"Do you want massive STEEM success or do you want quality?"
"I want both of course."
Sorry. You cannot have both. It is a statistical impossibility. If you want massive STEEM success, then it is time to stop espousing the idea that STEEM is a place ONLY for "quality" posts.
Essentially, this is a cancer that is running through STEEM that needs to be cut out.
To start, STEEM Is NOT a blogging platform. While it started out that way, things evolve and change. Most of the successful DApps on here will have nothing to do with blogging. While that might upset a few people, that is wonderful news. Blogging is a minor part of the whole. It is not the market to solicit.
Wordpress is by far the largest website/blogging platform out there. The last stats I saw was there are roughly 75M sites. That is a lot of people. Of course, not all of those sites are "quality". Some post very good stuff while others absolute garbage. But they all post stuff.
Most of us would not put posting links as "quality". However, the link posting site, Reddit, has 250M monthly active users with over 500M accounts. That means 250M people are posting, commenting, and upvoting on a monthly basis. This ignores how many people use the site just to read and find content.
So which is more valuable? 75M people or 250M people?
Do you want STEEM at $100? $500? Even $1000?
Then you are not getting it focusing upon "quality".
YouTube has over 1B users. How much of the stuff on there is "quality"? Sure there are plenty of videos that are well done by serious Vloggers. Yet there are also a ton of things that are complete lunacy. How many cat videos exist on YouTube?
Back in 2014, there were over 2M cat videos on YouTube which were viewed 25B times.
http://tubularinsights.com/2-million-cat-videos-youtube/
Can you imagine if the STEEM blockchain had 2M cat videos on it? Not if you are focused upon "quality". Most of those cat posts won't pass the "quality" test.
Of course, I would love 2M cat videos on STEEM getting 25B views...the bandwidth for that alone would make STEEM worth $50.
Do you know what else does not pass the "quality" test? Selfies. Did you ever ponder how many of them are taken?
According to this Google, 24B were uploaded in 2015 on Google servers alone. How many do you guess were uploaded on Facebook during that same time period?
The "quality" mantra is arrogant and exclusive. We have a problem with people going inactive. While I attribute most of it to the deathly slow sign up/approval process, part of it could be because people come on here and they are pounded with the idea of "quality". Either it is post "quality" content or "my content is quality" and nobody is upvoting it. Both these ideas will de-motivate the average user.
Here is the deal: The masses do not post "quality" so it is inane to even focus upon that if we want STEEM to appeal to them.
Do you know what people post? They post what INTERESTS them. That is the difference.
For some, their interest lies in cat videos; others selfies. Some want to post goofy conversations with their friends. Still others want to film a butt at the gym and post it. Whatever interests people, that is what they post. They could care less about quality.
This is the Internet after all. It is a total cross section of people around the world.
Does this mean serious bloggers/vloggers should drop their standards? Of course not. Nor does it mean that people who are looking for serious content on particular subject should abandon those who are posting content that meets their standards.
What it does mean is that people are free to post what they want and they are under no obligation to adhere to the standards of anyone else. In fact, while I maintain a quality about the posts I put up, I detest the idea of anyone on here trying to determine what is quality or not. The reason I do this is because I am into inclusion, not exclusion. People who espouse the idea of "quality" are simply exclusive. It is impossible to be any other way.
Some will say we have the ability to determine quality with the individual upvote. That is partially true. One can determine that. However, one does not have to use that standard. People often upvote something simply because they like it. That are many reasons to like a comment or post, most of which have nothing to do with the idea of quality.
My main goal is to make STEEM as successful as possible. For that reason, I would love to see 500M or 1B people on this blockchain. This will not happen if everyone is focusing upon making sure only "quality" content is published. I see many who call posts on here crap. Please tell me the names of the Steemians who are on the crap committee and make such decisions.
STEEM is changing and the ones who want this to be a blogging platform are going to be disappointed. We are seeing a host of DApps that extend well beyond the scope of that. In fact, the posting is only for verification. And wait until an app like APPICS comes fully online. Then you will really see the "quality" idea wounded. It will be selfie galore.
By the way, Instagram has 95M pics and videos uploaded PER DAY. Do you think all of them meet the quality test?
Does this one?
https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2017/04/20/instagram-statistics
If APPICS can do 1% of of what Instagram does, we will have a $10 token on our hands.
Yesterday I posted about doing another Minnow Uprising. Some take exception to my suggestion that people post 3-4 times a day because of the "quality" of content being so bad. Personally, I disagree with this viewpoint since I do not believe that smaller accounts (or any for that matter) should be held to some type of journalistic standard of what is good enough to post. People should be encouraged to post whatever they want.
So I ask again, do you want STEEM to be a raging success appealing to the masses and getting hundreds of millions of users on here? If the answer is yes, it is impossible to do that while holding onto the "quality" idea like a life jacket.
Here is what could happen if we continue down that path.
From 40K authors down to 15K. Certainly there were other factors that caused the decline but the point is when you take an excluding stance, people are driven away.
It isn't surprising to see the posting and commenting following the same path.
https://steemit.com/statistics/@arcange/steemit-statistics-20180908-en
The days of talking about STEEM like it is a blogging platform are over. STEEM is now a full-blown social media center that is creating applications that will appeal to the masses. With the masses comes all the quirky likes and dislikes. We are going to see just about everything posted on this blockchain if all goes well.
When this happens, I will be the first one applauding this. My goal is for STEEM to be as successful as possible. As the numbers in this article show, the blogging world is minor compared to the rest of the social media space. STEEM needed to decide what the target market is and the developers of the applications concluded it was not in blogging. Mass appeal is what STEEM needs.
And every account that has SP in it will be very happy with that decision. All those users are going to require bandwidth and that is still bought with STEEM.
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Images from the articles linked just below them.