RE: Content Crusaders: The Fight to Save Steemit Will Fail
The way reddit and other sites have grown is various different categories of content being extremely popular (i.e. filling up what is misnamed as "Trending" on here) at various times, and then having tastes (and the makeup of the user base) shift over time. Especially in its earlier days (though to be clear, the reddit user base even then was much, much larger than Steemit's today). At any particular time you would see a high concentration of a particular topic, be it NSFW, science, programming or politics. Small sites/communities can't be diverse; attempting to force this means destroying any possible network effect on a particular topic/subcommunity.
As you know I, and others, have been somewhat critical of Curie and similar efforts to "spread the wealth" in this manner by promoting a hodgepodge of disconencted posts/topics and in doing so discouraging any particular topic or subcommunity from thriving and driving growth. It is only whale domination on this platform that allows this to happen, essentially forced from the top down. Voting driven organically by a user base would naturally concentrate on a small number of interests (at least for a time, and especially with a "small" user base). Indeed, the periods of successful growth on Steemit aligned with it being first a hub for information and writing about cryptocurrency and decentralized systems, and later anarchism. Since the shotgun approach to "curation guilds" and "quality content" has taken hold, the growth has died. Coincidence? Maybe, but I'm not so sure.
I'm sure you have seen this graph before. There is a lot of wisdom contained within (for example, observe how long a particular topic remained dominant, generally a year or so). In terms of Steemit's scale and user base, we are at the extreme left edge:
http://www.randalolson.com/wp-content/uploads/SubredditGrowthOverTime-all-time.png
Good luck fighting this battle. I think it's the right one but I think it will be hard to convince the other whales. I thought crypto people understood decentralization versus top down but alas the whale content choices here suggest they do not.
I agree and disagree. The whale's "content choices" on things like SteemSports are decentralized. Maybe not decentralized to the point of all 100K+ accounts (mostly shill/scam accounts anyway), but there are probably a few dozen to a hundred or so whale accounts (of various sizes of course) and they choose what they want to vote for and support as do all the dolphins, mid-staked, and minnow accounts.
When you have a list of a dozen or so whales supporting SteemSports (at the moment; these things can change quickly in both directions), which in turn leads (along with votes from other non-whales) to SteemSports receiving and distributing a large portion of the reward pool, it is because we are each exercising our decentralized voting rights and expressing our preferences about what we think adds value.
If SteemSports posts were a ghost town and no one was participating in the games and benefiting from the wide and low-barrier distribution of rewards, the brand wasn't growing and developing new formats and content and investing in trying to grow the platform and its own brand, then I would stop supporting it. Other whales may or may not feel the same way.
I like it as an activity booster and reward distribution strategy just not as content strategy. Net net it's a positive.
People left Steemit when the price tanked (and we've seen the # of posts increase once again now that it's bounced back a bit). Did curation projects kill the price? We actually started after that. Curation projects arose to help authors in tough times, rewarding content creators who would not have been discovered or rewarded otherwise.
You know I'm supportive of many of your attempts to get other communities going, and indeed I'm glad to help you with more of them. Plenty of voting power out there and curation projects have concentrated some of it in areas like photography and Spanish, which have grown nicely. You may not think diversity is best, but you have to keep the masses happy or you won't have a site.
Also, when people stop by from other parts of the Internet, it's nice if they can see a few different things here rather than just one or two niches. Reddit had diversity also, even if there wasn't much going on initially in some of those subs, but I agree with you that we can build some communities here also.
I'm not claiming any particular direct cause->effect in terms of price, curation guilds (including my own) and "spread the wealth". Obviously there are always many different factors at work. I'm pointing to it as one factor and component of what seems a very questionable direction. (I'm not the first, or even the second, to point out that small growing communities need focus; if I could remember who those were, I would be happy to give credit.)
I'm still skeptical of the 'jack of all trades' approach, at this stage (again look at that reddit category graph and particularly the contrast between the earlier and later years). Spread a small community thin and each of 'a few different things' (presumably 'a few' there refers to quite a significant number since you contrast it with one or two) amount to basically nothing at all, each being too small to thrive and drive growth, viral or otherwise.
Taking Steemsports as a specific example, there are more people directly involved with Steemsports as writers, editors, coders, enthusiasts, sponsors, and marketers than there are in most if not all of the other subcommunities here, possibly combined (anarchism and cryptocurrency being a possible counterexamples but those seem to have faded). Those directly involved with Steemsports are not only creating the content, but they are creating a real subcommunity, recruiting friends to the platform and so forth. It has also spawned imitators and spin offs, further growing the sports niche. None of this happens without a certain critical mass of both people and resources with common interests.
There are billions of people in the world who are interested in sports (or gambling or porn). There are probably a few million interested in anarchism and maybe a million or so interested in cryptocurrencies. I'd be happy to see Steemit grow to a few orders of magnitudes larger than it current size on the basis of any one or two of these, and then have it grow horizontally (as did reddit, or Facebook, which started exclusively with college students and their particular interests), which would happen naturally because many people who are interested in X are also interested in Y. Once you bring enough people with a focus on X, then Y (and Z, etc.) can grow from that naturally. We can not be all things to all people with maybe 1000 active users. If we try to do this we will be nothing to anybody.
As a matter of fact, curation guilds are curating posts across a very narrow band of topics. There's no hodgepodge of niche content, because as you say, a community this small does not support it. Every week, ~85-90% posts from Curie are in the top 5 categories/tags. A post about a niche or diverse topic is very rare. Steemit has naturally consolidated on a bunch of topics, and curation guilds only work to pick out the best among them.
A community of 1000 people can never be about all things to all people in the first place - that's clearly illogical - and there's nothing a curation guild can do to change that.
There are dozens of curators involved in Steemtrail and over a 100 weekly active curators submitting to Curie - around 25 daily active; not to mention 700 users in the channel. The curation community is a vital and thriving part of Steemit, as inclusive and engaged as Steemsports.
Activity is tied directly to the price of Steem, and we have seen a substantial increase in the last couple of weeks. Indeed, there have been many returning users who were ignored 3-4 months ago, gave up and left. Let's hope we can retain them this time. Personally, for me, that's the end goal of curation guilds - user retention and engagement. We lost thousands of users when the price was high and the community was only voting for a couple of dozen users - it's not an opportunity we can afford to lose again.
The proof is in the pudding - there are countless people who have said they'd have left Steemit were it not for curation guilds - each day there's at least a couple of comments to that effect on @curie's posts, all by different people.
Without curation guilds and other engaging initiatives like Steemsports, Steemit would be a barren wasteland of about a couple hundred people, and only a couple of dozen people who would be voted for over and over again.
Of course, there's scope for all kinds of initiatives on Steemit, and curation guilds should absolute be part of it; as should be Steemsports and many others.
You make some good points. Thank you for the added background information.
I respect your perspective although I don't entirely share your enthusiasm for this form of what I would call corporatized curation. I very much prefer to just see people organically voting for what they like, or what they want to see more of. There are obviously different points of view on the matter.
Let me ask a serious question. When does the need for curation guilds end, and Steem/it become like other social sites where the users simply do their own voting and it is not funneled though a guild structure? What measurable and achievable criteria would you put forward for declaring that the mission of these guilds is accomplished and they can be disbanded?
EDIT: I just took a look at the latest Daily Curie, and I frankly would have to once again say that opinions differ on these things because I do very much see a hodgepodge. I don't know if those top 5 categories/tags are very broad or it is a question of whatever Curie votes for ends up defining the top 5 tags, but either way what I see defies any obvious themes (to my eye at least).
Replying to your last comment (comment tree limit).
An obvious benefit of curation guilds I didn't mention in my last comment is that curation guilds encourage and organise organic voting. Previously, people would just vote for whatever was profitable, generating bot swarms behind a very select few users. Of course, these bot swarms still exist, but curation has diversified greatly.
With curation guilds it's much more profitable to vote on good content, because they know a curation guild will be looking out to vote after them, so they can cash in greater curation rewards. (Needless to say, it would be much more profitable to vote on a post with few rewards generated than voting on posts which already attract bot swarms).
We can see this complete change in behaviour - even bots now look out for popular content (i.e. lots of votes with but very little payout). The top two bots by curation rewards - @biophil and @better (laonie) follow a similar algorithm.
So, curation guilds are just as essential to promote organic voting - which is definitely essential, as you mention.
That's a very good question! When I first took interest in curation, personally my chief goal was to retain users. It sucked to see thousands of users exit the platform en masse because they were offered no exposure or rewards. My initial thought was there would be a point at which curation guilds won't be required - I used to joke about "Curie being successful when there's no need for Curie".
But the more I work with a curation guild, the more I see other curation guilds like Steem Guild, the Reddit tag project, Steemtrail form; the more I realize that this may be the only true USP of Steem. Authors do get rewarded in other social platforms - whether by attention, exposure or engagement. But not curators (upvoters/likers etc.). Steem may be the only social network that actually rewards curation, and I have seen many people take interest. I'd say 10%-20% of the active user base are also active curators, and this does not include bots. I'm pretty certain (it would be logical) that they vote more diligently since there's a reward involved. (The of course - I hope the algorithm is fine tuned) I have also seen the enthusiasm and passion shared by many curators first hand - they are as involved as top authors and commenters. Curie really encourages this - our #curie channel is arguably the largest collaborative project in the community, with a hundred people collaborating every week.
So maybe curation guilds should stick around - if Steemit ever attains critical mass, it's going to lead to a better platform than Reddit, where there's a real problem of good content being undiscovered. One may argue that a curation guild would have a greater, more important purpose when there's volume - as then there will be truly great posts chosen. To add further, as a long term Redditor I can totally see how Reddit desperately needs a curation guild - but why would they take the time and effort to form one without the incentive of any reward?
Of course, I'd like to see a better allocation of R-shares, away from the top stakeholders to the top curators. (I have proposed a curator's reputation system previously, which would also weed out the greedy bots and naturally prevents Sybil attacks) That'll make curation guilds much more direct, doing away with the seemingly "corporate/top-down" nature which I totally understand why the community would be distrustful of. For now, we'll just have to work with what the network offers.
Reddit also has a much lower barrier to entry. If you can sign up an account and cut and paste a link - you can play. On Steemit - unless you can write, or want to spend your dowry on SP so you can curate - you play Steem Sports. If Steem Inc. was doing targeted advertising to various groups - perhaps this hodge podge of content idea would work. As it stands right now - this is the top post (as Steemit cult related posts almost always are). Instead of concentrating on doing away with SteemSports - what about the low quality poetry, pictures of cats, "photography", or posts that aren't that great that make large sums of money because of nepotism?
What's wrong with "photography" on Steemit?
Biggest market isn't the best. There are a lot of sites serving sports enthusiast. What does this one do better. That sounds not clear but I am nirvana really a sports guy. Cracking that will lead to success.
I don't know or particularly care if sports is the right market. It may not be. If sports stagnates and something else starts to take off, I'm perfectly happy with that. Whatever that might be, it will quickly dominate trending as its promise and popularity earns it support from existing and new users. Then the same sort of crusaders (even if not necessarily the exact same ones) will be up in arms about "too much" of it on the Trending page. That is the attitude and behavior that is incredibly toxic and is an existential threat to the possible success of the platform. It transcends sports.