I have to say, with the focus mainly on onboarding, and new users, steem is going to continue to lose established authors of quality.
Our initial rules and restrictions of new authors and the frequency of how often we curate the same authors have had to be lowered and often times even removed due to the effect of the price of Steem.
Really! I haven't noticed. I've been on a knife edge about powering down and leaving steem for some time now. I'm going to mention these concerns with curie in their private channel at some point, but I really do think the curation guilds should consider supporting decent established content creators on steem more.
Here's the thing, I can only speak to my own experience, I can't speak for anyone else. But since I've powered up all my earnings on here, as well as purchasing steem, both curie and OCD stopped curating me many moons ago. The message seems to be, you've got some stake so we'll forget about you. I stopped creating as much long-form, high quality content on steem simply because it was makeing on average, less than $0.30/hour for my time. Lack of support was happening well before I modified my average post to be shorter posts. Some people may be seeing support, but others aren't and the reality is that quality content creators are here for the hopes of getting paid as much as anyone else. The difference is that decent writers will go elsewhere quicker than shitposters 🤣
I'm waiting to see what happens after HF21... but I honestly don't see any indication in the way people are talking that anything will change. I'd like to post travel articles, short stories, comedy skits and articles around the arts again. But I'm not prepared to spend 4 - 8 hours writing, to have to buy any type of vote above $1.50 average trickling in from some kind peeps auto-voting my posts.
Many many decent writers have already left for all of the reasons I've stated above. These concerns aren't just about me being dissatisfied about my payouts, but also about many long term content creators on here I see who have the same experience.
Ha ha, now I've bitched about things... I do like that you're not messing around with steemengine tokens. I agree with what others have said that the majority of SE tokens are just a money grab and add extra downward pressure on the price of steem. If we can't get an effective content economy working with the native token, what's the point. SMT's need to follow a successful steem model.
Also, I do like your strategies around marketing to try and incentivise and onboard new users.
P.s. I really do hope that all the lazy ass people who delegate all their SP to bidbots do start to delegate to OCD or curie as at least this would guarantee that stake is being used to support real, quality, manually curated content.
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I'll check out your work. Adsup curates established Steem Content Creators who have a history of great content and engagement.
The letter number names rarely catch my attention, so I will take a look. I've recently realized if I can't read the name it doesn't get my attention.
(weird brain tricks)
Thanks @whatsup. At the moment my content is pretty Haiku heavy as I've been super busy this month and am going on holiday in 5 days. So, my engagement has been a little lack luster.
Ha ha, Yeah. I'm in the same position as abh12345. I chose my username without thinking about it too much, as I never expected steem to be something I'd become so involved with when I first joined up. I vaguely remember thinking that I also wanted to be anonymous and just ended up using my old MSN chat username 🤣 I'm showing my age.
But the username means something. It's my initials (raj) with the 808 being from a rave act I used to like as a teenager called 808state.
808state hey? Love Pacific State, that saxophone melody... Beautiful!
Good old msn messenger, grew up on those emojis haha!
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Like where?
I understand the frustration, but before any changes are made we've had rules to not curate authors over and over with at least some time in between last curation and on top of that we've whitelisted them to give them a way to continuously grow by bidding on @ocdb and making sure that content is not constantly degrading in quality as they are after all earning around 10% of their bids on each post. Something we will enforce with stricter rules come HF21 as mentioned in a comment here in the post.
Other than that we would want to continuously curate great quality authors and although we will focus mostly on the new ones we bring in to start out with we hope that many others will undelegate from bid bots and delegate to curation projects either doing the same or manually curating a whitelist of great quality authors. (No autovotes cause that will quickly spoil them which most of the time leads to lower quality but instead judge what kind of vote they deserve based on the content).
A lot of options for good writers... all with better chances of qualitive pay (as in being paid a reasonable rate for your time).
I don't post any short fiction here anymore. It all gets submitted to literary journals, magazines that pay for genre fiction or held for a personal collection. This is steem's loss, that may sound arrogant but it's not arrogant to not undervalue yourself to the tune of $0.30/hour lol
Article-wise it pays much better on medium if you're shared by their curators through the partner program. Also, there are many other websites that will pay $100+ for SEO specific articles, '10 greatest historical figures' type stuff.
Crypto-wise, 'Narrative' is looking pretty good ATM, and there are new options coming up in the future.
My point is, those types of places are where a lot of the best steem writers have gone. There is massive movement to Narrative ATM as there is no delegation, or bidbots over there.
OCDB is all well and good, and I do understand that you're trying to make the best of the mess that delegations brought to steem, but it's still buying a vote.
We used to have a renowned author posting on steem. He left a while ago. I curated pretty much exclusively poetry and fiction for curie for just over 8 months and we had at least 30 people on steem writing in those tags to a 'mainstream publishing' level. Right now, I can count on one hand the amount of people writing in these tags to that level.
These people will have left for all of the reasons I stated.
I'm not saying any of this to be negative, just speaking the truth as I see it.
P.s. I always try to end with something positive 😉
100% agree with you on this one acidyo 👍
Did you, or the other quality writers you're referring to, consider to start your own website where you're in control and can monetize traffic? Just curious.
Well... I can only speak for myself @fredrikaa. Yeah, I've considered building up my long abandoned WordPress site, but it would take a whole pile of extra work which I don't have time for right now due to health issues.
So far as others who have left are concerned, all I can say is I have personally spoken to a lot of people who are quality writers who've left steem, many whom stated some of the reasons I highlighted above.
I dunno what to say beyond that. In my opinion, it is a problem that the steep learning curve and crazy levels of networking required to get anywhere on steem drives many people away. Add to that diminishing rewards, and a large proportion of high quality content creators will walk. Right now steem is like an echo chamber of people writing about tribes and steem.
I'm not sure what mass appeal that has, but it wasn't always this way. There used to be a majority of wide ranging, decent quality content on here. Right now people are incentivised to create steem-centric content because that is what whales, devs and a bunch of people who are emotionally invested (myself included) seem to want. But this makes for a very strange site to look at from an outsider's perspective.
Anyway, I've gone on a tangent 🤣
There we go, being on the same wavelength again haha!
I just said something similar about maintaining current authors as that is just as important as getting new ones and what a small upvote from a massive account does to morale!
Working for $0.30 per hour does not compute in the UK! I mean min wage is 35x that in the UK so if it's just down to finances for your time, a job is far more valuable than writing a travel or piece of fiction for steem.
But we want to do what we love as creatives and earn for our creations.
I just hope that with hf21 that we see more curation guilds or initiatives that can help maintain current user base of decent high quality content creators.
Ha ha, yeah we so often seem to share the save insights Nik.
Yeah, this is the reality I'm facing, and it's why I'll leave if I do leave. But I've put a massive amount of time and energy in to steem beyond the content I've written. All of the community (discord) work I did from mid 2017 through to late 2018 was behind the scenes and went pretty much unnoticed but I used to work 20-30 hours/day on steem... 7 days a week.
Anyway, I remember when the content from the community was a lot more varied and vibrant. That's what we need here, and the only way for that to happen is to provide inspiration to new tallent coming to steem. Both through curation support for their content, but also by them seeing that consistent high quality work will be rewarded consistently. This is what is lacking, and has been dwindling since the first bidbots were invented. As soon as that happened large stake holders found another way to avoid honest curation, beyond circle jerks they could now delegate to bots, and things slowly went down the shiter.
I remember watching it happen. You had whales delegating to various projects/communities almost to try and justify what they were doing on the side either delegating most of their SP to bidbots, or running them.
Ha ha, but I shouldn't really let myself get drawn into these thoughts as they only wind me up 🤣
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I'm sure when steem was worth more at the time you were working tirelessly on it, it would have been worth it but such is the volatile nature of crypto and that we have to pay capital gains tax on anything over 10k earnings in the UK (or income tax if it is our sole earnings) you really need to be earning a salary from it and that's not feasible for content creators no matter how much you interact, especially if your content isn't steem centric.
The travel feed community have consistently supported my travel posts regardless of it being my first or my 40th. Great content is great content and it should be rewarded whatever your rep, length of stay on here or otherwise. And I'm not being arrogant by saying I produce some gems from time to time (the Actifit posts I've ditched for the most part because the micro blogs were only useful whilst I was travelling and a quick way to keep in contact with the platform and earn some steem) - that's what curation from great guilds does, it makes you feel more confident in your own ability and you can keep going. Dsound, curie, steempress, c-squared... (The list goes on) when you get an upvote from all these places, you feel like you're doing something right... Why does it stop for some guilds? I'm sure a 1-5% upvote wouldn't be tough on VP for regular support of vetted authors from these huge accounts?
You don't have to answer, it's just curiosity. I'm slowly building my account now, up to 2,300SP and the tribes are really helping earn extra steem as well.
I'm not going anywhere as I'm still doing this as a hobby and steem has really helped me sharpen up my own website - I'm pretty much embedded here. I've been convincing a few halfies over to steem full time from EMA and it's worked.
But if the hobby can turn in to something more then it's smiles all round. Road to dolphinhood here we go!
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