saw some gaming posts earning over $200.00 yesterday and compared to mine, they really weren't any better. I'm not saying mine are great, they are just not worse than those.
I know not all of my posts are worth much, but I have shared some nice quality things. Often though, the only way I can even get to ten is by using @booster and @randowhale, and honestly, that's just throwing money down the drain and pretending I'm getting upvotes. However, it seems like using them is the only way to attract another upvote or two. I tested. I don't want to use those anymore though.
So yes, I self-upvote a comment once in a while, because that feels like the only way I can still earn anywhere near to what I used to earn from upvotes, which are now being re-directed to newbies, simply for being new.
Guess what, I'm still a minnow too, because I didn't get a big break, simply for being new.
I don't really want to self-upvote my comments and I always do make sure I have enough power left to support the people I follow, but in the next few months, I actually might need the money I earn here. I'd love to earn for quality, but I feel that's not what's happening at the moment. So when people stop voting crazy high on simplistic posts because they come from newbies, and start giving the loyal members the light of day again, I will stop self-voting on some of my comments.
I try to be fair here, I've helped out a lot of newbies in the past by giving them some extra attention through my blog and by answering their questions and worries. I still do sometimes. Those actions go by unnoticed and I don't really mind that much, but I do mind that I am now getting passed by for not being new.
I have struggled to get to where I was. I have worked my butt off to get meaningful followers and slowly grow my earnings. And they did grow! Lately, however, I can hardly get any upvotes anymore. I am not happy that I now have to work my butt off for a $2.00 payout, because I'm not new, while the newbies get a break for being new and don't have to do much at all for big payouts left and right.
Can you not see you're hurting the community like this?
I would not be writing about this if it was just me. I am lucky enough to still get a small break now and then. I would simply write off the rest as frustration and people not liking me or my writing. I was always mostly invisible out there in the real world, so why wouldn't I be online? However, I hear this same story from many long-time members. Those of us who weren't lucky enough to be here in the first few months and who don't have the cash to buy our way to more Steem Power. We feel neglected and passed by on every side. I think all of our newbie supporters need to stop to think for a second and start worrying about the long time members who worked hard for this platform.
Isn't it important that the older members stay on? The loyal members who have worked their butts off? The people who still have big dreams for this place? The people who want to improve their quality of writing? The people who are here for more than just a quick buck?
Earnings aren't everything, but can you try to understand how frustrating it is to see your regular payouts drop from $15.00 (and the occassional $30.00) to $2.00 or $3.00 (and the occassional $10.00), while newbies earn hundreds? I don't think I have ever, in my entire Steemit life, went into the hundreds.
Do you really feel people deserve that much, simply for being new? I do not believe those posts are worth so much and if you start to think about the long term implications and stop thinking short term, you are just setting them up for disappointment. Because one day, these newbies won't be new and they will be the ones writing these kind of posts.
Only they will not be sad about losing $15.00 payouts. They will be sad about losing $100.00 payouts.
I know it's crazy for me to still think upvotes are based on quality at all, because we all know that's not the case for many people. I will still use my votes that way though. And you know what? I will keep supporting newbies, but I will not set them up to fail. There is plenty of that going around already.
I support the people I value on this platform (long standing minnows) with votes ranging from 10-20%. Either for being stand-up people, or for writing good posts. I support new people with votes ranging from 1-5% and a hearty welcome (which is much more important). I support great posts with ~50%, no matter who they come from.
I refuse to give newbies crazy payouts on posts that aren't worth it. The occassional great intro gets over 5%, but besides that, I welcome them and give them a small upvote, which is generous enough in my eyes. If they share my interests, I follow them and when they write good posts, I will reward them accordingly, but they will not get a 100% upvote on crap, simply because they are new.
I would like to say to all the newbie supporters: There are simply too many of you and you are setting them all up for disappointment. I know it's hard, but stop thinking short-term. Spead your love. There are more than just newbies here (and you're even missing some of those in your upvotes aswell).
Stop ignoring the long-time members!
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Great points! I am with you. If it wasn't for one certain voter all of my posts would be a dollar or two.., and I have been here over a year.
Then again I post about Cigars, and there aren't many cigar smokers here, yet.
Yeah, some people are lucky enough to have a constant whale backer and I'm happy for you on that front. I guess I haven't been lucky enough to find one yet! It's probably because I hardly connect with them, because we don't generally share the same interests. Atleast any post I find in trending just doesn't attract me :-)
Yeah, it is a very niche topic! I can't say I'm very interested in cigars either ;-)
I am grateful for the $15-20 vote it provides...., but of course I see so much more people are making for something that takes no time. I am ok with that, life is not fair and Steemit isn't suppose to be either.
Yup, Steemit is like anything else, it's a lot about who you know :-)
Yeah, no question about it. I don't have whale followers (none that I'm aware of), but a few dolphins and orcas. The only time a post I resteem gets a big bump in awards is when a follower who has a whale following him or her upvotes it. But that doesn't happen often.
I do a mix of resteeming - newbies, minnows, and others. Sometimes it helps, sometimes not so much.
Anyhow...here is a resteem for YOU to 12,000+ followers. I hope it helps, @playfulfoodie. :)
What @playfulfoodie write resonates with me as I am in the same position as a veteran minnow. Is this how we can call ourselves. Just appreciating the fact that you are resteeming the post. A lot of veteran minnows are in the same position.
12,000+? Oh my gosh, that are so many followers! I don't think I've seen anyone with that many followers yet... Thanks a lot for the resteem :-)
I see you made resteeming your core business! It is a very noble cause and much appreciated, I'm sure, by those you resteem.
You're right that an upvote from one individual can make all the difference, due to the voting trail they have :-)
I upvoted you :D
And I followed you. Maybe one day it will be worth something ;)
Hahaha.. I'd have to thank @innuendo for that, my highest paying post would probably be $5 without him
"Yet" Bam! My entire thoughts summed up in one word. Who will the aficionados flock to when they arrive?
The guy who's already established here.
Don't be here for today. Be here for what'll be happening a year from now.
Yes indeed..., I run more than one cigar group on FB... I am waiting for communities and/or a better UI to get a bunch of them over, I know most are fed up with FB and worried about getting shut down for cigar selling, trading, etc. The cigar community is absolutely huge on FB and elsewhere online.
Paypal is the main payment trading method, imagine if it was Steem.. :-D
I can see your humidor filling up with free samples from boutique operators hoping for a kind mention.
Being there then requires being here now.
That would be nice... lol.
By then there will be pro writers on Steemit, and that is fine with me, that would mean Steem is huge.
As the big meany who started #project-smackdown, I want to make a statement in my official capacity of founding member of the Steem Cooperative:
We do not want to 'punish' especially not little users, new, or old, at all. In fact, I admire your tenacity to keep going, though I wonder if you took a look at my wallet (@elfspice and @l0k1 both) you will see that I now have a total of around 2600 steem power. I managed to go from zero, to about 15,000 steem, in about 6 months, and put every last euro-cent of my welfare payments into Steem Power, before powering it down, in order to get my project of Make Elfspice Better (my health) Again.
I so far spent about $4000 of my powerdown, which amounted to about $8000, as I started it before the big price jump, I did not get the max possible which would have been about $40,000, buying GPU mining hardware, about $4000 worth. I have spent another 2000, probably, on renting an apartment in Bulgaria, for 3 months, while I seek to end my addictions, fix my health problems, and prepare myself for the Zombie Apocalypse, with some sensible shoes, lugol's iodine solution, some quality, practical tactical pants, some goggles (I love goggles, I hate dust and crap in my eyes, which happens every other week here in Sofia, with its' dusty river valley soil).
So, back to you - @smackdown.kitty is using the 100,000SP she was delegated, in a conservative fashion, to downvote the most absurdly large self rewards discovered, at a rate of about 20 such self voted comments per day. Note, this is ONLY comments, ONLY the top 20 in a 24 hour period, and NOT any account under 1000SP.
In fact, pretty much, what we really see is accounts with over 100,000 SP that are being downvoted. The content of their wonderous valuable comments can be seen in posts that myself and @personz made under #project-smackdown
We want to ban it on the blockchain level, BECAUSE IT IS BAD FOR SMALL ACCOUNTS - something @inertia pointed out in his response to my inital announcement post for #project-smackdown and @smackdown.kitty
Sure, new small acounts too, old ones, it doesn't make any difference. We also want to educate users and make the interface facilitate more judicious use of voting power, because it is our opinion that too many elements of the design of both interface and blockchain, yield such a homogenous, entropy (low novelty/information) outcome, or in other words, the good stuff is being missed, and not getting the rewards it would get, if the parameters were calibrated better, to produce a more balanced outcome.
If we can get the minnows, who constitute about 20-30% of the bottom half of total stake in the platform, to use their votes better, it will benefit the whole platform, as well as accelerate upward mobility.
This would mean faster growth for your account also. I have been following you for quite some time, and you are one of those who I describe as 'good honest, hard working, underpaid steemians'.
Thank you for your elaborate comment @elfspice! Let me first start by saying I don't think you're a big meany at all! ;-)
I did not know all the ins and outs of the project (as I stated) and I mainly used it as an example, a stepping stone to my bigger issue. Thank you for explaining a bit more about the project to me. I agree that self-upvoting excessively should be punished somehow (maybe punish is a strong word, counteract might be good here). I understand why non-whales do it though. Heck, I even understand why big whales would do it, though I think with how much they have invested in the platform and the effect their votes have, they should know better.
I can completely get behind the idea of banning it on the blockchain level and I would not be sad to see it go at all. If no one can upvote themselves, things would feel a lot fairer. Though in that case, I'd be worried about whales with alt accounts, but yeah...
How do you think interface changes can work towards a fairer rewards outcome? One thing I read a while ago was hiding pending payouts. How do you feel about that? At first, I thought "No way, I want to see my pending payouts!", but then I figured it might be better, because it would make it harder for people to 'follow the money' on big upvotes. Though ofcourse you can always check out past payouts on people's blogs, so I wonder how much effect it would really have.
I think we have many minnows who are not happy with how things are going now. They themselves try to be fair in their upvotes (even if they upvote themselves aswell), but with the other part of new minnows simply going for a quick buck through 'follower for follower' ideas, we don't have a big group of people trying to be fair. I still don't know how to combat ideas like 'follower for follower', other than to try and educate. In my opinion, it's really harming the platform both with spam and upvotes on crap content.
I don't know about dolphins and whales though. I don't know many at all, because they mostly go indepth on crypto topics quite a bit and my knowledge is very limited there, so I skip over it or can't contribute to their conversations. I wonder how they feel about Steemit and I wonder how they vote. Do they vote minnows a lot, or is it like a 'rich people making other richies more rich' kinda thing? I have noticed a few trying to build up their friends by upvoting all of their posts, which I understand. I'm doing the same for my brother, though my votes don't do much.
I guess my main focus is the other minnows on the platform, just struggling to get seen, so my overall view is somewhat limited at times.
Anyway, thanks again for your comment and also for the compliment. I try to be as honest as I can, though sometimes I tone it down a bit to not piss people off :-)
Currently, especially for small accounts, many of the defaults cause small accounts voting power to be rapidly consumed. If a minnow posts 4 posts a day, they knock their voting power to 80%, and any more votes after this, and every day like this, their vote power goes down, and down, and down, until there is no more.
So having an interface default that causes an unwitting consumption of vote power is doubly deleterious to minnow accounts.
There is other issues I have in my sights related to this, you can see a github issue I posted about the vote slider.
https://github.com/steemit/condenser/issues/1544
I missed the reply and issue, and I stand by my assertion that it is a bug. I am even locking horns with a highly upvoted witness on this issue. They are proposing to eliminate bandwidth limitation in the initial HF20 proposal, which in my view will open the floodgates for a tsunami of spammy nonsense originating from digital sweatshops 'mining' steem.
Which reminds me. I really have to write about that.
Aah I see! Yes, it is very hard for smaller minnows to keep up their voting power. I've heard complaints about that before. I definitely understand you fighting to give them a slider aswell!
Seems after hf19, people both old and new become very aggressive to make money. Stuff like randowhale, boosters, trails everywhere. And I am quite sure many people just browse, look at the author name, rep, upvote count, estimate payout, then how many minutes ago --> Vote, or not vote. Then, next post. Some people said steemit will grow and become well known like facebook. I was one of them, before. And now, I just think far to go. At least, I join almost the last month of hf18, and click upvote very happy without too much concern, both friends' post and post I like. And now, I feel pressure... especially I am still poor...
I think that's how people have worked with votes on Steemit for quite a while now. Chasing the posts that stand to make a lot more. I can understand it partly, but I hope these people find a good balance to also vote for posts they actually appreciate.
Very well said, i hope this post could reach out the steemit and eventually act on it. its hard being a minnow!! and mostly its very frustrating seeing someone with a very high amount of upvotes with just a non-sense post,
i am not a good writer, i actually hate writing even when i was studying, but this site gives me a room to improve myself.
THE REALITY HERE IS MONEY MAKES A MINNOW, NOT BY THE ARTICLE HE MADE!! DISREGARD ITS CONTENT OR VALUE,.
my upvote was just a fraction of a 1$ and doesn't have much weight but i give it to this post 100% agree on the content.
thanks for this wonderful post, i read it from start to bottom.
THIS POST SHOULD EARN THE 3 DIGIT TO 4 DIGIT..
HAVE A GOOD DAY!! :)
You have some very valid points. I think it is important that people who have committed time and energy to the platform are rewarded. People who will and do commit and are not just going to disappear if things get tough. I think votes overall are down after the forking. I hope things pick up for you :0)
Thank you @meesterboom! I've worked through good and bad times here and I will stick around, but I don't feel like we should just stay quiet and ignore every bad thing that's happening. Sometimes we just need to speak up. I don't think it'll be heard anyway, because most posts seem to fall through the cracks lately for many people.
Yes, voting overall seems down and I know it's been hard on people. Even more so when they see newbies (and the well established whales) breezing through.
It's a combination of many things, like cryptos, including Steem, dropping in value and the many new accounts and more posts to drown in. Today was when I felt like pointing out the other problem some have been noticing :-)
I feel its not just quality content that cuts it here, you need to have whale friends or many dolphin friends for better rewards
Yes, that's definitely a big part of it aswell. I've noticed quite a few getting 'sponsored' by whale friends I guess. Can't blame them too much, I would upvote my friends aswell. I just hope they balance things out by upvoting good quality from others aswell...
take it easy foodie san...I think the market is affecting the curations..Look at the big players...their curations has been dropped below half...The good thing you should do is wait till b4 august 1 then buy as much steem (or any altcoin that is profitable) as you can then wait till it bounces back in price.I am sure, your curations will go up again.I really do think that curations are parallel to the market...Steem is a volatile asset after all...
BTW Im almost done on my entry for this week..
Thanks @tediursa24! I have already been buying some Steem while it's on discount. Curation is down overall, I agree, but looking how hard older minnows are having it now and the ease with which some newbies get hundreds for mediocre posts, I do still stand behind my post. Though I know some newbies have it hard aswell.
Normally, I try to tone down my posts a bit more, but sometimes I feel a point needs to come across strong. A bit too strong perhaps, but this will mostly be ignored anyway, like most posts :-)
Great to hear you're almost done! I can't wait to see your entry :-)
LOL...it's still too early...But prices are really good right now(you can make profit even by buying right now)...I think steem will go below 1 dollar a week before the fork .Just a hunch.
Yeah, I still have some bitcoin left to spend (not whole bitcoins though, the value of my wallet isn't even 1 whole bitcoin anymore) and will be buying in over the next few weeks. I've put every buy/sale on hold for now though, so I can go all manual. Mainly because I really have no clue what will happen the 1st of august and it's all a bit over my head to be honest :-)
Lots of crappy content gets upvoted while the hidden gems remain hidden. Very old, persisting problem. And if you say anything, they'll just reply with "that's what the market wants". No, you're just greedy for the curation rewards, you don't even read the post !
Pretending " the market wants "the same thing you upvote for better curation rewards is delusional at best.
Leads to low content quality, which will slow the progress (or even kill) of steemit
Edit : Steemit on phone is laggy and almost unusable, any typo is because of that
I couldn't agree more with this! The curation rewards are a big problem in this, but I wonder how to fix it. If they were to go, no one would have incentive to upvote anymore, so that would also pretty much kill Steemit.
Courageous post. I personally feel that quality isnt really a metric of upvotes anymore. So much content that is clearly poor quality gets attention and nurturing while in depth, intellectual and well considered posts languish.
Oh oh, can we call it the languish barrier?
Please?
Please, yes.
I couldn't agree more.
Honestly, I was very curious to see the reactions on this post, but so far, I haven't heard anyone speak negatively about it yet. It's an issue everyone agrees with so far. It's just sad to see that it's still happening, even though many seem to agree it's there.
It's true. However we should be careful with who does this.
I can't agree more on the fact that minnows should upvote themselves. We are still in a place where we don't think our posts earn what they deserve, so we keep trying and hoarding for some upvotes. Any upvote is a good one.
When you look at whales upvoting their comments, I am like;
It's not like they need more to stand out from the crowd and are scavenging to get what they think they deserve.
There is a giant gap between whales and minnows and we need someone or something to make that gap smaller. Like you mentioned, there are bots out there trying to, but I am not sure if bots are the answer.
Personally, I try to involve and drag people along in my posts. For example I created a content and would love to encourage people to create their own post to enter (so they can earn some from that aswell along with the potential prize money). Aswell as my Steemit Collaborations where I try to shine some light on minnows who are barely getting anything for their cool posts.
I guess this is my contribution to the community and I hope to be able to do that for long. I hope to grow on Steemit and get to a place where my contribution starts counting in bigger numbers to help more Steemians.
I like your way of doing things for the community! I also started a contest. I don't have many participants yet, but I'm sure it'll grow eventually.
I'm just a bit worried about bots though, because they don't actually vote for quality, they just vote for whatever reasons their creators tell them to. Buying votes is something that is open to everyone, so I'm still not sure how to feel about that. At the very least they are free to be used by everyone.