I don't understand the shitposting debate

almost 3 years ago

This is a debate going on since forever on Hive and coming from the old blockchain as well.

Are shitposts good for the platform? Should we encourage them or put them down? What is a shitpost, who's judging and from what perspective?

I'm tired of this debate, if we can call it that. All the pros and cons to shitposts, on one hand. All the virtues and drawbacks of longform quality posts, on the other hand.

^Source

Do we have shitposts on Hive? Of course we do. People say they are the majority. I don't dispute that, they might be. They probably are. Why? It's much easier to write a shitpost than to write a quality, longform post. It takes less time, it requires less skill, less attention to details and research. So more people feel they have what it takes to do that. Even more, it's less likely to be wrong in a shitpost. Another easy path. On the other hand, that implies less proof of brain, doesn't it? And rewards may reflect that. Or may not.

Do we also have quality longform posts on Hive? Sure we do! Just look at the curation trail of @steemstem, for example. You will often find great pieces of content there, many of them respecting the rigors of short scientific articles. I follow that trail out of respect for the work being put into those articles, on top of the fact that I have an affinity towards the STEM domains.

And like that we have other examples. Tribes and communities offered us the opportunity to create niches, which may even be incompatible with one another.

Unless we become a longform quality content platform only, I don't see how the so-called shitposting will ever be less prominent than today. More widely spread, yes, because that's the trend on major centralized social media platforms and when we speak of high number of people.

In sheer numbers, that's where our largest chunk of prospective new users will likely come from - the big centralized social media platforms.

I only see this debate taking place because of the finite Hive reward pool, which is the same for each and every content producer and curator, may it be a shitposter or an accomplished writer, a hard-working manual curator or someone who completely automated curation.

Hardfork 25 will bring manual curators on equal footing to bots, and will likely bring back comment upvotes as well.

On the balance between shitposts and quality longform content, I believe it will not shift in the favor of the latter at Hive level as a whole, because superficiality is a general trend in the society, not just on Hive, and the more the former are put down (excluding abuses), the more adoption and retention are hindered.

In the end, we can summarize this by these points: