RE: Content Crusaders: The Fight to Save Steemit Will Fail
I think you make a good point, however, as someone who very frequently expresses the need for higher quality content I wanted to distinguish what I believe (and what i like to think many of the quality of content advocates believe, though i speak for no one buyt myself) from the position that you seem to be arguing against.
I don't believe that "bet on sports" type posts are evil, or that they don't deserve any rewards at all, or even necessarily that any single one of them is overrewarded.
However, I personally would say (and yes, this is a subjective opinion) that the rewards they recieve are inconsistent with the amount of value to which they bring to the platform. They are also inconsistent with the quality of the individual posts.
Granted im not a huge sports guy, but to me steemsports doesn't really provide great sports content. A copy paste of the wikipedia entry for both teams playing, and a copy paste of their roster photos plus a very general original paragraph about each team.
Which is all to say that yeah, steemsports is about sports. But its a series of poorly written posts about sports that no one outside steem would really care to read. ANd yeah, its about gambling. But its about gambling to free roll for whats usually around a dollar.
So it does two things. It informs people about sports, but it does it badly, mostly using information already readily available on other sites. And it allows people to gamble on sports, but it also does that badly, because theyre gambling for less than a dollar. Granted its a freeroll for less than a dollar, but still.
And its successful not because it addresses an appealing topic, but because it has a "hook" that appealed to smooth and other whales, then it got on a bunch of lists. and now it gets 200 views and 800 votes. ANd because its so forumlaic, it can be cut and pasted many times a day with no effort. And since it has a guarnateed reward due whale support, it will be cut and pasted many times a day.
That is to say, the question with posts like steemsports and other whale favorites is not:
How can I write good quality posts that add value to the system and get that sweet sweet whale love.
it is:
What gimmicky format can i come up with that allows me to basically cut and paste my posts with no effort so that i can make as many posts per day and take as much of the reward pool as possible for hitting control-c and control-v.
If you want to consider steemit a lottery where one buys one's tickets by creating content, the problem is that what you're rewarding isnt good or original content.
I think that this is a valid argument. That's not to say that I necessarily agree, however. I'm not sure that we can really quantify the value of @steemsports in any meaningful way. Regarding the quality - that's certainly true. The different presenters have different styles and for some of them, English isn't their native language. I'm not sure if you ever read the ones when I presented, but on two different posts when I did, I noticed people saying how well it was done. Not trying to brag, but there are people out there who recognize quality within the category and among the various posts.
To be clear - I'm not saying that we can't offer constructive criticism for improvement. My issue is that there are people explicitly stating that the content does not add value and that it shouldn't be on the platform - or should at least be separated into its own shadowy corner where it can essentially wither and die.
This is mostly a consequence of bot /trail voting. There aren't 360 users voting on a winner every game. I would imagine that at least 20% of those (don't quote me on this stat) are bot/trail votes. Before such voting, the distributions were commonly 5+ SP for the winner on even some of the crowded bets. I remember receiving 10+ SP several times. Then the autovoting bots and trails came, along with the continued price decline.
That's certainly one of the downsides to game posts - the same game can be repeated easily, to the benefit of both the poster and the players. But that's something that has to be monitored by the more influential users and they'll need to judge for themselves whether or not the games are being favored or hated by the community in general. So far, there hasn't been much backlash about it. Most of the "active users" participate in their games, as well as others around the platform.
But as I said - it's not an issue about whether or not we agree on what's quality and what isn't or what's valuable and what isn't. We won't always agree on that. That doesn't mean we need to try to push certain users or content off the platform...or continually, publicly denigrate certain users and their content. That isn't going to magically make Steemit a better social media platform. I'm not saying that you do that, but there are others who do and have been at it for a while.