Steem N00b opinion...
I've found Steem to be a very useful platform with tons of great potential, some of which is being utilized.
The main problem I've sound so far is the pure lack of commentary on this site, even amongst the most popular posts.
Let's compare to Facebook, which I assume, is any social platform's main competitor.
Exhibit A: Sally posts a picture of her breakfast on Facebook:
- She gets 115+ likes.
- She gets 20-30 comments.
- These comments may not be considered "good content", some of which may be simple one word replies ("Yum!")
Exhibit B: Sally posts the same picture on Steem:
- She gets 115+ upvotes.
- She gets 2-3 replies.
- Out of the 3 comments, 2 of them may very well be from bots, which I do not consider good content either.
There seems to be a serious lack of real interaction among the users, is this due to the anonymous nature of the platform? Is this where a platform like Facebook succeeds, by using KYC?
I don't know the cause, and I don't know the solution - this is merely an observation I've made in my less than 2 weeks here.
Thanks for letting me share.
-CryptoAstronaut
100% powerup
Before HF21, 2 months ago, there were tons of comments as well on each every post published here. The problem is that, after HF21 code deployment, commenting is not well rewarded due to the new rewarding algorithm and even worst, it could penalize what you can earn as a curator if you try to upvote a comment since it will not reach a value that overpass the profitable mark. That's why commenting has decreased a lot and so it also does engaging.
People upvotes but just a few try to interact with the author since it is not worth the time spent.
I'm still upvoting and commenting everytime I feel so, I don't care about earning right now but it is a pity we fixed some issues and destroy the interaction between us by deploying such an aggressive rewarding algorithm.
Original post btw.
@dustsweeper is a very useful service for helping get your voted comments past the minimum for payout.
Thanks for the compliment at the end.
So it seems that the focus is too many people are concerned with making money off the platform, instead of just using it for its own sake. Sure the prospect of being rewarded drew me here, but so did the concept/vision behind it, which I think is still really good.
any comment on your long-term prospects for Steem?
It all depends on the situation of the market. Steem will do well when the market confirms a reversal
Posted using Partiko iOS
the crypto market in general? which is heavily relevant to the price of $btc?
seems like this platform should be able to withstand on its own, without being affected by other cryptos.
it should be, yes, but it is not the case, still.
We need more new and fresh FIAT entering to the market, then, some will come to STEEM as well but the problem is our visibility. People knows BITCOIN, ETH and other major... steem is another step on the knowledge of the newcomer.
I had a lack of comments even before the HF. But I see what you mean.
People have become too self centered in my opinion focusing mostly on posting on a regular basis and getting their auto votes rewards. It matters a lot the people you follow and the ones following you but overall interaction is very poor nowadays. Many have quit the platform and for now we can't compare it with Facebook. Here the trybes are mostly created with people that haven't ever met and it's not the same situation as with Facebook where you have your family and friends seeing your posts. It's the auto votes that I blame for such superficial interaction. If everyone would have to manually curate every say to get their curator rewards then they would probably read more and interact more. I hope things will change for the future.
Interesting analysis. What's your long term perspective on the platform?
Why would you say that most have quit the platform?
What would it take to get rid of the bots/auto-votes?
I don't have one. I have a long term hope though.
Mostly due to the price continuous fall and lack of success with their blog. Sometimes you can appreciate having lots of comments to your posts but almost no rewards but you can't have that forever. It is a rewards based "social media thing" though. Especially when you see/have seen that much circle jerking and boosted posts and so on.
Bid bots problem already solved. You can't buy upvotes from them anymore. At least the ones that I am aware of. Auto votes, I don't know but I would take this feature out asap, if you wanna have a "live platform" and encourage as many people as possible to be active and why not even invest in Steem from their own money.
I can't tell you why there are only a few people commenting.
All I can say for my part is I'd rather just read than comment. But I do that on all platforms.
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STOPTo support your work, I also upvoted your post!
Do not miss the last post from @steemitboard:
I think the future of STEEM lies with the dApps at this point. Steemit as a blogging platform served as a great start, but apps like Splinterlands/Steemmonsters are where the growth is.
Facebook is a strong social media competitor. I remember back in the day I thought sites like Twitter were completely redundant, pointless, and would never become popular. Competing with the big boys requires a lot of functional diversification and targeting new untapped communities.
Functional Diversification
Fortunately, Steem is not a social media site. It's just a blockchain that you can write plain text on. That text could be code, blogs, messages, or any other organization of characters.
Steemit created Steem, and Steemit is technically social media, so it gets confusing.
Is that a problem? Eh, I don't know. I feel like the Steemit site would still provide a very large majority of value even if comments were completely disabled. Most of the content that I find to have value comes from the original post, as most of the commenters often don't know much about the given topic, and often don't provide much (if any) extra value.
An interesting thing to note here is that Steemt Incorporated actually can't disable comments, because people would just go to another frontend like Busy, Steempeak, SteemLeo, Palnet, etc. All of these frontends are centralized hubs that can organize the data on the blockchain any way they see fit. Anyone in the world can create one of these centralized hubs.
The crux of Steem is the cryptocurrency aspect. Facebook would never be able to allow users to control the inflation of an underlying native currency. That would be a regulation nightmare, assuming they would even want to do it... which they don't because Libra already proves this idea. They want to retain as much control as humanly possible.
It's a lot harder to make activities on Steem illegal because there are less centralized points of attack and it exists in a borderless environment. We can implement peer-to-peer gambling here. No regulator in the world has the resources to go after random people gambling against each other. It's the same reason why torrents were impossible to stop, except crypto is far more resistant than torrents are.
Steem can create a host of services, all with built-in governance structures, that are highly resistant to censorship. The social media aspect of the platform might account for 90% of the activity that goes on today, but nobody can regulate what happens here. We have no idea what kind of functionality is going to take root here in the future.
TLDR
You can't really legitimately compare Facebook to Steem in any way.
wow... I didn't even talk about community targeting.
i talk too much.
On 2017 when I arrived here there were much more comments than posts and posts were shorter. There was a time that people even asked for a nesting in comments -the way they were shown-. Luckily people began to create better quality posts and somehow people also began to comment less.
People keeps comparing Steem with Facebook, while that's wrong. Facebook is about people you expect to share some more intimate moments in your life. Steem is for writing about something and getting rewarded for it. People can also comment, and be rewarded for their comments. Steem is more like Medium or a Twitter without character limits.
Yeah, lack of engagement is a real problem here. Most of the comments on my posts are from bots (usually small groups that upvote community posts.) I try to comment on people hoping they will read and interact with my posts but I could only comment on so many per day.
I think @eSteemapp points made me want to comment a lot more.
Congratulations @cryptoastronaut!
Your post was mentioned in the Steem Hit Parade for newcomers in the following category:
I'd say to take a look at this post from a long term user who would say the opposite. You just need to find your place here and communities should help after xmas.