A few days ago I wrote two articles talking about Steemit. In the first one I was saying how Steemit is getting more and more popular each day and how that means in the future it's gonna be really hard to get noticed. I also talked about why that means we should do our best to come up with amazing content as fast as possible and form a community around what we do.
The second article approached a problem everyone is aware of, something that makes Steemit a little worse than it should. Really bad content. I was harsh enough to call it "garbage" and as much as others may hate that word, I wont' change it.
Anyway, after I wrote those articles I started working on something else and whenever I take a break from what I do I usually get on Medium and I read a few articles. While doing that I thought a little about the reason I'm not spending a lot of time reading things from Steemit and what's the advantage Medium has over this website.
I realized that the quality of the content is indeed an advantage Medium has, because there you can find a lot of amazing things, articles written in a very nice way by people who spent God knows how much time writing.
But that's not the only thing. High quality content itself isn't enough to boost the popularity of the platform. It's the consistency that matters, and the reason Medium is a lot more popular than Steemit isn't because it has high quality content, but because the platform is filled with people who are willing to constantly create amazing stuff.
That's what Steemit doesn't have at the present moment.
While I follow some people on this website and I love their content, I guess we can all agree that a vast majority of the creators are here only for the money. If the rewards are gone, more than half of them will be gone in a single day.
That is an advantage and a disadvantage as well. The advantage is that those who know how money are made in general (by giving the consumer something valuable) are doing their best to write amazing things in order to get paid more and more every day.
But those who don't know that... let's call it "strategy" even if at this point it should be common sense, spend God knows how much time sharing really bad memes, jokes they copied from some strange website hoping to get paid for that, writing articles that have less than 100 words, and expecting tons of rewards for their "hard work".
The reason Medium is at the present moment more popular than Steemit is the main reason a lot of us are on this platform - money. Medium doesn't pay you only for publishing, and because of that the people who are on that platform are there because they want to make a difference with their high quality content. The only way to get paid on Medium is by having a lot of readers every day to read your articles.
Because Steemit offers money to content creators (which I really appreciate), too many of those creators are eager to share or create whatever piece of garbage they can hoping for a few upvotes from whales or anyone who has some Steem Power.
The money itself, the main feature of this website and the reason it attracts so many people, is the main reason we're not yet more popular than Medium. That's probably gonna change in the future, especially because here, the community is always trying to "punish" those who can't come up with anything decent to publish.
But this is a problem that will persist as long as we're all gonna receive money for our creation. Either this website will get to a point where people will understand they're not getting anything unless they work, or it will get to a point where those who used the website for a few days and didn't receive anything will advise others to not join because it's impossible to make any money here.
I don't really have any "conclusion" to this article or any idea about how to "solve" this problem, because I don't think there is any way of doing that (except changing the way everything works and only reward those who can get a partnership with the website, which may change everything for the worse), and the only reason I wrote this is because I thought about it and I wanted to share my opinion with you.
Steemit is still at an early stage and a lot will be different in a few years. I'm not saying I'm completely right and we're never gonna be better than Medium or other similar platforms. I hope we will, i truly do.
But it's vital we ask questions like "Why are others better right now? What are they doing different?" because we need to find the problem before thinking of a solution and the best way to do that and to improve this platform is to ask the right questions.