The concept

Recently, Hive account@blueorgy made a post about his newly created site, "Catch A Whale". It dynamically generates a "Whale Catching Score" for the next 5 minutes, to help users to potentially get more whale upvotes on their posts.

The problem

For most minnows on here, this sounds like a good idea, and whale-catching is getting more and more popular. However, most content that is published right now just aims to get upvoted by one or two whales, and to hit the "jackpot", to be one of the top articles on the trending page. Users are not trying to write about uncovered topics or their personal interests, everything has to be built around steemit, whales, girls and hiking.

"Catch A Whale" is taking the wrong approach. When everyone is just begging for attention to the big ones, we are losing the social aspect. We don't care about the good authors writing excellent, long articles about interesting topics, just because we're busy catching the big ones.

The solution?

This is a problem which is extremely hard to solve. Most of you have probably read this article by Hive account@johnsmith, which raised almost 6000$. However, he has made a point which I think should be discussed a bit further:

Your deep analysis of something important is not going to bring the herd stampeding to Steemit. Steemit needs bodies. Lots of them. Right now the universe it telling you that out of 30,000 people, 48 think you're cool enough to hang out with. That's like 0.16% and means the community values your contributions at about $0.04/hr.

Of course it is obvious that steemit can only run sustainably with a lot of users. However, what's currently happening is that more and more users get frustrated and just give up. So what's the point in aquiring a million users when most of them stop posting after a few days because they don't get any attention (or only attention from minnows, which doesn't earn them money)?

In my opinion, there are two things that need to change:

• The behaviour of some whales
  Don't get me wrong here, there are a few whales such as Hive account@steemed, who is actually searching for good content creators to upvote them. However, many whales are not voting at all, and some are just upvoting the stuff I mentioned above. I think we need more whales like Hive account@steemed, actively providing help to outstanding writers.
• The behaviour of the minnows
  I am going to quote Hive account@johnsmith on this one again, as he summed it up in one sentence:

No go write something that makes you smile!
We should focus on writing articles about topics we are interested in. Even if those don't earn anything right now, there will be a time when those articles will earn good amounts of money regularly, thanks to whales like Hive account@steemed and thanks to those who achieved the dolphin status just recently.

#steemit #journalism #circlejerk
(Image Credit: Wikimedia)