Good morning! Day two on SteemIt and I'm excited to get started!
In this post I'll be examining some of the issues with the SteemIt platform (From my one-day of newbie experience) and how SteemIt might go about addressing them.
I had a busy day on SteemIt yesterday with five posts, rocketing me up to level 28 on day one! Overall the platform has a lot going for it. The monetization of posts seems like a great incentive for bloggers, and the editor is extremely easy to use and format.
The downsides? Mostly that the platform creates incentive for bad behavior, and junk posts are often more valuable than real content.
My posts from yesterday based on current profit:
($0.71) Introducing Keevah the Husky
Everyone loves dog pictures!($0.52) Medieval Combat
Talking about my favorite hobby.($0.02) Building Your SteemIt Audience and Earning SBD
An analysis of the most profitable / most commented tags on SteemIt and how a new user might choose to select tags/topics based on these values.($0.01) Securing Your Cryptocurrency
A talk about the pros and cons of software, hardware, and paper wallets.
Each of these posts was original content. Each one took me roughly an hour to write between researching, formatting and writing. Overall I'm going to be rewarded about $1.30 x 75% = ~$0.98 for more than four hours of work. I actually think that's pretty fair compensation considering that it was my first day and I don't have an audience yet.
As someone who's just starting on the platform, some of my posts might be worth $0.01. Someone else without major influence who drops a vote on my post is essentially throwing away that vote. It won't make my post substantially more noticeable, and it won't make the curator any substantial amount of money.
As a result, people who are solely interested in earning Steem have no reason to read posts at all. The easiest way to make money is to upvote a post that's relatively new by a major blogger or whale with a large following, as such a post is likely to gain more upvotes and be profitable. For this reason, there are bots whose only job is to upvote new posts by whales. Other bots provide upvoting services. Someone who got the first comment on a whale's post and wrote "Plz upvote." can make more money than I did as an author contributing four hours of my time to produce actual content.
The root of the problem? There is no incentive to interact with content on Steem. There is only incentive to interact with the Steem platform itself.
What I'm getting at here is that there is no reason for someone who is chasing profit to read a blog post, or make meaningful commentary. The fastest route to profit completely ignores the content of the post, and only cares about the importance of the original author and the timing of the response to that author's content. This system is great for encouraging interactions, but the interactions that it encourages the most are entirely meaningless.
How do we fix this? A few ideas:
Warnings, Suspensions, Bans
- Establish a community team of moderators (If it doesn't already exist)
- Allow posts to be flagged for review by moderators if they fail to contribute to meaningful discussions such as "Plz upvote". Down-voting alone is not effective, as many of these posts actually get up-voted.
- Allow posts to be flagged for review by moderators if they are verifiable plagiarized content.
- After moderator review, reward moderators and users who have reported "bad" posts. Warn / suspend / ban the accounts creating these "bad" posts if moderators agree with the users reporting them.
- Bot accounts should be suspended or banned if they contribute to automated up-voting or automated commenting.
Reward Structure Changes
- Create incentive for people to interact with new authors by decreasing the monetary value of their up-votes and comments on subsequent interactions with the same author.
- EG a first interaction by a user with an author will fetch 100% of it's normal value. The next interaction of a user with that same author will fetch 50% of its normal value, and so on. This could recharge over time in a similar manner that voting power recharges, but on a per-author basis.
There's plenty more that could be done, but these are some starting points.
How can we improve the incentive for users to actually read posts and meaningfully contribute to the platform?
Are any of my suggestions awful? Let me know!
Thanks for reading,
-Matt