[Announcement] Jumpstarting New Tags, Rewarding Comments, Boosting Engagement and Going Viral!

in #steemit8 years ago (edited)

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This post is co-written by @donkeypong and @the-alien

If there is something that we learned from steemfest it is that the steemit community is one of the most valuable assets we have.

Some of us weren’t lucky to be there due to prior commitments, but nonetheless we received countless messages of fellow steemians saying something in the lines of: “After meeting so many amazing people this weekend, my faith in steemit is stronger than ever”.

Two things are clear:

First of all, @roelandp you have got to host at least another one! And secondly, this is community effort everyone coming together, this is too valuable to ignore.

The weekend might be over, but we can still be an active vibrant community, this is not over. And more importantly, the fun is not over.

Fun, Friends and Virality

Today, we’re starting to reward new categories such us #funny and #til where you’ll be rewarded well for posting AND commenting with good content in these tags.

Yes, comments will be rewarded too! Because human interaction is one of the most important aspects not only of social media, but in life itself.

On addition to that, we’re also jumpstarting the #news tag on Steemit to make sure that people get rewarded well for posting and commenting on news stories.

Let’s face it, most people get their news today from social media. So why go elsewhere to get your news updates while you can get rewarded for posting and commenting here in this amazing platform?

The Power of Catchy

Now, as you might have noticed, /r/funny, /r/news and /r/til (Today I Learned), are some of the most popular Reddit subs.

One of the reasons we chose those tags is to attract redditors giving them the choice to post and comment on reddit for no rewards, or joining Steemit where they can get paid to do both.

And more importantly, we just want to make things fun and easy for you fellow steemians, and rewarding comments is a great way to encourage interaction and engagment, because sometimes it’s easy to forget how vibrant of a community we have here.

Let’s make Steemit the “go to” source for news and for fun!

Rewarding Short Content + Links

While Steemit has an invaluable number of high quality longer length articles on a daily basis. We would like to open the door to other shorter content as well.

Why limit ourselves? We can have all sorts of content, long, short and medium.

Many people like Reddit because they all they do is post links, and many people don’t have the attention nor the time for long form content no matter how valuable it is.

On the plus side, if some links catch on, we only need a few viral posts to drive an influx of new comers here to steemit.

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For sharing pictures and memes, we recommend using http://www.steemimg.com/ and if it’s undergoing maintenance, then you can try https://postimage.org/ or others that you prefer. Youtube video links embed directly on Steemit.com. Oh and by the ways, you can link to other sites, also.

Just give us a little bit more with the links. Tell us something about the content in your own words, and then drop the link.

Rewarding Comments

Also, let’s reward good comments with the payouts they deserve. Not everyone writes articles. Many great community members post amazing comments. They stimulate discussions, they encourage content creation, and they make this site better.

Please feel free to post, comment, and curate in #news , #funny and #til !

And more importantly, let’s have some fun!

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank @smooth for giving us the idea to focus on Reddit-style tags. @smooth @berniesanders and @nextgencrypto are generously providing voting support to these new tags – thank you.

Also many thanks to the Members of Project Curie and The Steem Guild, as well as members of Steemtrails, Steemprentice, and other individuals have helped. You truly care about this community. Steemit is a better place because of you!

Also, we would like to thank the dozens of Steemians who have helped plan and create these new tags.

Thank you!

@the-alien and @donkeypong

To kick off this new initiative and encourage both comments and short content, we like to present you with a fun promo that hopefully gets traction and drives some attention to steemit.

Let the fun begin!

Short Content Kick Off: Steemit Fun Promo

Image Sources: 1 - 2

P.S: Let's make some noise!

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I love your videos!

Totally agree, let your personality shine :)

Everybody loves that !

Sup babes ;D

I made a proposal to establish a channel for posting links already 2 months ago and so I´m more than happy to see that Curie now is taking action in such a direction. I believe this is an important move to attract users beyond the blogosphere.
I hope that you can tune rewards in a way so that short content and links will not outcompete longer and/or work-intensive primary content posts. For links (plus one or two sentences to give it a personal touch) anything in the range of 1-2 $ would already be awesome and potentially a game changer.
Thanks for this initiative - very promising!

Thank you @shaka! Very insightful input!

You´re very welcome!
I would also like to note that one should consider that content creators on yt, fb or elsewhere may see it critical if someone is making money on Steemit by posting a link to their work (a big problem in which the Yours.network will run into imo, whenever they roll out). This prompted me to propose an alternative payout scheme in my above mentioned post which I allow myself to cite here:

I propose to establish a special section for link-posts where a different payout scheme is automatically applied. Let´s say 10% go to the poster to reward his curation efforts. The remaining 90% are payed into a pool account from which the original content creator can claim his reward after signing-up. Ideally, a post in that section triggers a notification bot that reaches out to the original content provider, e.g. via youtube, facebook etc.

The beauty of such an approach might be that it would not only attract more reddit-type of users but also more content creators who will register to claim their cut (verification could occur via their respective yt, fb, instagram accounts).

If you find any of this useful, feel free to implement or adapt as you wish!

This might not be popular, but it's my opinion: I don't mind short content, but there has to be something redeeming about the post beyond slapping a meme, picture or video on the blog. Take away the quick link, and what are we left with? If the answer is nothing, I click away. There's a reason why I'm currently ranked #20 in post count - because I'm looking for interaction. And no, I'm not a bot. Most of my comments are about this long - so give me something to comment about.

Yeah I know @merej99! You're one of the people that always try to engage the community.

As we said above, not just a link, add some texture to it, a little bit of touch... And also good comments and posts will be rewarded, not the simple ones such as "congrats".

"give me something to comment about" you can comment on the video above to kick-off this innitiative, or you can comment on the community's new post on the tags #TIL, #funny and #news.

Thanks for your input, and I hope you'll have a great time!

Done. :)
And I just followed your YouTube channel and shared the video on Twitter & Facebook. Hopefully people will come out of their social media comas and join!

Thanks so much @merej99! Yeah let's hope more people join!

That's nice. Just saw a post about NASA and Mars photos earlier, on sciencealert, enjoyed it a lot, and even thought to refer it somehow on Steemit as well. But I was a bit hesitant.

After seeing your post, I realized the #news tag could be just the space I needed for this to happen. Already posted it.

Thank you @dragosrua for starting with the #news tag! We'll start reviewing those, voting and commenting shortly :)

Look forward to seeing more diversity on Steemit! I know it'll take us some time to adjust, but it'll be worth it.

Really cool video! Steemit, Inc should have commissioned promotional stuff like this long ago. :)

Thank you Sen! For those who don't know @liberosist is also a big part of this, and together with all of us, with all of you fellow steemians we can create a lot of buzz and get this place vibrating :)

You're right man, it will take some time to adjust but I think we'll be fine :)

Bottom $: People want to be entertained on Steemit = #funny!! I'm in! :))

Exactly. We need to have some fun around here again. Entertain us!

I had a comment earlier today that said they wished there had been a group hug in the team photo at SteemFest, so there's a suggestion for SteemFest 2 #funny and #grouphug! Steem on @donkeypong!

Thanks @mindhunter! I think #funny will be a great addition, We even opted to launch with this funny video :)

Bad canine staring at all that ass! Ha ha! Great vid!

Fully agree with you guys....I was criticised in the past for posting short AND successful stuff, and felt it was nonsense. If a post can trigger a good laugh, a smile, or a new idea then well. ..that's a good post, regardless of length!

And comments are rewarded too :)

Awesome, I'll work on a post or two. Noob question, what is #til stand for?

Ahh, well #til what #til means :p. Thanks @eureka.

Maybe do a post about that ;)

Good to see you using your new knowledge already.

Knowledge is power!

Absolutely! We'll take a look and make sure you get some votes.

I think this is great news! Interaction has been lacking on Steemit. I also dig that short articles and links will get love too, I don't have time to read a short story.

Thanks Greg! Yeah expanding to other types of content can only be a positive :)

After my recent chat with @donkeypong on a thread about Short Form Post (s) and the like -- I started to use that phrase in my blog post titles. There is clearly a place for it. Is there a suggested # or exact wording the community suggests using for those??

@smooth @berniesanders @nextgencrypto @the-alien @donkeypong and others, thanks for the continued work. We appreciate you.

For now, we start with the three tags #TIL, #News and #funny and then we grow from there.

But yeah, short form posts, or medium are needed too!

If Government answered as quickly as some of you guys here, we would all be fine LOL!

We already have some people branching out into other tags also (such as #showerthoughts ). Feel free to post and comment in other tags (new or existing ones) or use these that we're focusing on today. Good quality short content should be rewarded.

I agree, I messaged the #showerthoughts fella earlier lol. #SteemElders and #Steem101 are ones I have come up with and I think are pretty good ones for subject sorting and finding.

Hahaha! Thanks for the nice words!