I just want to start by saying that I LOVE steemit. I love the idea of steemit. I love the success stories that steemit has already managed to create and I think that the aims of the steemit community are admirable. But I fear that in these important times of early adoption, we are making some big mistakes.
The panacea I hope steemit eventually reaches is one where there is great quality content across a wide range of subject matters. Where well curated and well written articles are the norm as people discover the voices of others around the world. A place that emphasises substance over simple marketing tricks and hidden agendas. What scares me is that this doesn’t seem to be the trend right now. Which brings me to the title of my post.
Why is steemit narcissistic?
You only need to look at the distribution of payouts basted on tags and you can immediately see why. At the time of writing, 56% of replies are on posts tagged with steemit, steem, and introduceyourself. This has translated to 62% of the total 3.4 million SBDs paid out so far going towards only these 3 subject matters aswell!
Now why is that? Is it because the quality of the content on these 3 subject tags is substantially higher than on say the science tag? Absolutely not. Is it because the vision of Ned Scott and Dan Larimer when starting all of this was to start a community to mainly talk about how awesome their creation was? Very unlikely, but if you guys are reading this let me know if I am wrong!
We in the steemit community love it and want to see it succeed. We are your captive audience, and whether most posts are about steem or philosophy or science or art, I doubt many of us will care. We will actively try to contribute to areas we like to write about and read about other areas from people that have different passions. That’s probably why we love posting about steemit and our experiences using it! But is this really what the rest of the world wants?
Let’s wheel out the granny example
Let me give a silly but (I think) useful example. My gran couldn’t care less about the steemit. She would have no interest in reading articles explaining the ins and outs of how it works. But she is interested in cooking. She loves to cook. Loves talking about it, sharing recipes and I know for a fact that many of you reading this would enjoy them too. She has quality content that she would never even think of sharing on steemit. Now the only thing that would attract her to steemit would be other original and quality content on cooking.
To engage with people that have no interest in steem or cryptocurrencies MUST be the next step along the steemit journey. And the only way is to engage these people is to have fantastic and wide ranging content across a plethora of subject areas. In order to attract this quality content, the easiest way is through economic incentives and this is where I turn to the Whales.
Whales save us!
Many posts have talked about your importance in shaping the future of steemit. Some have been critical of the level of influence you have over the general community. I am not here to condone or criticise the current distribution of steem power. I am just here to provide some food for thought.
With the steem power distribution situation as it is, we are in a situation where a relatively small group of people are able to really drive the community away from the unintended narcissism it is currently experiencing and back towards what I hope it was intended for. I know very few people that would be interested in joining a community that only talks about itself!
Whales must drive payouts towards other areas of interest to attract people interested in art or travel or food without a prerequisite interest in steem, which currently seems to be a requirement in this community. We must move away from a situation where economic incentives are heavily skewed towards focusing on 3 tags that the wider world do not care about.
I call on you all to please nurture areas outside of your current interests and read what the smaller parts of the steemit community are writing about. Only then can we hope to reshape the future of steemit for the better. We need to make sure that we incentivise quality content contributors across all subject areas so that we can engage the most amount of people around the world. And it is through this type of engagement that interest in steem will organically grow.
p.s. I realise the irony of posting this under the steem and steemit tag but it’s the only way to maximise the chances of this being read! QED