[IMAGE: https://steemitimages.com/0x0/https://steemitimages.com/DQmeXw7SoJtP1yksyjFLP8koXsewoSAVuDAUaRyXuvfgA1E/image.png]
SteemSTEM has grown a lot in the past few months, but with the growth came the problems. Our goals were simple:
- Promote good STEM content on the Steem blockchain;
- Create a community (with engagement and activities).
The first of these goals was achieved quite nicely, thanks in particular on some comfortable delegation we received a few weeks ago. Here are the statistics some of you may ask about how we use this delegation.
[IMAGE: https://s10.postimg.org/3z78giqyx/steemstem_stats.png]
In blue, the number of posts we upvote with the steemstem account week after week. We are reaching some maximum those days, but very importantly, the exponential growth of early 2018 can be observed.
In green, the same information but presented in terms of the number of unique authors we upvote every week. We are probably not distributing STEEM as much as what could be done with memes or development projects, but this shows that the scientific (or actually STEMistic) community on STEEM gets sizeable.
Finally, in yellow, you can see that our weekly available voting power is mostly used at the 100% level.
However, to achieve this goal, our team members were slaved away to find, read and vote good content, engage wit the users on discord, in the comments of their posts. In other words, they work as much as you would expect for a full-time job with getting minimum pay. You can check the @steemstem wallet to see how much each get. And remember, none of the 19 involved people is eligible for curie-votes. In addition, some of them have a 60 hours per week job, dedicate 40 hours to steemstem every week and have also a well-filled private life.
In short, we do that mostly on a voluntary basis.
More and more people joined, more and more posts were voted ... more and more people complained. Yes, we all work for free to get barely a ‘thank you’ and mostly people complaining about their super-hyper post not being upvoted, or because their pay-check is not large enough.
The feeling of entitlement grew. And at the same time, number two of our goals barely happened. One small team cannot replace the engagement of a community: commenting, voting, encouraging each other. That is what we hoped our members would do. Some do. Most do not.
As a result of all of this, we will now take a break of a week and try to restructure.
There will be next to no votes from the steemstem account. We will not explain to you in detail why your post was not voted. We need some time to figure out how to carry on, why to carry on.
Because if the community is not a community but just a bunch of people trying to milk steemSTEM as much as possible, there is no reason to keep going. This does not have to be the end. We don't plan to shut it all down for good. We just need a break, some air to think. I hope you all can understand that.
And if you have ideas about how to improve, or about what you could do for steemSTEM, feel free to comment our post. We will try to answer everyone.
The steemstem management
Get some rest. You deserved it after working so hard for the past couple of months. I have never intended to reap as many rewards as I can from steemstem. My target is to try help this community grow by creating some exciting article and attract some people to contribute to this community.
>With great power comes great responsibility.
The increment of work among steemstem curators is inevitable as the population keeps on growing. We can't expect the number of curators to stay the same, can't we? Even @curie recruits some new curators who are appointed/recommended by their top-rated curator each week. Regarding complaints and everything, I think you know what to do. You can never satisfy anyone. At one point, they will be complaining that they haven't received any upvote from you, and on another, they complained about the number of rewards they should get for their work.
I'm sure all of you, will overcome this hurdle. We need Steemstem community to flourish. This is the only community in Steemit which in my opinion are not stagnant.
Good luck to all of the Steemstem's administrators and thank you for your continuous support and contribution to empower STEM-related content.
P/s: An update for any of decision made by the Steemstem's admin would be much appreciated. We wanted to help as much as we could. A week is relatively quite some days, and we should target to solve this as soon as possible. Afterall, an active account is a growing account (same goes for the community). This is just my two cents. Apologise if I'm being rude.
@muphy | March 13, 2018, 7:50 a.m. | Votes: 9 | [
VOTE ]
Thank you for this post. It is important that the steemstem 'board' shares its concerns with the base member/poster, so that we can all try and give a helping hand.
I wonder actually how you distribute the scanning of the articles between the curators just based on the Steemstem tag. How does one curator knows that an article has already been screaned, avoiding repeating work carried out by another curator?
I would suggest that all Steemstem articles be tagged Steemstem + another keyword specific to the group. For example if I write an article about electric fields, I would need to tag it: #steemstem and #steemstemphysics. A list of valid secondary tags would be set and communicated to the community.
A curator would be assigned to a specific secondary tag. He/she then can list all articles under his wing, knowing that these have not been screened previously. That should optimise the work.
As a second point, if there are not enough curators for the mass of articles that pop up everyday, I would defined two types of curators and an administrator:
1st class curators: those that wish to curate on dayly basis, like currently.
2nd class curators: those that can curate one set day (or more) a week.
Administrator: person that organises the curating schedule for 2nd class curators.
Then there would be a call to application for 2nd class curators. Selection would be based on the quality of the blog of the applicant.
For example, I think I would enjoy very much curating for Steemstem, but my dynamic life would pevent me doing so on a daily basis reliably, and for extensive periods of time. There would be multiple curators for the same secondary keyword, each of them being assigned a day of the week by the administrator. The 2nd class curators + administrator system would probably bring quite a bol of fresh air to 1st class curators (those already existing).
So I am applying as 2nd class curator :-)!
I hope these ideas help. Be well.
@mobbs | March 13, 2018, 8:15 a.m. | Votes: 4 | [
VOTE ]
These are all cool ideas but just a point to make:
The problem with expanding further is payment. Not only will people be working voluntarily, but they would need to take a pay cut because they would no longer be eligible for the curie half (the bigger half) of our votes. It's not easy for people to see the bigger picture of the community in this regard.
Even if this were the case, we have no more VP to give them even the steemSTEM half of rewards so they would basically be working without any extra entitlement to votes, and any vote they get would be a fraction of what it was. This makes it very difficult to find trustworthy, hardworking individuals who stay long term.
We've actually been extremely lucky so far finding the team we have gotten but as things grow, this kind of luck should be expected less. These are reasons why we decline very kind offers from individuals who want to help out; they essentially get punished for contributing to the cause.
Regarding distribution, again because we have a fairly small team, it's broken down quite simply and double screening happens rarely, something I notice perhaps once every week or less. This is because the core curators cover all time zones (me in Asia, JTM & kryzsec in North America and lemouth, trumpman, ruthgirl & zest in Europe/Africa time zones), and we simply cover a period of time available to us.
On top of that our sub-communities such as de-stem and stemng have their own secondary tags which we leave alone similar to your suggestion. I imagine when we are way bigger, secondary subject tags will likely be inevitable, assuming steemit.inc continues to not release a more workable interface.
Thanks for the ideas!
@muphy | March 13, 2018, 11:14 a.m. | Votes: 1 | [
VOTE ]
Oh, I didn't know that, thanks for explaining it.
Well, sorry for being blunt, but that's where the problem lies...
The Steemstem base grows, that is a fact clearly expressed in the post. If the number of curators doesn't follow, you are just heading for a wall, and this wonderful idea will just end by a curator burn-out epidemic !
I would recommend you review in depth the payment system during that week of reflexion, and consider how you could allow new curators to join the team.
What could be done is a slight redistribution of the Steemsteem reward pool, so that a curator breaks even compared to a successful poster.
Say you take on-board 5 news curators. You are currently up-voting 350 posts/week. If you decrease by a certain percentage , the % of the upvotes of the Steemstem trail, that fraction could be allotted to "maintenance costs". I'll take 5% as example in this comment.
For example, I am upvoted 48$ for a post by the Curie trail (25$) + Steemstem trail (23$). I probably wouldn't even notice or care if it is $46 or $47 instead of $48! I would still feel happy to see my work validated.
The $1 or $2 could be redistributed to the people doing the curation work . If this what is needed to keep the community alive and everybody happy, it's a damn good deal
Technically, how could these 5% finance the curators?
Ideas:
1/ Each curator would be allowed to upvote his own posts twice a week at full VP of the trail, to compensate for the Loss of Curie vote.
or/and
2/ For each post a curator selects for upvote, the curator would be allowed to post a comment on this post and upvote himself say at 3% of the Steemstem trail, with a limit at 10 times a day.
There would be a little statistics and calculations to be made to adjust the parameters (percentages) and limits (number of times per period of time) of curator self-upvotes. The objective of this calculation would be to find the levels so to compensate curators for the lack of Curie vote, and even give a little 10-20% extra for the work involved.
In the end, even the most dedicated person has a rent or mortgage to pay and food to put on the table... I believe fair that as the community grows, those spending many hours maintaining it get compensated in a fair and transparent manner.
An idea for what to do to improve community engagement (this isn't really for steemstem management but for others) will be listed here.
Give tips to users on how to improve their writing on posts from tips to using markdown/html all the way to providing tips to getting content.
Comment, ask questions, create discussions.... But also when writing posts, leave points open for people to ask comments or give little teasers if possible.
Make response posts. So lets say someone writes a post on science proving that jelly belly jelly beans are the best type of jelly bean but you found sources that say other jelly beans are better, or maybe you found evidence that points to it all being personal preference, write an entire post about it in response to theirs. Don't attack their post but realize that this is a type of engagement rarely seen.
Vote on content, either manually or trail the steemstem vote (by either giving your private posting keys to anarchyhasnogods or using a trailing service)
Write about something you are passionate about.... So what I mean is maybe you really like jelly beans, make a steemstem post about jelly beans like "cool science facts" or maybe go with "statistics of jellybeans" and do like a cool math thing surrounding it... Maybe even create a special taxonomical classification flow chart for different jellybean bags and stuff. Like create content you are passionate about that is fun to write, because if its fun to write then it is fun to read. Just make sure to add in references to the science stuff too.
Collaboration posts. Like maybe author A could write part 1 and author B could write part 2, or you do something like @zest and @abigail-dantes where they are each writing on a specific topic from different perspectives (anthropological versus psychological)
And more... The point is, it would be so easy and so much fun to have a community that actively engaged. I can give examples of times that happened even in my experience (before I became a curator) and they were some of the most fun I had ever had while posting. I mean there was this post by trumpman where a guy lit his cat on fire by lighting his fart on fire while a cat jumped through his fart (no idea where it is located now) anyways I responded to it with a post to try and see if it was possible, and someone else responded to mine with a post arguing the otherside... and so on. The point is that we actively engaged and it was fun... So make it fun, become a community, get to know eachother and make inside jokes. You don't have to know everyone in the group, but you should strive to learn something from people, whether they have 10,000+ SP, 1,000+ SP, or less than 20 SP (and that category I missed, ignore them, they suck... Just kidding, get to know them too, they are awesome)
I challenge all the steemstem community members to do something off of this list that they haven't done. If you have never done a colab post, then collaborate with someone... maybe make a series with someone... Idc what, just have fun and get to know others in our group, we have some really amazing people here and we could do some very great things.
EDIT
This doesn't mean all of your posts have to be, like, top notch collaboration posts or that you have to do these things 100%. These are just some ideas on how to promote engagement in the community but there are way way way more ways. I don't want anyone to think that these are guidelines.
@rickie | March 13, 2018, 10:08 a.m. | Votes: 2 | [
VOTE ]
Quite a brilliant idea and suggestion here, guys!
From the various comments and responses to this post, I can say for certain that I've been one of those guilty of not having too much time to interact with other members of the steemstem community, as is expected. I really hope to improve on that from now on.
Steemstem has been a blessing to so many of us, and its been amazing getting to know so many of the brilliant minds that are behind the project.
Words aren't going to be enough to actually appreciate the team for what they've done and achieved over the last couple of months - it's been simply amazing.
While so many of us - like me - have benefited at some point from the various curation and upvotes, so many others have put in immense effort to take the project to where it has gotten to today. And for that you earn our huge respect.
It is never an easy task to handle a project which affects people of diverse backgrounds, different level of intellect and various persona and mannerism. But @steemstem and the team has coped and handled that decently over the last couple of months. And you've earned the steemit community's respect including mine; as I deeply appreciate the project and efforts of the team.
As for the break, it is well-deserved. Hopefully, the team and project would be back within the said time, and much stronger and better structured, as well.
The break would also give so many of us who have gotten lazy with the quality of content we churn out, the time to restructure, improved and re-invent ourselves; I'm also a guilty party.
Thanks for being an essential part of the steemit community, Steemstem!
@rickie
Or you could grade the posts. Use a rubric similar to ones used in a University. A post which dives deep into the subject matter and is well researched with all the references in tact, should tick those boxes and get a good ‘grade’. Because this is a blog, creativity should also be evaluated. How good are the illustrations, are they original etc. Does the author put effort into the presentation of the article. All these things must be evaluated
You would then upvote and post the results in the comments. So the authors would have the feedback and get an idea of how to improve the posts moving forward.
You could even include interactions into the upvote. If the authors correspond with their audience and elaborately answer their questions, they could get a reward for that.
It may end up looking something like:
Research: 7/10
Language and grammar:7/10
Presentation: 5/10
Correspondence: 6/10
Average: 62% upvote
You would then minus 5% if it is your second post for the week.
Minus another 5% if it is your third for the week.
So if this above example was my third steemstem post for the week it would end up as:
62% -10% = 42% upvote
This would discentivise people people from abusing steemstem votes and focus on the best quality for their first post. So you end up getting less, but, higher quality content for steemstem
I believe that a community it built on quality of content. I will not comment on a post which add zero value to my life just for the sake of commenting. We can chit chat on discord.
So for example; If I post something of the highest quality which impacts and stimulates people’s minds, they will be more inclined to comment and interact with me. Because I’ve done extensive research on the topic, I am then able to reply back to them with a meaningful answer and multiply the effect.
The point of steemstem should not become a glorified chat group, but, rather a community which produces the highest quality scientific content that people actually want to engage with.
The best magazines, newsapapers, blogs always have the highest traffic and interactions.
The best journal articles have been cited the most.
People will comment if they feel compelled to do so. When I read something that sparks my interest I’m filled with questions.
If I don’t find something interesting or I think it is poorly presented, I won’t engage with it.
If you guys insist that we do so, regardless, then it will just become a fake community who feel obliged to interact with content that doesn’t actually impress them.
I would rather sit in a room with 5 interesting people who know their craft like the back of their hand, than with 100 dim wits who can teach me nothing and waste my time. (I’m being general here, not referring to our community)
Quality always trumps quantity when it comes to science. This refers to the posts and the comments.
Steve Jobs said if you want to make a difference in this world, do great work.
We should feel a sense of prestige to be upvoted by you guys and featured on the distilled post. When people access the the steemstem tag, they must be blown away at the quality of content.
If all this had to happen, I believe everything else will sort itself out.
In my opinion, I would incentivize curation more. Give each team member all the curation rewards for the posts they find. So, it would work on a commision type model. The more high-quality posts you find, the more you get paid. This then gives each team member an option to either create more posts or curate more. You might find some members of the team will end up curating full time, if, it is incentivised enough.
I think that every team members own posts should go through the same scrutiny and protocol that our posts go through in order to maintain a quality standard. The shortfall, due to lack of curie vote, could be made up through a higher 'limit' vote from steemstem.
One must also understand that the nature of being a curator of such a large community already brings a lot of attention to their blogs, which is a bonus in and of itself.
You may ask; how do we grow the steemstem account, if, all the curation rewards are distributed as commision?
Well, you already feed it through the news-letters and distilled posts. As the founders, yourself and JTM may consider delegating most of your personal steem power to the steemstem account. Every owner has to put money back into the business for it to grow. An increased Steemstem account, would improve all the curators commisions and keep them happy.
Finally, you could incentivise delegation. Every delegated amount to steemstem, over 1000sp, for example, would get one of their upvoted posts re-steemed by the steemstem account per week. This would give the donator exposure in return for their contribution.
So, to re-iterate this last point.
In order to get advertising from steemstem you must:
1. Produce a post for steemstem
2. Your post must meet quality standards for an upvote
3. You must be an investor
I fully support the break. You guys deserve a rest (more than a week in my opinion) as I know many of you have full-time jobs outside of steemstem and restructuring how you handle things can be greatly beneficial.
I'll be one of the first to admit that I need to engage with more steemstem authors. There are a few authors that I read and interact with almost every post as I find their content very interesting and well-written but I should definitely give more authors and topics a chance, which I'm definitely going to start doing.
I currently only look at physics, (some) space articles, ecology, geology, and biology posts and there is so much more that is offered by the community that I need to read on as I am fairly ignorant of the topics.
In regards to engagement with other authors outside of the community, may I suggest adding a discord chat room that allows people (who want to co-write an article, series, or something ) to post a topic and connect with potential co-authors. I know they can do this on their own, but I imagine it would be easier to find like-minded individuals this way.
Another suggestion is having a requirement of community activity in order to receive upvotes from @steemstem. This activity could be non-spam comments, upvoting, re-steeming, etc. I know there can be issues with that, but I bet the community engagement would go up because, as you guys said, a lot of people are just waiting on a payday and they will probably do whatever it takes to get that payday.
Just wanted to throw my 2 cents in and say thanks for the work that you've done with SteemSTEM, I've only managed to make one post thus far due to other commitments, but I have nothing but positivity for the guys over at SteemSTEM and really appreciate what you do.
I was lucky enough to have my post upvoted and felt welcomed with open arms in the discord too. It's great to have a community like this and it's a real shame it's being taken for granted.
I know it's been mentioned by others, but I will tend to agree that active engagement I think is key to growing a healthy and prosperous community, albeit slightly more consuming.
Although my post got upvoted, I didn't really get many comments at all on the post, and from an authors point of view I value visibility and engagement over any kind of pay-out reward in many respects.
So from that point of view, I'd be completely happy with even half of the reward, but more engagement and discussion on the topic at hand etc.
Anyway, keep up the good work, I'll hopefully be able to put more time into SteemSTEM when I have less going on :)
I devote 50% of my time reading and upvoting and commenting and 50% researching and writing. I quantify it, so it becomes easier that way.
If people don't quantify, it's harder to keep track of where they spend most of their time, and they end up writing posts more than they read/comment.
Another thing I do is I follow this distilled digest diligently and read every single article and leave a comment, even when I haven't got anything to say really, because at least that way I let the person know I've read their article. And I read everything in their entirety, I don't skim-read.
And I'm a couple distilleds behind for this reason.
Often people need to be told what to do. Quantify it. Don't tell them "engage", tell them "read all the distilleds and comment" ... I don't mean this specifically, I just mean concrete advice, even tho it kinda sounds stupid.
Or here's another way to do it, which is what I've just done: tell people what you do, and let them be inspired that way.
Here's another way a mere generic suggestion might go wrong: People tend to prefer to comment on bigger users' posts where they know upvotes to their comments will make it worth their while. Check out Abigail's comment thread! She needs to hire an extra hand just to read the wall of comments she receives, much less reply! And it's probably mostly because she has a big VP, not because people really care. So generically suggesting people should "engage" will just make them all make a bee-line toward certain users and completely disregard others. People like exercisinghealth get only a couple comments each post, and that guy made the effort to make whole videos.
But even when you do your best, it's still hard. I haven't been participating in the discord/formerly steemit.chat channel because I read posts. And when I try to give each person I follow equal attention, that means I could go for 2 weeks or more not giving any attention to people like trumpman and mobbs and ruthgirl who are so active and write stuff that's fun to read, which seems unfair. So after ~8 months on steemit, I'm still trying to figure out how to spend my time here most productively community-wise. It's no wonder those who are new to this are struggling (that's assuming they're making an effort at all).
It's not easy to quantify (at least I haven't managed to do it), I have a list of posts I want to read every day that I don't always have the time to finish. Sometimes real life doesn't leave you the time to do everything you want. I also read posts I upvote, but I don't have much to comment. I won't bother leaving a "nice work" kind of thing, as it won't add anything useful (your posts are an example, I mean I love your work, so well-written and researched, but since I am not an expert on the topic I don't think I can add arguments for further discussion).
And that thing about chatrooms, I am totally with you. It's not only that I don't have enough time to visit them, but also that I don't do well in places where too many people are gathered, I cannot do the small talk.
I believe that if people found a couple of users whose work they value and try to keep up with them, then this place would be so much different. And you know? By forming these "micro-environments" we become parts of small circles that end up entwining on the same platform. That's what I can think of, maybe I'm wrong.
Pfff, like you said it, it's hard though. If you want to be committed, you need to spend almost all your day on Steemit. It's always relevant, since we don't all share the same amount of free time, so engagement and real, essential curation should be judged depending on how much time available everyone has (which is impossible in my opinion).
I find it painful all this is happening at a time I don't have enough time to write a science post because of my exams. This is really something that hurts.
Whenever I call @samminator and it happens that we talk about steemSTEM, the major thing we talked about is the sense of entitlement people show towards steemSTEM.
The time I joined steemit, I wrote science posts without having a touch or something valuable on the post. Although my posts were not as defined as they are now but at least they were scientific. FInding @suesa was one thing that made me feel lucky. She introduced me to steemSTEM.
In steemSTEM, I wrote my science posts, read a few others from better authors to step up my game and be a better person. If steemSTEM voted me, I used to be happy because I saw it as a priviledge not an entitlement. For God sake, I didn't invest in steemSTEM to believe I deserve to be voted everyday.
Aside from seeing the upvote as an entitlement, saying a wonderful post was not voted by the steemSTEM curators is an insult to them. Having 19 people search for quality science posts, read them, check for plagiarism and copyright violation, disqualification from curie vote, and other things that might be involved is more like a selfless to the community and we still insult them by claiming we are entitled to votes we didn't pay for or by even saying they didn't see our post.
I appreciate the steemSTEM community and the curators because of the huge effort they put into this platform. This is a reason I take it upon myself to send them a token once in a while because I feel they deseerve to be appreciated and I know they also have a private life to manage and of course, some of them have works that they do outside steemit too.
If there's one thing steemSTEM has always emphasized, it is that this community is set out to give visibility to quality STEM related post and not to enrich writer's pockets. I now wonder how most people have become oblivious of that..
If steemSTEM is taking a break, I think it's well deserved. A restructuring is necessary for the betterment of this community!
Live long, steemSTEM!!!
:o
Ok. Fair enough. In my outburst, I did skip a lot of stuff.
First off, I've been looking a lot into the study of MBTI personality types and understanding how people work. I myself is an INTP; borderline INTJ. I started reading into this because, not being very social, it's hard for me to figure people out. Now, what I've found was very interesting. I would say most of the people that are involved in the STEM world tend to be logical thinkers. The reason why I say "tend" is because, lets face it, we've all met that engineer that really should have been a salesman. Apparently, true logical thinking types (the Vulcans) only occur in about 15% of the population. (I've forgotten where I picked up this statistic so if anyone has a source, I'm all ears.) The rest of the population, therefore, make decisions based mostly on feel.
So now I have to ask, what is the main purpose of promoting STEM on Steem? Is it to bring more people into the field? Bring more discussion? Or bring more appreciation towards how much work actually goes into making a coffee maker idiot proof? And the answer, I would hope, is all those things.
Being a society of mostly logical thinkers, we tend to think everyone else thinks the same way. I have a friend that is ENFJ. On a bad day, she is a disaster... uses intuition as opposed to data, driven by feel and not thinking, and making judgement before asking the question. On good days, she is the best person to be around. But this same person, stared at me with a blank and had no care in the world that her car was such a complex piece of machinery that needed regular maintenance. I was not able to convince her using logical reasoning... but she was thoroughly convinced when there was this one time when her brakes nearly failed. Now this is a very negative way in convincing someone to do the right thing.
The positive way? I think Mythbusters hit the nail on the head. They made it silly, fun, took it seriously, and there was always an explosion in the end.
What I'm trying to say is we need to be able to make it fun and emotionally captivating. Silly cat videos are top of the list because it is emotionally captivating even though it serves little purpose in furthering the human race or solving world hunger. Constantly correcting people's posts regarding scientific facts is actually not that productive either. Why? Even though, as an INTP, I would love to be corrected if I were wrong but most people need something to keep their egos afloat; because it's not always grounded enough by logical thinking. Yes, this is the reality that I am seeing so far. I haven't arrived at the point where I can say... this is the strategy I will take when I'm trying to convince someone of something. All I know right now are which landmines to try and avoid. So really, I admire you guys for this effort and I hope it continues. Maybe we can all strategize and create an effective and self sustaining approach.
Find something to rally people's nerves (in a positive way) and the masses will come?
> So now I have to ask, what is the main purpose of promoting STEM on Steem? Is it to bring more people into the field? Bring more discussion? Or bring more appreciation towards how much work actually goes into making a coffee maker idiot proof? And the answer, I would hope, is all those things.
Well, we have a platform (the STEEM blockchain) that is somehow revolutionary. Why not having simply a STEM community on it, with the idea of making good STEM content visible, having a bunch of people commenting the write-ups of each other, etc. When we started this project, it was mainly because we wanted to fine a way to have relevant STEM content and discussions made visible. And from then, it includes many things, from helping scientist to get an audience here to motivating anyone who just try to do something related to STEM on his/her own. The scope is larger and concerns varied levels.
> What I'm trying to say is we need to be able to make it fun and emotionally captivating. Silly cat videos are top of the list because it is emotionally captivating even though it serves little purpose in furthering the human race or solving world hunger.
Which is why we focus on the most complicated part :)
> Constantly correcting people's posts regarding scientific facts is actually not that productive either
It depends how the correction is made, I guess. And our way goes along what you point, somehow.
> Find something to rally people's nerves (in a positive way) and the masses will come?
Well, this is what we are doing for more almost 2 years. We have tried many things and where we are today is huge compared to where we were in the past :)
I hope that I'm not offending or discouraging your efforts. I really do admire the work that has been done so far. If I'm stating the obvious then I apologize for repeating what's already known.
To have communities, there needs to be organization. When I started looking at Steemit, it was mostly out of curiosity; to learn about this new type of blockchain application that has what looks like a pyramid scheme built in. At first glance, that was what I saw. The articles that rolled through on the "trending" and "new" pages were bots, links to other articles, a few photos,.. whatever people could do to earn upvotes.
I'm glad to say that after a few days of digging through the "noise" and having a few comments replied to with constructive feedback, it's not too shabby. Of course, no one needs my approval for anything. All I'm trying to point out was that it took some digging. I actually found this thread entirely by random chance. What Steemit is lacking right now.. or I haven't found the button yet... are ways to manage groups. That would make a lot of things easier.
> When we started this project, it was mainly because we wanted to fine a way to have relevant STEM content and discussions made visible. And from then, it includes many things, from helping scientist to get an audience here to motivating anyone who just try to do something related to STEM on his/her own. The scope is larger and concerns varied levels.
Good answer. Theoretically, we can have a large enough community of whales that can grant meaningful funding using the power of upvotes. =D (i.e. ... if I can just buy that focal reducer... I may be able to fit more than just 1/3 of the moon in my FoV for a shot...)
Pointing out errors in other posts is an endless task and can be discouraging to most people. What we have here is not Wikipedia. Instead of "flagging" inaccurate content, how about just focus more on promoting the best stuff? (Which you guys are already doing.)
> Well, this is what we are doing for more almost 2 years. We have tried many things and where we are today is huge compared to where we were in the past :)
Please don't give up.
[IMAGE: https://steemitimages.com/DQmUC8K7KSgRWcdoqvs2T7KYg4NDYFkQSd9DjeZY3wZBbNj/DSC_0019.JPG]
Thank you for sharing what you think. Take the time you need to make your decisions.
Thank you for everything you've done for this community and I think I couldn't tell you how grateful I am for the work you have been doing. And before last night's discussion on Discord, I didn't think I was part of the problem, but it turns out to be quite the opposite. I thought I was doing well in trying to write my articles as best I could, but I forgot to interact with the rest of the community and I realize that now I have a problem that should not have existed in the first place. I will change my behaviour and do my best to really be part of this community, one of the best I have ever met :)
I've tried to think of different ideas that could allow for more involvement of the community while relieving the SteemSTEM team of the incredible workload you have right now. Here are some of them I'd like to share with you: (I don't know if it's already been mentioned in the comments, I haven't had time to read them all yet)
The first idea is to offer members a broader mentoring program to connect newcomers with experienced members a bit like what you might see in some universities.
Perhaps it might also be possible to involve community members more in the curation process to facilitate the work of the curators. For example, there could be a channel on discord, accessible to members you have a minimum trust in, on which a bot would post all articles published on the steemstem tag and trusted members could use feedback (the emoji) to say if they think the content is good quality or not, if they have checked the copyright on the images used, if they have verified that it was not a copy/paste or spam. This does not mean promoting, or deciding the curation, but rather facilitating the work of the curators. I used discord as an example but one could imagine using a website or any other service.
The last idea is a way to sort steemstem publications by field either by asking to use a certain tag in addition to steemstem (I know a lot of them already do but maybe standardize it in an article) or have a space where you can share articles according to themes. I think that if we have easier access to articles in the topic we are looking for (even if it doesn't explain everything), we might have more interaction.
Here are my 2 cents, I don't know if these are good or bad ideas, but I hope that some solutions will be found and we will move forward.
Anyway, THANK YOU to all of you ! See you soon !
I will try and keep this concise.
I was originally invited by @zest and @abigail-dantes to join Steemstem. At that time I honestly felt privileged (back in December 2017 or early Jan) to be a part of the team. Also, to some extent (and because I had read some of their posts which are always quality) they affirmed my belief that my work was actually good enough to warrant their invitation. I have always wanted to write, knew I had a gift for it but never had an outlet and @Steemstem provided that. For this I am truly grateful.
One of the biggest problems is that Steem and Steemstem has grown exponentially fast. The foundation wasn't there to support the influx of new content creators to our group.
>"More and more people joined, more and more posts were voted ... more and more people complained. Yes, we all work for free to get barely a ‘thank you’
This is why I agree you guys should take a break. Entitlement inevitably subverts any form of gratitude. Although all of us may feel entitled at times, it indicates that something is indeed rotten at the roots.
Now this is my opinion and please feel free to disagree. Posting for steemSTEM is not just a hobby or a means to create a following on Steemit. I am in it for the rewards just as much as I feel an obligation to create quality content and discover and encourage it in other authors.
I have literally been telling friends and family , with a chip on my shoulder, that I "write part-time now". Correct me if I am wrong, but if a post doesn't lift it's proverbial pinky, it should GTFO. I (think) I understand what steemSTEM wants to achieve, but the latter remains an important part to that, and also leads me to my next point:
If we apply Ockham's Razor, I would argue that there is no community involvement because an exceedingly large portion of our members aren't interested in this. We can't and shouldn't force involvement. How do we separate the wheat from the chaff? I honestly don't know.
At the moment, to me at least, it boils down to entitlement vs. gratitude and involvement. Maybe, instead of steemSTEM members following the curation trail set by steemstem, steemSTEM should follow the members. We should inevitably root out the weeds.
Anyways, take a well deserved break. I need some time to think over all of this , too.
While I understand your sentiments completely, in the current state of this decentralized model, active participation is a must, otherwise the system fails. If you think of STEEMit as a traditional job where you get paid for your writing, the question becomes, who pays you? You would need people that have acquired STEEM--either by "buying/trading"--outside of STEEMit itself to bring it into STEEMit for the sole purpose of consumption.
In the current community model, there is no "boss", no entity that is making money from somewhere to then give you to create great content. Or as is the case for a startup, self-investing to create great content and draw people in the hopes of having a model to make that money back. Instead, it is a you scratch my back, I scratch your back, model. You write about physics, but may love art, so you give your votes there. Someone else writes about art and gives to biology. And on and on the wheel turns creating an economy that flows. If everyone comes here only to make money and does not give any, the whole thing comes to a grinding halt.
So you see, either the wheel turns or the content on STEEMit reaches a high enough level and is organized in a way that is easy to find so that people come to STEEMit with externally acquired STEEM with the sole intention of spending it on the content they consume. Until then, STEEMit cannot support people who come here only to create and make money. Does that make sense?
My question is, what does STEEMit want to be, a community or an outlet? Both are valid, but the design of the system depends on knowing your identity.
If a much deserved break is what is needed to refresh and find time to think about how to restructure, to make the next phases easier for everyone, then go for it and enjoy! You all deserve a holiday, ready for a nice summer time flow i hope!
But please consider really hard if thinking to quit as I think after all the efforts and the achievements so far, it would be a massive shame to see it all crumble and divide just because things got to much. This should be a happy experience doing things you love. If you end up feeling shit every day because the thing you love isn't working, then you must grab the bitch and tell her what you need to make things work, and find a way to compromise with others by talking to each other, non emotionally as possible, and just figure out what would make things more enjoyable and less pressured for each person and how can you make that work between you.
Do you really need to spend so much time on here if it's affecting your life? If not, how many hours would you be happy doing, or what days would you like off every week? Can the community understand and survive without you for those days? Who is available to be around if youre not? what part of the job do you dislike, and can someone else happily do it instead if you trade them to work on something they dislike? etc, all this seems to need a nice healthy discussion with everyone involved, and some time to think about any ideas to make plans for phase 2 of growth.
That is how empires survive. And you guys have done amazing at building such a good,valued empire. Despite how shitty things can get sometimes you still made it so far!
You gotta think of your castle and the land it owns, and you gotta find ways to defend it and keep everyone alive and happy. And when i say you, i mean everyone who is part of steemstem and it's community. That's the beauty of a community. You will argue, cry and wish it was "dead" but like any family, you all just carry on anyway, because in the end theres always a lot of love and good ideas and deeds being done, and that's what life is about.
I hope you guys figure out what you can and want to do, then just let everyone else know and we can all adapted accordingly, or even offer help if there are shortfalls in places. I dunno cos i dont know enough bout the ins an outs... but point is, be happy! and dont let good ideas go to waste. (just found out Stephen Hawkin died today :( We are one amazing brain down in this world where many are dumb and stupid, we need all the good brains doing as many good things as possible to keep ahead of the wars against stupid)
But i guess the most important thing right now is HAVE A LOVELY HOLIDAAAY! (but please do come back and keep trying :D )
In time steemstem community is going to grow. I think the internal mechanics will improve, and real STEM posters have a place they can turn to for help, and get their work seen and viewed. A few of those complaining about lack of comments or votes need to view post from other STEM posters, see what they are doing and try to emulate them.
You, Suesa, and Greenrun, all do very good at the interaction with your audience. If an individual does not want to accept input, then they are not going to accept it. When first reading the post here and those first several entries; The post seemed to be about taking a break and reevaluating and defending itself, and about quality of work and then why they are not able to engage everyone. That last part I fully understand, and commenting guiding and helping can at times be a thankless job, and at other times a wonderful one.
People understand when they need a break, but not when someone else needs one. Steemstem community will grow, and people will learn to engage. The core working group, of STEM are the ones that will have fingers pointed at them, as in any group, it is always the leaders fault and never the Plebs fault for their own failure.
One of these days soon, I am going to need to take my break, and go and read Suesa's latest funny take, Greenruns thoughtful story, and see a couple of your post, and learn a bit about you since I see you always trying to help and like you said answering your commenters reasonably. Thank you for the response.
