losing hope in Steemit
Welcome to the 21st weekly installment of my series on Steemit income and growth!
Income on Steemit is generated by "investment" (the more Steem you have, the more you earn) and by "work" (earning Steem by contributing content that adds value). Already having invested my savings in Steem, I'm now "working" by uploading unique valuable content to the blockchain. My goal is to increase my average weekly income to 15 Steem.
Calculating weekly income
Considering income from accounts that I own, and that my wife owns, and accounts started as group projects with my funds (currently @drutter, @medikatie, @greatesteem, @hempy, @girlsofgreen, and @sativazeee), here's the running tally:
Week 01 - 0840 (+ ? ) Steem (+?%)
Week 02 - 0848 (+ 8 ) Steem (+0.95%)
Week 03 - 0862 (+14) Steem (+1.65%)
Week 04 - 0868 (+ 6 ) Steem (+0.70%)
Week 05 - 0876 (+ 8 ) Steem (+0.92%)
Week 06 - 0888 (+12) Steem (+1.37%)
Week 07 - 0914 (+26) Steem (+2.93%)
Week 08 - 0929 (+15) Steem (+1.64%)
Week 09 - 0936 (+ 7 ) Steem (+0.75%)
Week 10 - 0953 (+17) Steem (+1.82%)
Week 11 - 0960 (+ 7 ) Steem (+0.73%)
Week 12 - 0966 (+ 6 ) Steem (+0.63%)
Week 13 - 0973 (+ 7 ) Steem (+0.72%)
Week 14 - 0980 (+ 7 ) Steem (+0.72%)
Week 15 - 0986 (+ 6 ) Steem (+0.61%)
Week 16 - 0991 (+ 5 ) Steem (+0.51%)
Week 17 - 0996 (+ 5 ) Steem (+0.50%)
Week 18 - 1032 (+36) Steem (+3.61%)
Week 19 - 1040 (+ 8 ) Steem (+0.78%)
Week 20 - 1045 (+ 5 ) Steem (+0.48%)
Week 21 - 1051 (+ 6 ) Steem (+0.57%)
Average weekly income (last 10 weeks): +9.1 Steem (+0.91%)
After the worst 2 weeks in recorded history, the average weekly growth has dropped to its lowers level yet, below 1%. Looking ahead, even working and uploading full-time, we aren't going to be able to keep that average up. There's a real lack of upvotes to go around lately. Our activists and models are busy creating high-quality original content, but for some reason it's no longer being seen. Or, it's being seen, but nobody is upvoting it.
We notice that a large number of people have sold some or all of their upvotes into Steemit investment schemes, generally called "bots" and "trails". Perhaps that's why there are less organic upvotes to go around?
Steemit will die if it stops finding high-quality original content (and rewarding it). Content-creators will sometimes work for free, but if they want to do that, they can go back to mainstream media platforms which have massively larger audiences and opportunities.
Steemit's slant is that it has a unique crypto reward system that finds the best content, encourages innovation, empowers artists, and rewards quality. If it ever really did that, it certainly isn't today.
Many other creators of quality content are disappearing in search of a site that will actually find their content, and actually reward them. If Steemit can't do that, it won't recruit or keep content-creators, and it will be a site about itself. It's almost that, already. The "top" lists are flooded with nothing but spam about how to get rich on Steemit, and lists of the top upvote bots. PUKE.
I've been here a full year now. When I got here, I was hearing promises of a major update that would solve many glitches and speed up the signup process. It was coming "any day". It never came! A year is a very long time in cyber-land. They've stopped promising it's coming... and the users have stopped asking. The site is dying.
Our goal of a mere 15 Steem per week is unattainable unless something changes. Our team is giving it their all. We're at peak performance and pumping out articles, videos, photo albums, public appearances, speeches, research, memes, gardening tips, crypto chart analysis, cannamodeling, etc etc. We're unable to generate 15 Steem worth of upvotes per week! We're only trying to make $14 USD per week (two dollars a day) and we can't even do that. More than half of our upvote income comes from each other, so actually we're making under a dollar per day.
We're wearing out our equipment. Our savings were invested into Steem at the start of the year.... which are down over 90%. Should have just stashed fiat dollars under the mattress.
My team and I are the kind of content-creators this site claims it's looking for. Something's wrong!
"Steemit has redefined social media by building a living, breathing, and growing social economy - a community where users are rewarded for sharing their voice."
My calculations show that to be false, at this time. I hope it changes soon and I believe that's possible.
DRutter
One of the issues with blockchain projects like this is that improving on architecture-level changes is hard, if not impossible. On any non-blockchain platform, the answer would be "We need to get rid of the bots and the ability for you to pay bots to upvote for you." After all, this system turns steem from a content-creators-first platform to a have-money-to-make-money platform. However, how do you pull such a stunt on a blockchain project? You can't remove the ability for others to add to the blockchain. So instead someone has to care enough to run analysis on the data: find out who the bots are. But then what do you do with that information? How do you discipline actors in Steem? Do we have a mechanism for that? I don't think so.
This reminds me of the Civil project, in an interesting way. Civil is a journalism blockchain project. In addition to aiming for censorship-resistance through the use of blockchain, Civil uses a Constitution. Newsrooms on the Civil platform must abide by the constitution. Any citizen can accuse a Newsroom of violating the constitution by staking a certain amount of their CVL token. And then the community votes. That Newsroom can be kicked off the platform if they violate the constitution. This is an oversimplification of their approach, but my main point is this: our experiments in blockchain as a community have focused so far on the libertarian end of the spectrum. Expecting pure market forces to give us our desired outcomes. Perhaps it's time to start experimenting with democracy.
Yea man I feel you, I have been loosing faith and not bothering as much anymore. I just don’t seem to be receiving upvotes anywhere near as much as I used to. I don’t understand why people don’t upvote as it doesn’t cost them a thing, your sbd or steem stays the same so it would be nice to get my regular upvotes for posts. I’m putting in more effort this week and starting some video uploads again as they worked best for me.
My main worry is that steemit is going to go under. Someone pointed out to me last week that the owner/ceo of steemit (ned) has been powering down all of his steem and transferring huge amounts to random new accounts, which they feel means he is trying to cash out and get out of here before it goes under and steem isn’t worth a thing. I don’t really have enough to ‘cash out’ now especially with these low prices.
On the contrary, steem generally follows the btc trend, right? So why is btc and all of these other cryptos crashing like this? What is going to boost everything to recover? Are cryptos going to crash? are they going to start having more independence outside of the btc trend? Who knows... but it seems when btc has a jump everything does. I’m really surprised with the price of other cryptos such as XRP, stellar and cardano, but it seems that steem can plummet due to the uninterested users. Hmm....
Steemit is way more then just putting out content, it’s about networking and interaction.
Yes! I find that about half of Steemit is the comment section. Well-thought-out comments that add to the conversation are key. The more people who do this, the more likely it is that real content will be found, which is Steemit's #1 purpose.
Keep your head up, once steem goes back up, they’ll be a lot of people posting again. And imagine your are apart of the group who post and interacts even when it’s low. You’ll be sitting in a good spot then👍
True true, the place always gets busier when the price is up. Which is weird, the best time to earn (or invest) is when the price is low, like now! So you're right, it's good to just keep trying.
I just got a $2 upvote on one of my FaceBook stories from the other day, so that's something. And it boosted me over the line to 52 rep, woop woop. : )