Soon after I joined Steemit, I discovered many complaints about unfairness with how rewards are distributed. Like many newcomers, I was confused as to why a painting could be upvoted to over $100 but assumed that it was by a distinguished Korean artist and the rewards were justified. I know better now.
But the complaints of unfairness continue and steemcurators (The Steemit Team and Community Members) consistently come "under attack" for their choice of votes. @o1eh's written a few posts about the difficulty of curating and if you haven't read his most recent post, I suggest that you do so as it will provide some additional background to this post.
Now that I've experienced steemcuration for a couple of weeks, I understand the picture better and when I stumbled across the @our-concern2 account yesterday and this post (as well as their now muted follow-up), I wanted a name to look at - a username that felt the unfairness so that I could form my own opinion as to whether it's justified.
Only 1 user had replied in support of that post so with their agreement, I am doing a review of @pandev (who was nominated) to share my thoughts. I've promised to be nice (gulp!) and I hope that some of these thoughts are useful to those of you who continue beyond this introduction 🙂
Who is @pandev
Pandev joined around the same time as me, in March of last year and I even commented on his first football post soon after he joined. In his introduction post, he talks about his favourite sport (football) and a lot about learning and life. I'll come back to the football part later.
Club Status
From purely a "is he club5050" point of view, I see a difficulty...
| Timeframe | Chart |
|---|---|
| 1 Month |  |
| 2 Months |  |
| 3 Months |  |
Whilst many still believe that liquid STEEM in the wallet isn't included within the "club rules", steemcurator01 confirmed that:
We do take notice also of liquid STEEM and SBD in wallets, as well as Cash Out v Power Up.
So although Pandev is powering up more than he's withdrawing, this could be causing a difficulty.
"But he might be saving for spud4steem" I hear you cry. So if we look at the dates of the power ups, they're 15th February, 23rd February and 2nd March. Is this spud4steem territory? I'm not sure.
So club5050 eligibility is borderline. And as a curator, I prefer "Clear Cut".
Recommendation 1: Power Up some of that liquid STEEM (or better yet, all of it) and/or Transfer Out some of that liquid STEEM
Shared Wallets
This is a slight aside but something I'll sometimes look at. Pandev has a shared wallet with the user @muktaraliu and looking at muktaraliu's introduction post, I believe there's nothing amiss here so we'll quickly move on...
Activity - Posts, Comments, Votes and Tags
Posts
There's a lot to look at over the course of a year so I'll break down Pandev's posts by month and by community starting from the month he joined.
| Month | Community (Posts) |
|---|---|
| March | World Of Football (1) Lifestyle (3) Newcomers' Community (2) Writing & Reviews (3) SteemitCryptoAcademy (1) Steem Ghana (6) Steem Schools (1) Account Booster (1) Venezolanos Steem (1) Steemit Nursery (1) |
I've realised that this is going to take far too long so I'll fast forward to some thoughts...
My first thought is that from the outset, Pandev has been bouncing around communities (and my interpretation of this is that he's searching for rewards). If you look at the communities that he is a member of, there are a lot including many of the ones I simply don't get (zzan for example). The only really consistent presence is within "Steem Ghana". This makes a lot of sense but Steem Venezuela and Steemkids (for a non-parent) doesn't make sense to me. I mentioned "Football" earlier as one of the few hobbies mentioned in the introduction, there are very few football related posts with the most recent being 3 months ago.
Many of the tips that I read in my early days were based around consistency and persistence. I see both here but I believe that consistently jumping around communities will leave a trail of very few people getting to know him and his content.
Recommendation 2: Narrow down the communities that you're active in to a handful that match your interests. Steem Ghana, World of Football, WOX Sports (shameless plug) for example
Comments
If there were too many posts to categorise, I'll need a different approach to comments and for this, I'll look at the past couple of months. For me, comments are an important part of Steemit - they differentiate between the broadcasters (those who post and run) and the truly engaged (who make meaningful replies to everything) - most people will sit somewhere on this scale.
I'll exclude contest entries and community verification from my thoughts and I can see that Pandev's comments are probably split 50/50 between replies to comments in his own posts and comments on posts by others. I don't think there's much to be read into this but the crucial thing that I do see is the "depth" to the comments - almost all of the comments are short (fewer than 10 words) and whilst you can see high effort going into his posts (notice that this is the 1st time I've mentioned the quality of his content), there doesn't appear to be much effort going into building meaningful relationships with other users - perhaps reflective of the "bouncing around communities".
Recommendation 3: Try to write more significant comments that will make the person remember you for good reasons. These relationships will reward you in the long-term
Votes
Outgoing Votes - There's a wide range of votes going out and Pandev doesn't seem to favour any particular users. I don't have much thought on this - having been on the platform for a year, I have formed fairly obvious biases towards a core set of users.
Incoming Votes - Similarly, there's a wide range of votes coming in. The larger votes tend to come from the Steem Ghana community - is it a coincidence that the community Pandev's been involved with from the beginning of his journey to now is the one that he receives the most support from? Certainly not. Consistency. Let people get to know you. And you get to know them.
But one username jumps out at me...
Tags
A BIG NO-NO for me is krsuccess. It's the most widely used and most widely spammed tag here on Steemit. It's ubiquitous use to earn $0.02 just makes absolutely no sense to me and I know that I'm not the only user who will turn away from anybody using it.
Tags are important. If you are writing a post about how to help Korea become a more successful nation, then use krsuccess. If you're falling asleep writing about something, use zzan. Or zzzzzzzzzzzzzan.
Other than krsuccess, the tags look good.
Recommendation 4: Stop using krsuccess
Having been writing this for I don't know how long and not actually discussing Pandev's content, should demonstrate that writing good content isn't enough. The old saying "Content Is King" is probably not true on Steemit but it does help. Oh, and proof read your content. I probably spend more time proof reading my content and making edits (even after I've published my post) than I spend writing the original draft. It doesn't matter how good your content is if the reader is distracted by typos or poor grammar.
Closing Thoughts
Unfortunately, I don't have enough time to dissect any of Pandev's content - I am surprised by the lack of football content given it's one of the few things that got a specific mention in his introduction post.
Perhaps this lack of football content is due to the decreasing activity within the Sports communities and the desire to find a home where the rewards are. I see a lot of users follow the money, follow the booming votes, follow the steemcurators - looking for the tags that get the votes and try to "copy" what others have done. ALWAYS one step behind and not seeing the opportunity to do something that others aren't doing.
I'm very much of the opinion that you should get noticed for doing something original rather than another clone who inevitably ends up complaining about not getting votes.
I'm talking in general terms now rather than specifically about Pandev (forgive me for calling you Pandev for my entire post, I did look at your real name but thought it better if I go with your username). And I'm also aware that I'm slowly going off-topic...
Whilst many will have seen Steemit's Engagement Challenge and interpreted it as a challenge for community leaders, that's not how I see it. We don't need more communities telling us that our content isn't plagiarised, that we're not in a club because we didn't use a club5050 hashtag even though we do 100% power-ups, that we do or don't delegate to their community.
This kind of engagement is soulless, and borderline spam. (Note that with the example I've linked here, plagiarism requires a "recheck" which received a laugh and a right royal "fuck off" from me so I won't be posting there again. (Stop. Be Nice. Continue.) I'd previously replied to one of these comments with a question and received no reply. If this is what "Engagement Challenge" is expecting, I hope that Steemit reconsider what they're asking for.)
The real challenge that I believe Steemit is asking for is meaningful comments, meaningful engagement, Top Commenters. It's these relationships that make people stay and make people feel valued. When you resort to complaining about money and nothing else, that's not where the real problem lies. Which reminds me of the "Bath Model"...
Notice how little influence "Pay" has on "Commitment", "Motivation" and "Satisfaction". Whether we realise it, or are willing to acknowledge it, as users, we're looking for more than to just "get paid".
I hope that this post was useful and gives you plenty of food for thought. As always (I almost wrote "it goes without saying" and then I realised that by saying "it goes without saying" that "I was saying"...), please share your thoughts in the comments and I especially look forward to hearing from @pandev - I hope that I was nice and that you find this useful 🙂