I've been growing more frustrated with Steemit of late. This isn't a post whining about the lack of upvotes or how whales get all the attention. This post is about how Steemit's Medium-like format optimizes for creation and not discussion.
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Value from Non-Creators
We may have a first world problem in the sense that the content tries to encourage original blog posts. However, the ugly truth is that most of us suck at it. There are those that can hammer out quality posts, day in and day out and they clearly deserve to have whale-sized followings and up votes. However, there is much value to be gained for the 90% (guessing here) of us that are less good at generating original content.
On sites with active message boards with comments in the 10's and 100's, the value-ratio of original post versus comment is way, way lower. A creator could very well post an asinine message, intended to troll the community, but as a result, set of a deep and insightful discussion that the community as a whole gains from. This phenomenon is not common on Steemit.
Perhaps, I just haven't looked inside the right posts, but many of the posts here fall under very cookie cutter categories like prices of crypto currencies, memes, news summaries, or photographs including sunsets, beaches, flowers, travel, food porn or real porn.
Questions?
- What do we need to do to create more discussion?
- Is this an economics issue or a UI/UX issue?
- Does the economics of Steemit (or the misunderstanding of the economics) put pressure to create content over discussing content?
- Does the power dynamic of Steemit (whales vs minnows) also affect the discussion quality of Steemit?
What questions or insights would you have about generating more value from content discussions?
EDIT: Thank you so much for all the lengthy and thoughtful comments! I'm totally psyched to see that this can happen on Steemit! Keep posting and I'll upvote as many as I can.