The power of manual curation is quite evident on Medium.com
A few days ago, I made a rather startling discovery (that probably won't make any new friends for me here):
Since April, Steemit has been on a fairly steady decline with a small uptick of late. Looking at that graph (charts are from Alexa), it is plain to see that there is a fair amount of correspondence between the worldwide ranking of Steemit.com and the rise and decline of the cryptocurrency bubble of last year and this year. That might explain a fair share of the decline, but I think there is more to it than that.
Now look at the next graph for Medium.com.
Here we see Medium and it is still on the rise. Medium is our competition. Worldwide, Steemit is at 1749 and Medium is at 261. Let's see if we can make sense of the differences.
Is this a fair comparison? Perhaps not. But it seems fair to say that the rise of Steemit had just as much to do with the rise of the cryptocurrency bubble as the decline of Steemit had to do with the bursting of the bubble. The popularity of Medium shows no correlation with cryptocurrency prices. This has actually been a point of concern for me.
One of the highest ranking accounts on Steemit is @haejin, the cryptocurrency market forecaster. If anyone demonstrates that an obsession with cryptocurrency is present on Steemit, @haejin's popularity does it. I have to admit that I feel a certain sense of alienation about this. I don't like to write about crypto. I know that it's there, but seriously, can't we talk about something else?
I'm well aware that there are some very popular travel and culinary bloggers here, but there must be something more. Right? Ok, on the trending page, there are a few articles about Steemit, SMTs, and baseball. What do visitors think when they come to Steemit, a professed blogging site, and find that a good chunk of the "hot" content is about crypto?
Medium isn't dependent on cryptocurrency prices. There are some accounts that write about cryptocurrency investing, but they're not the top accounts. I've been on Medium for a few years and I didn't see the point of it when I have Blogger. But a few weeks ago, I noticed that Medium has introduced a way for people to get paid. Now that got my attention.
People pay $5 a month or $50 a year to be a member. Then they can read any article they like. Content creators like myself can post behind an open paywall or not. People can earn money based on how many likes they get from their articles. The fees are the reward pool. The more likes you get, the more money you earn from the reward pool.
Here is how it works, from their FAQ:
Currently, Partner Program writers are paid every month based on how members engage with stories. Some factors include reading time (how long members spend reading a story) and applause (how much members clap). Each member’s $5/month subscription is distributed proportionally to the stories that the individual member engaged with that month. So if someone engaged with 10 stories in a given month, their monthly subscription would be distributed to those authors only.
Note that voting is not stake based. In other words, just because you're a whale on Medium, doesn't mean that your vote is coveted, and that people are pining away for your vote. There are no whales really, because there is no accumulation of "capital" or Steem to be used for influence. One person, one vote. That determines how much you earn on Medium.
We have stake based voting on Steemit. How has that been working out? Very early adopters became whales when it was cheap and easy to earn Steem (I think they called it, "N2"). Those very early adopters can now earn good money with their stake and post what they like. They can rent their Steem Power. Does stake based voting work for Steemit? The rankings on Alexa would seem to say no.
I also don't see any sh!tposts on Medium. People aren't posting a video with zero editorial, hoping for an upvote on Medium. I've seen plenty of articles on Steemit bemoaning The Trending Page and the crap that has appeared there. I've seen plenty of articles talking about how reputation doesn't mean anything on Steemit anymore. Does it? Is that "proof of brain"?
There are no bots on Medium. Medium is manual curation on steroids. There is no API that one can use to automate any voting, whatsoever. It's all eyeballs. Humans reading the work of other humans.
On Steemit, there are bots for upvotes all over, hence the sh!tpost problem as mentioned earlier. Some have SP for rent and some bots like Steemvoter are just to make sure a favored account gets an automatic upvote. I think if anything, the success of Medium demonstrates that bots are not needed to make Steemit a success.
I have seen the news about Smart Media Tokens and I see the emphasis on "proof of brain", which might as well be "proof of eyes" on Medium. Medium already has proof of brain built in. I hope @ned, et. al., are right about their claims for proof of brain function of SMTs. I'm not going to argue with the success of Steem. I'm still here and I have no plans to leave.
I'm just saying that we might look to Medium to see what they're doing right and borrow what we can to improve the applications that run on top of Steem. We can learn from our competition.
This article is born of a sort of frustration with noticing that things have really slowed down of late. So I'm joining the @thesteemengine to see if I can build some steam again and start growing my account more. I'm working on getting more involved in the Steemit community, but Medium sure looks interesting.
Write on.
Slogan by @tecnosgirl
Plan B for Humanity
A basic guaranteed income in the context of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
A sort of political movie review: Star Wars: Rogue One
Happiness isn't getting everything you want - happiness is a skill
The opposite of love is not hate, it is apathy
A short but growing list of people I admire, who have helped me, and/or influenced me, my thinking and/or my posts:
- @taskmaster4450 - The Age of Abundance is here
- @scottsantens - The Age of Universal Basic Income is here
- @gric - A very cool artist with some interesting perspectives
- @gringalicious - great writing, cooking and photography
- @luzcypher - for teaching me about how gift economies work
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out of range...
haha
Steemit sucks and makes use of real world statist features that the people hate. As soon as the new platforms roll out, Steemit is done...
The Steem blockchain of which Steemit is just one frontend is a growing ecosystem.. it will not be done as you claim.
You are hoping so...but it's not guaranteed.
a lot more guaranteed than your sky is falling supposition.
Hmmm, you are not very objective. Statistics are on my side.
right well as you should know ... statistics show that 99.9% of statistics is bullshit
This is the 0.1% then. More business models fail than succeed.😜
Steemit is hardly the sky...
and you're hardly credible yet both you and the sky exist
To your first part- that's your opinion...to your second- that's a Strawman Argument. Please refute a specific point I make or each one, please.
When you make some valid points I might take the time to give a damn what you think. In the meantime, I have some actual work to do. I'll leave the trolling up to you.
That's an interesting analysis. Do you see anything on the horizon that would fit your prediction?
People don't like having uneven voting weights. They prefer to be equal. Also, Minds started around the same time as Steemit, yet is three times the size. This is inspite the fact they don't earn on Minds Yet.
Also, Steemit runs like crony capitalism, which few like. Sola just came out this year and already has over 100, 000 unique users from google playstore alone. Steemit just hit 1 mill after over two years?
I created 3 accounts on Steemit and most users have multiple accounts, so at best half the accounts are unique, but you and I both know it's less.
Steemit simply isnt drawing the masses, not keeping the majority they do draw and morale over bots and value is very low...
If you think the average user has a positive opinion of Steemit, then you don't understand the system. Negativity is frowned upon. I could keep going, but feel this is enough, @digitalfirehose
Sola is more like Instagram than Steemit.
https://steemit.com/sola/@misslasvegas/what-steemit-is-for-facebook-sola-can-be-for-instagram-trouble?sort=votes
And yes, there are some problems with Steemit, but I'm finding that the community can deal with them. I just joined @thesteemengine a few days ago, and already, I'm seeing measurable improvement in my earnings. No longer am I groping in the dark for to gain visibility. The Steem Engine has given me a new hope for my work here on Steemit.
As to your cronyism concerns...I may have just the thing for you:
https://steemit.com/steem-help/@luzcypher/the-most-valuable-steemit-post-begins-in-your-head-tips-to-mazimize-your-social-currency-on-steemit
Steemit is a gift economy, first and foremost. While there are concerns about quality to be sure, it is the community that matters.
Write on.
I'd be interested to see these charts going back a few months more. Medium has been around a lot longer than Steemit, and if it recently introduced a payment scheme, that in itself might explain its recent increase in ranking. I think a lot more people are aware of Medium than Steemit, because it's more established. Though I certainly take your point about manual curation.
However, bear in mind that Steemit rewards curation as well as blogging. Does Medium do that? I'm not really familiar with Medium.com, but I suspect that Steemit has more going for it in the long term than Medium.
On this page:
https://siterankdata.com/medium.com
You'll find a chart going back to 2013. It looks like 450 is where it started to level off after opening Medium.com. There is a clear leap around 2017 and it's been hold well since then.
In March of 2017, Medium introduced paid subscriptions. In August of last year, they introduced pay per clap, too. There seems to be a good correlation between the jump from 325 to 261 since they introduced author payouts, but I think that they were a strong site from the beginning.
I did change my tune in the last couple of days, thanks to comments here and posts elsewhere...
https://steemit.com/steemit/@digitalfirehose/steem-integration-transaction-demand-and-bitcoin-shorts
Thanks for your comment...
Thanks for the info. I've commented on your latest post too.
interesting comparison although not only is Medium older and more well established their revenue model is considerably different including the ability to moderate posts which Steemit doesn't as the blockchain is immutable.
Your points are well taken, if taken a bit tardy. Thanks for your comment. :)