Lack of Content Discovery on Steemit!
I've been active on Steemit for just about 2 years and while I've made some great improvements in terms of earnings, I've noticed that I've hit a bit of a ceiling. My regular posts, those ones I do not promote, get an average of around $1.5 - $3.00 in post rewards. Mostly due to my significant investment in Steem Basic Income and the friends I've made on Steem.
Let's be honest here, there's not really any sort of content discovery system present here. People earn what they earn because they became friends with people who have a significant stake. I'm no different, I've acquired a couple of big upvotes due to my involvement with @oracle-d or by sometimes tagging a couple of whales when it was relevant to my post's content. Other than that, my base-line earnings are, as I've mentioned, around $1.5 - $3.00 per post.
The thing is, I've seen so many people on here who write much better blogs than me and they don't even earn more than $1 per blog post.
Steemit.com Is Terrible
Out of all the different Steem interfaces, Steemit.com is arguably the worst when it comes to displaying interesting content. The system can be gamed so easily and it's nearly impossible to find any good new content, by using Steemit.com exclusively.
Fact of the matter is, Steemit.com is still by far the most popular interface for the Steem blockchain. How is it possible that there haven't been any changes to how the website is structured? Who even clicks on the "Promoted" link for example? Who gives any credit to the artificially upvoted content on Trending?
Don't get me wrong, a select number of people do reach the trending page with their excellent content, but it's so rare that it can't be considered as "the system working as intended".
Other Steem Interfaces
I know some other interfaces are working towards improving the content discovery system, like Steeve for example. Also, SteemPeak is actively working towards improving the user-experience.
I can't help but wonder if it's too little, too late? Well, perhaps not, when I see the amount of upgrades some of these interfaces have been pushing out, I actually find that they're doing a pretty awesome job. Maybe not specifically in terms of improving content discovery, but in other areas... Sure!
Seems like the fundamentals are just a little bit skewed and I doubt that this will get fixed when HF21 comes out.
Ending Rant
Ugh, I'm a little bit frustrated that there are just so few tangible improvements to Steemit.com. Lately I've been spending a lot of time on LBRY and while they have a budget that's far smaller than that of Steemit Inc, they do seem to push out significant updates in weeks, months at most.
Sure, their scope is a lot different, but it just goes to show that difficult problems can be tackled in a short amount of time, without that big of a budget.
Don't take this post as me wanting to leave Steem, I assure you that isn't the case. I just wish we saw some significant improvements already. We've been waiting long enough, haven't we?
Indeed, we have. I have been lamenting for some time now that it is basically the delegations that give you any amount of upvote. I would guess that 75% of the value of my upvotes com from delegations and not from actual organic users. That is why for a period of time I had more than half my SP delegated away. It just made more sense. I don't know as though we will ever find a way to change it though. The price of Steem rising and new users showing up might help. However, they will probably leave pretty quickly if they solely rely on Steemit.
Interesting point, I still prefer to keep most of my SP because I do try to manually curate content. Though, I do not often get organic votes myself, it does happen, but it's a very small part of my received upvotes.
I've enjoyed the new communities for exactly this reason: I'm spending my time in the "new" section and seeing what comes up.
Sometimes it's a bit of a challenge, it's a little like going into the library and finding someone has thrown all the books on the floor and then done a good job of shuffling them around. You never know what you are going to find and it is a bit of a mixed bag.
I want to curate a feed for each of the communities I'm interested in so that I have something relevant and interesting to show people I'd like to attract to Steem. At the moment, all the feeds are like T K Maxx - you know there's some good stuff in there, provided you've got the energy to get in there and find it.
Haha, I completely get what you're saying about the "New" section. It's quite daunting to go sift through all of that content. Good point about the community feeds too!
I think a social network is a more accurate description of Steem than a content discovery platform and I think that is fine.
Of course I am more interested in reading and engaging with people I know.
I can find great content any time, anywhere with google. A social network is about engaging with others that you know.
That's an interesting way of looking at it, can't say that I fully agree with it though. I personally envisioned more something like Youtube, but then for written content. I personally want to read blogs that are genuinely interesting and not necessarily of people I know.
But yeah, everyone has their own vision and that's totally okay!
On Myspace I had a lonely account with no connections.
When facebook came along they hooked me up with my old friends, interests, and people that I was interested in.
I moved to where I could interact with people I knew or cared about their views.
Look, if you share a picture of your kid... I don't care. Looking at stranger's kids is creepy.
I also don't care what you had for dinner or your political views if I don't know you from Adam. The more I know you, the more it matters.
Some of the new Scot-tribes are doing pretty good, sportstalk, and steemleo have some pretty specific topical tags. So if I want to see sports stories about swimming, or car racing, or american football, very easy to find on sports talk. Steemleo the same for financial new, help and advice. Will they and the other Tribes be able to maintain that separation and ease of content hunting is yet to really be seen, they are new still, so we wait and see.
It's getting a bit better indeed, but the thing I find a bit annoying about those scot tribes, is the fact that they just fork the original Steemit design together with all its downfalls.
The concept itself it good though.
I think they are just testing the waters, I think they will have their own unique individual looks eventually, busy, partiko, esteem don't really look like stemmit much anymore. So like them, after a growth period, they may want to look a bit different.
Steemit never put any effort into searches.
In fact, they designed steem to be as unsearchable as possible.
Almost two years ago, someone was working on making you be able to hide all the resteems in a person's feed. (So you could see THEIR articles... you know, like you went there to find) And, it was almost done... accept the back end couldn't handle it.
We should be able to go to a person's blog page and search by date, title word and limit by tags. As a bare minimum. However, this is superly hard on the back-end servers.
I should be able to go to the "New" list and sort by tag-cloud or word count. I should be able to exclude posts that only have a video, or just a picture (meme)...
So much should be done with the meta data... three years ago.
Ouch, that kinda hurt to read! Very good point though, however sad it is :-/
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while i don't disagree with your assessment, Steemit Inc has been working pretty diligently on first the coding for HF21 and now trying to roll out SMTs and communities. With their pared down staff, something has to give it seems.
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Great breakdown of the challenges facing content creators here on the platform. I've been writing and publishing for years, but I have just recently found my way to steem.
The UI is what kills me with this site. It's so ugly and hard to navigate. And as you said, it's very hard to organically come across engaging content.
There are a few other blockchain publishing sites that I think look and navigate so much better than steemit. cough SCORUM cough
But those other sites pale in comparison to the user base and current projects that steem has going on.
I won't lie, this site is very daunting. It seems if you are going to make it here you need a lot more than just talent.
Anyways, thanks again for the post.