Steem is still losing minnows
We have been monitoring the numbers of accounts at various levels for some time and it is disappointing to see the number of minnows decreasing. If you go back a couple of months you can see that the difference is more or less matched by increases in dolphins, orcas and whales. Of course it is great to see so many people investing serious money in Steem. Not many can get that big just on post rewards. Still, we should be gaining new minnows all the time and so the number should not be decreasing this fast.
The @tenkminnows account votes up a couple of dozen small accounts automatically and the trail is followed by a number of people who can add around an extra Steem to the post rewards. It will only upvote a couple of posts each day per account in order to retain enough voting power. We will be checking on the progress of those accounts. Any that get well past minnow level (~500SP) may be dropped from the list. If anyone is powering down or found to be buying excessive votes they will also be dropped as this is about encouraging real engagement and dedication to Steem.
We would encourage small account to buy some Steem if they can. It is still relatively cheap and getting to minnow does not cost that much for someone on European or US wages. Doing so gives your vote more value and increases what you can make from curation. You ought to be able to make a good return on your investment, especially if the Steem price bounces back. Of course some cannot afford this, but may still have the time to make good posts. It should be about quality and driving real engagement. It may take more than just doing a daily Actifit post to get people commenting. Review things, create art, teach us something. Your content needs to have value. There are curation efforts out there that may find you if you are actively engaging with others.
Steem is not intended to be a 'magic money machine'. Let us make it work as it should and empower people around the world.
Steem on!
Could it be that more than a few of those minnows that were lost became dolphins?
I was thinking the same thing
That is what I was implying at the start. We should still be making new minnows though. It is only about $85/£65 to buy your way to minnow from nothing.
How much would someone stand to benefit from spending the money they have now in order to buy enough steem power to end up within the minnow range?
Having not been up there myself I don't know what it is a reasonable expectation and what sort of time frame for breaking even with their investment a person should expect.
I have not done the sums, but it depends on what confidence you have in Steem. For now the price is low due to general crypto issues. I think you have to decide what you want from it. If it is just money then there may be better options. If you want to be part of something radical then it may be worth investing what you can afford. If you can boost your SP a bit then people will appreciate your votes. I see some of your posts have done well, so you have something people want to see.
Thanks. That gives me a bit to think about. It's not just money I want out of it, but I also can't afford to lose money from it either and I've reached a point in my life that I know I have to make self employment work for me so money factors in but isn't the only thing.
I'd make my art even if I made nothing from it and there was no prospect of it, and making my art or writing a program is good for my mental health, so the things I do on here and the other platforms I'm on have a lot more use than just making money. On the other hand though, making money from it would allow me to do it more than if I have to rely on a job (especially if the job took away too many spoons / too much of my energy and hindered my ability to do my creative stuff outside of work) and it also means I'll no longer be a fish trying to climb a tree.
I also care about rewarding other artists and I definitely like that boosting my SP would make my votes more valuable to the people I want to support. I definitely like to support other people. If I was a bit more financially secure, there are people I would be supporting on patreon too.
As of halfway through last week, I'm currently out of work atm (but I'm hoping to switch to making my business, of which this Steem account is part but far from the whole, an actual income capable of being a main source of income), trying to buy a house on my partner's wage (but we still need to save some deposit) and recovering from a massive burnout, which was pretty damn terrible but honestly isn't all bad as it has lead to more understanding of myself.
This understanding further pushes me to believe that self-employment is what I should be aiming at and I'm going in and giving it what I can to make that work.
Because of my situation, any money I was to invest is competing with going towards a house deposit, other ways to monetarily invest in my business and money for surviving until the business does better, so while money isn't the only goal or reason for me to use these platforms, it does play a role in determining whether I should invest money (and also time really) into them or not.
The reason for time is simply because the time I spend on here is competing with time spent on other creative things that may also make money. If it was competing with time spent on facebook or reddit, that would be different and would fit with what I see other people say about treating anything earned as a bonus (I hardly use facebook and I do use reddit but that's individual communities that don't appear have the same presence here), as in that case it's competing with non-productive social media time, but for me it is competing more-so with time spent on other potentially money earning activities. I think the opportunity cost influences which mindset is applicable (ie whether the opportunity cost is time spent on facebook not earning money vs whether the opportunity cost is time spent creating a design for Redbubble or making something for Etsy etc).
Whether through investment or time and content creation, I do hope to eventually be powerful enough on here to properly reward those I appreciate though. Given my situation it probably isn't the time to spend money investing here now though. I'd have to know I'd at least make the investment back as we do need the money for things.
Thanks for giving me a bit to think about.
I like your project and still feel it is very relevant with #newsteem.
I think based on your data, we aren't losing minnows, they are graduating.
However, we are not gaining minnows.
support + onboarding = more minnows.
I haven't been active with onboarding too much. I've helped a few people and I like helping the smaller curation projects with votes or following curation trails.
You have an interestig idea here and minnows definitely need support. I especially like that you mention Steem is inexpensive now and it's the right time to consider buying.
I've also noticed more people from developed countries buying Steem. Right now minnow status (~500steem @ 200krw each) costs around 12.5 hours of minimum wage (8000krw/hr) labour in Korea. If you consider it would be difficult to write 10 decent blogs that time and nearly impossible to get 500 steem doing it, that's not too bad.
I was suggesting that people had moved up levels, but few new minnows are replacing them. We need a steady flow of new users who can accumulate or buy some Steem Power. Unfortunately a lot do not stick around long enough. This project was designed to help people out in those early days, but it can only do so much. We need brand new users too and that requires marketing or for people to more actively recruit specific groups.
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i think there are 2 main reasons for that. One of them is for our community to blame and the other one is the authors fault.
Let's start with the authors. So many of them are just here or come here to get rich fast with close to 0 effort. That means they don't interact much with others and make shitty posts. Ofc they won't see much of a response by the community either that means upvotes or comments. Then they will leave.
Now as far as it concerns the community. ok ok i know that the hardfork lead a lot of people to curate manually and search for some decent posts. Still there are issues and trust me i know, i do manual curation,upvoting,commenting since i joined the platform.
Ofc we got some curation trails and curators that search for quality posts but the truth is that searching manually is a chaos. There are way too many shitty posts and at a certain point it's just time consuming. Also, a bunch of "famous" people or accounts with high sp power vote each others, maybe share some upvotes in their comment section or lend some sp to voting trails. That doesn't change the fact that basically they vote the same and same people.
So we either need to do more curation and actually try and search for great content, either my have more curators by giving each of them a single tag to search or this will continue!
Experiment
I did an experiment the other day. I was absent from steemit for 5 months due to no free time and frustration regarding the bot abuse. Now i now exactly what tags to use in order to gain more upvotes other than the usual ones. So i wanted to check out the whole "we curating manually and we changed attitude".
Result
As expected using certain tags i earned more upvotes by curation trails and stuff and by using some others i earned nothing more than the ones from my usual followers. Now if i could write the exact same post and give it to one of the "famous authors" i would had 10-15x times the rewards. This in a way proves what i said above. Now i will bet that my next post will get the "help" of a curation trail or a curator.
All in all we need more manual curation and search for different authors. that will lead to better marketing via the word of mouth and more people will join or return without spending a single dime on ads.
It is fairly obvious that using tags like #steem will get you more attention. I would hope the various 'tribes' are curating the content they specialise in. That is one way to get people more engaged. Steem is small and we lack people to effectively seek out stuff to curate, but you can earn from doing so. If you can lead big accounts to good posts the rewards can be good if you get your vote in first. There are more incentives to curate, but it has to be across all topics. The hardfork has worked out better than I expected, but there is still a lot to be done.
I'm still here and a minnow!!! @tenkminnows has helped me so much and encouraged me to stay on STEEM'n. Soon I'll be no longer a minnow.
Although I have had an account with Steemit for a couple of years, the first time I have ever used it for anything was just a few days ago. I keep seeing articles saying that Steemit is dead which is a little discouraging, however, I see a ton of potential here. Never before have I been so inspired to engage with others like I have since being here.
As a newbie with little reputation and little SP I can see it is a little difficult to get going and definitely a little confusing to understand all the moving parts. Thanks for your efforts to help build up this community. The water's warm and I am really enjoying it over here.
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