RE: Mmmm Yeah Baby, Put It In My Reward Pool
Once the rewards are being monopolized by people who are making money with little to no effort, then the genuine content creators will leave because they are not getting rewarded.
It's not about "genuine content creators"
There are farmers in Guatemala that grow rare stems of white cacao. It's a country with sun all year long and jungles. They work hard and sweat 70hrs/week for this agriculture.
Once their rare, biologic, genuine cacao is harvested, what do they do with it?
They sell it bulk DIRT CHEAP to big companies that actually know how to process it to be appealing to the people... The laters cash in +1000% profits
Coca-Cola is a bubbling sugared drink.
Nike is producing polyester and cotton clothes.
Starbucks sell 5$ coffees.
This is about marketing, this is about getting noticed, this is about knowing how to make money
This is how the world turns, and it isn't going to change
Steem is a capitalist platform, being a "genuine creator" is not enough
Absolutely. The correlation between quality and income just isn't there. The people with the means make it to the top. If you got in late, and want to be in the top, you have to do something different. It's the same with businesses. You can take a super genius engineer and have him build the greatest watch in the world, but if he's just a single guy and doesn't have a strategy to get eyes on it, it won't sell.
This right here. Although I would add that if you are promoting shit, people will notice. As soon as the marketing dollars are removed then it will disappear.
If it's quality, then it will linger.
That was kind of the point of my post. Probably should have made that more clear. People aren't putting their best faces forward. They aren't taking any pride in their work. Most of the posts on here are low effort shots of their breakfast. They aren't actually trying to create valuable content.
Once they realize that success on any platform depends on creating valuable content, my hope is that they'll up their game a little bit. Or they'll just quit because they thought it would be easy money over here.
This will definitely happen in the long run. I'd like to think Steemit now is akin to Youtube at it's early age, when you get shit like Youtubepoop and Replygirls videos.. One day only the best content gets highlighted on Steemit (who knows, when "great" content creators jump over from Youtube or Medium, maybe even fuckin Washington Post itself). Then we know that the Steem Blockchain has succeeded in what it set out to do.
The issue is that there is no incentive to create better content because people are getting rewarded for producing shit. As long as you "network" here and post things that the top 300ish accounts want to see, then they'll upvote you and you'll make money regardless of quality.
This will all change with SMT, if it ever comes out. I can guarantee that.
of course, quality is subjective and it doesnt matter who the market is a person will profit if they give what the market wants. In this case we're talking about the whales. Seems typical to me.
I guess it's really because the steem network effect hasn't reached a size where it mirrors the mainstream zeitgeist. We're only less than a million users big, taking into account the alts and the bots and the ghost account. That's pretty small for a content platform, much less a social media.
I can see how forward thinking steemians can win though. Produce quality content AND THEN market it all over the net, Medium, personal website, build a personality and run ads on the bigger social media. Then monetize it by drawing them to any of the Steem platforms instead of begging for Patreons.
Beats circlejerking in the long run.
And of course that has been your message all along.