RE: Content Crusaders: The Fight to Save Steemit Will Fail
Any category that grows faster than the others, especially on a site that starts out small, will quickly dominate Trending, which after all is a leaderboard of the pre-payout posts getting the most stake-weighted votes. That is simple math. Take a look at the reddit content mix chart that I posted in response to @donkeypong, especially the early years. That is what organic, viral growth looks like when categories have different growth rates and those rates shift over time. Exponential growth means that whatever is growing fastest at any particular time quickly dominates.
Stomping on categories because they have "too much" in Trending is stomping on anything that starts to thrive and drive growth.
If Sports and/or betting took hold and grew the Steemit user base by 10x (from about 1000 active to 10000 active users) would fill >90% of Trending. If something else then took hold (again, see reddit graph) and grew it by another 10x (to 100K active users), that would push aside sports from Trending and fill >90% of it.
Instead of crusading against concepts and categories that dominate Trending (i.e. the ones that grow the fastest), we should be embracing them. To do otherwise is to successively sabotage each source of growth in its earliest stages. A nice 'balanced' Trending means that nothing is particularly growing. Trending is not and can not be a "directory" of every category on the site. If people want that, a completely different page needs to be created for it. Until and unless this completely wrong-headed idea of "balance" is abandoned, Steemit is going nowhere.
I agree. It feels like there are some people who want to try to push Steemit in a certain direction right now because there's a small user base - that they're afraid there will be no way to control it once it grows. And they're right about that. When thousands of users start joining per week, there will be very little that any one person or small group of people can do.
So, I can only guess that the intent today is to try to make people conform to a specific viewpoint and certain subjects/styles that these few people want with the hope that they can actually steer the future of Steemit. But that's a losing proposition. I don't know what would make them think they can direct/control the content here, even now. It's not like there's any evidence that anyone other than the top ~5% of stakeholders has that kind of power.
There's a lot of delusion going around.
They are not wrong, in that if sources of growth are stomped on, then it will remain small and controllable. That isn't what most of us want, but some either want control more than growth (for example, you hear derisive comments about becoming another reddit), or they aren't capable of thinking through how this actually works.
There are people in the top 5% of stakeholders who behave in this manner.
We need a core group of people of which the steemit interest fits. Where would it make sense to have a steemit post that was tagged something else? It's technology crytpocurrency software networks.