When Steemit began, some of the first posts on the site were just links. Others were shorter posts than we often see today. But because voting allocates real money, voters seemed to gravitate towards the posts which added the most perceived value to the platform. The longer posts began to get more rewards.
Today, Steemit’s content resembles the Medium site in terms of the voters’ preference for longer length articles. This is fine, but in embracing that model only, perhaps we have lost something along the way. Not everyone enjoys writing (or reading) long pieces.
There are several mature social networking models online. In its general approach, Steemit today is modeled very much after Reddit. The trending/hot/new pages, the upvotes and downvotes, the comments down below, the very short term lifecycle of posts - it is all Reddit. One look at Reddit's top posts, though, reveals something interesting. Many are just links, re-shares, some are even just a picture without a single letter of text. The value is driven not by the post themselves, but by the immense engagement they generate. This has been Reddit's success, and despite some shaky management why 300+ million Redditors stick around to this day.
Of course, Steemit's greatest innovation are the monetary rewards. Understandably, this has led voters to value original content and articles much more. Today, the content being more akin to Wordpress or Medium. However, unlike Steemit, Medium is not a social network - it's a publishing platform. To engage the community, we need a greater diversity of content, whether personal rambles or sharing the best of the internet. This will generate discussion, comments and engagement we are lacking right now, and ultimately reach out to a much larger audience than Medium ever could.
We would like to see both on Steemit - a short term social network platform driven by short form posts, re-posts, re-links, and upvotes. The Trending page should reflect not stakeweighted rewards but overall engagement. Ultimately, the community will decide what these short form posts are worth. And a longer term publishing platform driven by original content and greater rewards.
Shorter length articles can be fun, expressive, and informative. In the last few days, Project Curie’s curators have begun to notice more of them on the site. We like this trend.
In the coming days (teaser alert!), a group of Steemians will be announcing exciting new steps to reward some shorter length content in particular tags.
We will continue to support and reward the traditional long posts, but we also will begin looking for high quality, short form posts. These also deserve some rewards. We hope to see more of them.
Image credit:
Creative Commons via Wikimedia, Montage By Peter Wadsworth
Image attributions: Heike Andres Pleple2000 Lilly M SaNtINa/kIKs Pleple2000 Pleple2000 Steve Jurvetson [CC BY 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons