My first experience with Steemit has turned into an interesting and somewhat annoying example of the beta status of the platform. This is a look at what happened and my thoughts on changing the experience to help avoid scaring away new authors in the future.
My First Experience Writing For Steemit
I've been with Steemit as a reader since launch. I setup a wallet a while back and simply perused the articles and have followed the huge growth as more people continue to gravitate to the platform. In the meantime, I had recently launched a traditional magazine style blog called Lisk Nation, focused on reporting news and writing articles about the Lisk Platform. After giving it much thought, I decided to take the plunge and move my efforts on Lisk Nation to instead just be me, writing as myself, with Steemit as a platform for reaching more people as an experiment in branding my writing to myself, rather than some kind of magazine or outside entity.
The decision took a lot of thought but I was primed and ready to go. This morning I sat down and I created an introduction post describing everything above, my decision to move and why, and a introduction to myself. I knew I wouldn't immediately get a ton of followers or huge up-votes, but I was hoping to at least see a few people comment, maybe welcome me to the platform, and see a few of the Lisk community giving me their thoughts on the move.
Unfortunately, it took a turn.
Shortly after posting, I went back as any anxious blogger would, to see if anyone had commented. I was greeted with a warning stating that my blog post had been hidden due to a low rating. I have to say, I was immediately shocked and questioned my decision and almost walked away from the platform straight away. After calming down and looking into it a little bit, the entire thing happened because one guy (
Not for any particular reason from what I can tell, he runs some things he calls the daily downvote and it looks like he randomly downvotes posts. Maybe it is a form of Steemit trolling that has developed, or maybe he had a valid reason and just isn't telling me (I asked in the comments), but either way, it was a very discouraging and negative experience, all stemming from one individual and just 1 apparently randomly chosen flagging.
This experience has the potential to scare away new authors and I think we need to propose possible methods or work-arounds to keep others from having the experience I had. The truth is, many new authors or bloggers might just walk away after their first post under the circumstances laid out above.
Let's Talk Solutions
I don't believe in bringing up problems without offering solutions. I would like to discuss a few potential fixes that we might be able to implement to discourage trolling random posts.
1. Allow new authors a grace period on their first post. This would be a period of let's say 12 hours, on a new account, where even if down-voted, they wouldn't be immediately removed or grayed out from the listings. A threshold could be set where this would be negated, for instance, if someone were down-voted 10 times on their first post in the first 12 hours, they would still be grayed out.
2. Set a threshold irregardless of the # of posts someone has. Give everyone a small benefit of the doubt and rather than allow 1 person with significant voting weight (I'm not sure if it was due to his weight or simply that I had 1 flag and no up-votes yet, I will look more into the rules) to ruin their day, require a vote threshold of 3 or 5 flags / down-votes before a post gets the warning message. Make it a # of votes, not a specific amount of weight (if that is how it is currently setup).
3. Don't gray out or warn against posts, let the reader decide. A more simple solution would be to just show a # of up-votes and a number of down-votes or flags on each post and allow the readers to decide whether or not they still want to click it. No warnings or artificial protections, assume we are adults and can decide for ourselves. I don't think the coddling is really necessary and believe this to be a better solution.
Bottom Line
At the end of the day, users are smart. If you curate the lists and trending posts based on number of up-votes and the "new" list is the only place showing all posts, users can determine for themselves what they want to read. My first experience with Steemit wasn't a great one and I almost walked away on post #1. I think we can negate this factor and make it less harmful to new authors by implementing one of the suggestions above, or maybe a combination of them.
Do you have an additional idea I didn't think of? Do you think I'm a crybaby and the current system is fine? Let me know in the comments, I'll check back and respond as soon as I see your comments!