Gaining experience

Today, I was in a meeting with two location directors from one large manufacturing company. We were talking a lot about communication flow and clarity of information as they are struggling to get people to get behind recent changes. From their perspective (both engineers) this is a technical issue that requires development of and tinkering with systems to make sure all required information is available.

From my perspective, the changes haven't been supported quickly or strongly enough because the information people need to move is missing; they don't know why they should. Of course, to keep their jobs and get paid but, the changes have been made in areas that are outside of their personal knowledge and skill banks so they do not immediately understand why this affects that, even if they know what this and that is.

I find that at Steemit there is the same issue going on, in fact, I know it because I have the same problem here. Steemit is a complicated ecosystem with many pathways, streams, plant types and storms and earthquakes which create a continually changing landscape. Understanding all of it is near impossible as it actually requires a very, very broad knowledge base. One that I am lacking on in many areas.

Many people come in to Steemit from various communities with a narrow set of rules. Centralised systems are always narrower as the central authority dictates behaviours. Steemit has very little dictation and much more freedom but, habits generally win out in new surroundings so people act as if nothing is different and without investigation, it may appear it isn't.

Social media habit is about constant sharing and personal branding based on popular trends and in your face sales techniques. This can be seen with the Youtube, Facebook and Instagram newcomers who in their branding enthusiasm, spam and offer fluff content that people will like without thinking whether or not it is of value. Many of these people think popularity and numbers of followers matter yet, do not understand how voting algorithms or curation work.

Then there are the people who come in to really make a difference in the world and teach everyone how things should operate. They spend their effort writing long pieces of text that sound like professors wrote them for other professors. Some of these texts are very valuable but, unlikely to be read as they fail to recognise that the majority of users are TL:DR types.

There are also the crypto people who come in and have the attitude that it is all about maximising return, increasing coin stacks. They spend a lot of time working out how to use the system to provide the most return on posting or curation.

These are also the tech developers who, similar to they crypto, try to use the system to their advantage and spend a great deal of time understanding the platform itself and worrying about the smallest technical issues whether they are relevant to the big picture or not.

The problem I find though is very few people want to get out of their own department and interact with the others, they instead sit in their comfort zones. But, this is a complex ecosystem and to build a niche market, be a trending poster in a popular category or increase the value of coins earned takes cross-departmental knowledge.

This is why it is so important for people to interact widely, especially in their early days here. It is like walking into a big party where you only know a few people and then spending the entire night with them, never meeting anyone new. This is not very social is it? Each of these departments could inter-mingle and extract value from each other that brings value to each.

It is important for non-crypto people to learn about markets and currencies as that is the income here. It is important for the thinkers to bring their views to a wider audience as they can perhaps help people change some negative behaviours. It is important for the developers to start interacting with real people and see how they use the platform.

As people spread their attention wider, they develop the understanding of or why not their various approaches work or fail and it gives them the chance to adjust. It doesn't take becoming an expert trader to be successful, or an in your face self-promoter to be seen. A philosopher can have some very practical suggestions for UI design and a developer can gain the knowledge on how best to build to serve the users.

Once people work out why they are here, they can then start investigating how to best operate in the ecosystem to reach their goals. Rarely is that going to be within a silo or echo chamber and rarely does one person have all the information they require when they first join. They all may want the platform to be successful yet, they don't understand why some people find this bit or that bit important.

Get out there, play around, ask questions, post valuable content, read broadly and learn all you can. Yes, the platform has plenty of room for improvement but wishing it was different is not going to improve the experience, nor is expecting it to be like whatever you have experiences elsewhere. For me, this is what is the most interesting as elsewhere is too narrow, too designed, too controlled, too forced.

Here we could make something entirely different.

Taraz
[ a Steemit original ]