RE: For the First Time, I Might Be Losing Faith in Steem...

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RE: For the First Time, I Might Be Losing Faith in Steem...

louisthomas in #steem • 6 years ago

Hey mark. Thanks for taking the time to leave a thoughtful response. I'd like to reciprocate the favour.

Perhaps you're right and I am over-reacting. I was pretty mad when I posted this, but I'm still glad that I did.

It may not be censorship in the strictest sense of the word, but in my opinion still acts as a proxy for that if it leads to less people seeing my content and 90% of my income being lost in a post with a single downvote. It's not much different to the adpocalypse on YouTube and all the demonetisation that occurred - which is why I came to be such a fan of Steem in the first place. To see the same thing over again here is immensely frustrating to say the least.

It isn't a one-off, as 3 of my posts in the past week have been downvoted and I've lost 90% of the rewards. The scary thing for me is that I have absolutely no idea how long this will last for. Is it gonna be a permanent thing? Am I effectively gonna lose half my income from now on?

Steem has been very good to me, which I'm very appreciate of. But you have to ask - if a large crypto YouTuber can't make a great income on Steem, then who on earth can? And when you consider that 50% of rewards go to curators, I'm left with approx $15USD worth of rewards per post, often for videos that take 6-8 hours to produce. Is that excessive and worthy of being downvoted? In my personal opinion, no.

And just to clarify - I have made exclusive posts for Steem on multiple occasions. And I have to pay a monthly fee to upload to @3Speak, which I'm more than happy to do. And I've made several videos about Steem that have led to adoption. So I absolutely consider myself someone who has invested a lot into this platform.

6 years ago in #steem by louisthomas

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smooth 6 years ago (edited)

a large crypto YouTuber can't make a great income on Steem, then who on earth can?

YouTube earnings comes from advertising. Steem earnings come from inflation and (if you are cashing out, which apparently you are) selling pressure which drives down the price of Steem and hurts everyone's investment. YouTube can therefore afford to pay you merely for having an audience, Steem can not.

Steem earnings need to directed to rewarding activities which directly contribute value back to Steem in order to avoid an inflationary death spiral.

You may be a successful or very successful YouTuber but:

Do you recruit your large YouTube audience to join Steem and engage with you on the Steem platform? Can you cite metrics (even estimated) on how many you have recruited, and how many remain active after some period of time?
Do you promote Steem as an investment in your YouTube content? Can you cite metrics on net investment over time (again, estimated is fine)?
Do you leverage your success as an influencer to promote Steem when making other appearances? How frequently and how effective has this promotion been?
Is your Steem content generating large amounts of traffic which in turn drives new user signups and/or investment. If so, what are the metrics on cost per user, attrition, etc. relative to rewards paid out?
Etc.

If not, then congratulations on your success and I wish you nothing but continued success, but sending a regular paycheck of Steem rewards to you (and others like you; this is not meant to single anyone out) to cash out does not help us.

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6 votes

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louisthomas 6 years ago

I feel like you have the best intentions but are thinking about this in the wrong way. And I'm saying this out of love for this platform.

Content creators just want to create content. Those kinds of questions almost sound like you expect me to become a sales rep for the Steem blockchain in order to be deserving of rewards on Steem.

You know how often I promote YouTube, Twitter, Facebook etc? The answer is never.

Merely posting content on this platform, should be enough to earn rewards on this platform. Steem absolutely will NOT succeed long term if you expect anything more of content creators - they will simply go elsewhere.

If there's any problem here, it's related to the game theory and mechanics of the Steem blockchain.

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4 votes

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smooth 6 years ago (edited)

That's the nature of any platform where earnings are not derived from advertising, subscriptions, etc. There aren't many of these (maybe just one), so yes it can seem a bit strange.

It is Steem stakeholders, not viewers, who are paying you. Unless you are returning value to Steem stakeholders (or alternately/equivalently the Steem platform itself), paying you is a waste of money.

One obvious way to contribute to the platform would be exclusive content which at least draws users to Steem who want to see it (ideally with some sort of visible metrics on effectiveness in actually doing this). But I see from other comments that you aren't even doing that, your content are just reposts where you expect to get some extra free money from Steem for doing a few clicks to repost. How does that help us?

That's not at all meant as a personal attack, in case it sounded like one. Again, I wish you the best to earn on platforms where you are being paid by viewers or subscribers alone, if that's what you are after.

Steem is a different beast, no doubt.

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louisthomas 6 years ago

How many people here have got YouTube videos with more than 20,000 views expressing their love for Steemit?

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4 votes

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smooth 6 years ago

Great! No question it is value add. I wasn't aware of that video, so it is definitely informative.

Now as a content creator, I'm sure you have some idea of a market value on views, typical conversion rates, etc.

How much do you think 20k views on a piece that is two years old is worth?

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mariuszkarowski (1) 6 years ago

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louisthomas 6 years ago

I'm contributing to the platform in the form of content that I've put hours into creating. Without content creators such as myself, there is no content, and thus no reason to be on Steem at all.

I have created exclusive content on multiple occasions. And I've made positive videos about Steem that have gotten thousands of videos on YouTube and led to hundreds (if not thousands) of new people enjoying Steem.

I've done more to assist Steem adoption than at least 99% of people here. Fact.

What does "repost" even mean? Like, I record a video on my camera. It gets posted on YouTube AND Steem AND other places. Why isn't the YouTube video considered a repost of a Steem video? I make content for all platforms.

You don't seem to be viewing things from my perspective, so I'll give up trying to explain. But Steem will never, ever, ever, ever, ever succeed if people are expected to act as sales reps in order to get rewards. Ever, everrrrrrrrrrrr.

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1 vote

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smooth 6 years ago (edited)

Without content creators such as myself, there is no content, and thus no reason to be on Steem at all.

There is unlimited content and links to content on reddit along with engaging discussions and a huge user base. #19 site on the entire internet according on Alexa (I've seen higher rankings using different metrics). No one is paid to post there. There is also lots of content posted to twitter, facebook, etc. where again, no one is paid. A lot of non-monetized content gets posted on YouTube as well.

I could go on and on. There are certainly opportunities to get paid (a lot) to produce content by using certain platforms (generally ad-supported, less often subscription-supported), but the idea of not being paid (a lot) by a platform to produce content means no content on the platform is absurd.

What does "repost" even mean?

I don't know, I just read that. I assumed it meant older content being reposted. If it is new content posted simultaneously on multiple platforms, then non-exclusive would be a better description.

act as sales reps in order to get rewards

There is no one thing that constitutes contributing value, and claiming anything that does is being a 'sales rep' is taking it to an illogical extreme. Some people might want to actively promote, others can do other things.

Compare the two:

Creator who posts exclusive content that must (since it is exclusive) draw an audience to Steem if it has an audience at all. Creator both actively and passively (since the content is exclusive, any links to the content are promoting) promotes Steem.
Creator who posts on Steem in addition to posting on a bunch of other sites and does nothing else to help Steem.

Which does it make more sense for Steem to (highly) reward?

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louisthomas 6 years ago

It's literally impossible to make a full-time living on Steem right now.

I'm one of the most generously rewarded people on here, and will maybe earn the equivalent of $200-300 USD per month. Impossible to survive on.

And even if I did make the leap to post exclusively full-time on Steem, there's absolutely nothing preventing one or two whales from downvoting my content like they have been over the past week, on three occasions.

And this is the problem with down voting for "overrewarding" too. It makes it impossible for people to earn enough on Steem to post exclusively.

If I can earn $60 on a YouTube video, why would I post exclusively on Steem when (especially after downvotes) I might only make $5 on a video? Rational people won't do that.

So you're preventing people from going full time on Steem. If you want a platform full of hobbyists, that's fine. Or only people who are so rich that they don't need financial compensation, that's fine too.

But Steem won't attract professional content creators with this overrewarding downvoting nonsense.

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2 votes

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markkujantunen 6 years ago (edited)

The entire idea of making a living by being a content creator on Steem at the moment is something anyone living in a first world country should not even consider. What we have is a platform very much a work in progress. The value of the token is speculative as it is based on future expectations of what can be accomplished if everything pans out. It would be completely foolhardy to even consider that at this stage.

What Steem needs is the necessary features for mass onboarding before any content creator can realistically consider this a place to earn a steady income.

Rather than some downvotes I'd worry about the token price plummeting if I were a content creator trying to make a living off Steem.

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1 vote

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smooth 6 years ago

@markkujantunen pretty much nailed it. The priority right now isn't meaningfully paying a broad swath of content creators for content alone. That is an impossible and unaffordable luxury given Steem's precarious position. It is trying to maximize impact with what little budget we have now (in the manner I described above), and slow or ideally reverse the plummeting token price.

Until then, please consider prioritizing what you can do to help increase the value of your Steem investment, and not treating Steem like an ATM for the tiny pittance it can add to your youtube, etc. earnings, downvotes or no downvotes.

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3 votes

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markkujantunen 6 years ago (edited)

It may not be censorship in the strictest sense of the word, but in my opinion still acts as a proxy for that if it leads to less people seeing my content and 90% of my income being lost in a post with a single downvote. It's not much different to the adpocalypse on YouTube and all the demonetisation that occurred - which is why I came to be such a fan of Steem in the first place. To see the same thing over again here is immensely frustrating to say the least.

What's different about Steem and YouTube is that the latter is a monolith whereas everything is up for public debate on Steem. As you can see, this post you made seems to be on its way to being rewarded rather well for the points you made and the discussion you have sparked.

It isn't a one-off, as 3 of my posts in the past week have been downvoted and I've lost 90% of the rewards. The scary thing for me is that I have absolutely no idea how long this will last for. Is it gonna be a permanent thing? Am I effectively gonna lose half my income from now on?

That too, is up for debate. @ocdb is not controlled by some single asshole but a group of curators in charge of an account most of whose SP is delegated to it.

Steem has been very good to me, which I'm very appreciate of. But you have to ask - if a large crypto YouTuber can't make a great income on Steem, then who on earth can? And when you consider that 50% of rewards go to curators, I'm left with approx $15USD worth of rewards per post, often for videos that take 6-8 hours to produce. Is that excessive and worthy of being downvoted? In my personal opinion, no.

That depends also on what else is there on Steem competing for the same rewards. You crosspost most of your crypto posts from YouTube. I'm guessing you earn on YouTube, too. But yes, I do value your contributions, which is why I've had you on autovote for a long time and continue to comment on your videos.

If this type of excessive downvotes keep coming, I'm going to have to reconsider my delegations.

And just to clarify - I have made exclusive posts for Steem on multiple occasions.

I see.

And I have to pay a monthly fee to upload to @3Speak, which I'm more than happy to do. And I've made several videos about Steem that have led to adoption. So I absolutely consider myself someone who has invested a lot into this platform.

Your sweat equity spent on your videos is no doubt considerable. I've always found your content to be well-researched and very well thought-out. They have a lot of potential to drive traffic to Steem, which is why think they should continue to occupy the top positions among high-earning posts.

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1 vote

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andrarchy 6 years ago

This will actually change after Communities which are now in private beta. Communities disentangles visibility, downvoting and flagging. After Communities whether a post gets hidden will have more to do with the rules of a given Community and not whether the post was downvoted. In short, we agree that the current implementation is not ideal. While it is not technically censorship, it can feel like it. The implementation arose out of necessity but can be, and is being, improved.

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1 vote

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themonetaryfew 6 years ago

Just going over the great comments here as a reply to your post...

The perfect content for a great YouTube video!

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preparedwombat 6 years ago

90% of my income being lost in a post with a single downvote.

Except it’s not your income. Any STU amount showing before payout is nothing more than a snapshot of potential earnings at that particular point in time. Consensus-building is still underway. Once the 7-day period ends and payout actually goes into your wallet, then it’s your income.

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crypto.piotr 6 years ago

Dear @louisthomas

It may not be censorship in the strictest sense of the word, but in my opinion still acts as a proxy for that if it leads to less people seeing my content

Things can get easily censored on steem. It hardly matters that some content will be stored on blockchain. What matters is: will this content be diplayed to our audience ?

It doesn't matter much that "The Steem blockchain retains everything". It's a bit like saying that all your data and activity on facebook does also stays forever (and it indeed does). If people cannot access content easily - it's as this content doesn't exist.

Yours, Piotr

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