It's hard to have this conversation with fellow steemians without seeing the complete polarization of positions unfold right before my eyes. The truth of the matter is that I believe that the answer lies somewhere in the middle, but at the same time I have the hardest of times defining what the middle is.
Stands Mr. Merit, he believes that only effort should be compensated and if it does not take a content creator at least thirty minutes to finish a post, then without a doubt the post cannot be valuable. Mr Merit has a valid point, in many ways we are taught by the very system, that time is money and to break down "work" into time slots. The math for Mr. Merit boils down to: Well, if you are making $20 an hour as a writer and it took you 30 minutes to do the post, a $10 payout sounds accurate. Anything above that is overvalued, anything below that is probably not right, depends on your skill level.
You see Mr. Merit believes in pragmatism and absolutes. His biases are not necessarily uncommon or evil, to use a more dramatic tinged word, they just are. And I happen to stand buy more tickets in favor of Mr. Merit most of the time, because more often than not, It's easier for my biases and I to aligned with this idea of merit.
On my right wearing blue trousers
Stands Mr Skill, he believes that the years he has spent mastering his unique abilities grant him the power, if you will to achieve the same results, with less effort. Mr. Skill is also not wrong, as a musician I've seen this with my own two eyes. Someone would walk into a studio and in two takes complete his track, while another musician would spend two days recording his share of the song.
The truth is that Mr. Skill is a little more rare than Mr. Merit, but truth be told they are tackling the same problems, through different paths and that is a completely valid assessment to make.
Where is the middle?
This is where I struggle, because quality is very subjective. To believe that we can all agree on something of quality is to reveal that you've never visited an art gallery in your life. The solution however is to remove as much as possible our personal biases from this equation and attempt to see it from the viewpoint of a possible adopter of our beloved platform.
Can we expect everyone to make long form content?
Absolutely not. There is now way we could be advocates for liberty, for self governance, for anarchism and in the same breath demand some sort of behavior set to our particular biases of standard and merit. As the old saying says "You can't have your cake and eat it too". So attempting to make an argument for some sort of minimum word count, minimum picture count or anything of the sort is cognitively dissonant.
The truth is that we should expect people to learn to enjoy the platform in their own way, create the content they find valuable as long as this content has a healthy ethical audience, it really does not matter our personal opinion of said content.
I will try to be more specific as to not make anyone tilt their head sideways like a puppy. Basically, if someone can make his readers laugh with two lines, and their readers enjoy the zapplin, we as stake holders of the platform should be happy of this fact. This is of course not considering the abusers with no audience, spamming our network or "soft mining" with bots. (please note the air quotes, they are of a sarcastic nature)
Short content has a place on this platform
And I think those of us who lean towards the Mr. Merit of my analogy have to learn to see the bigger picture in front of us. We all want and need mass adoption, coming to peace with the fact that content creators and content consumers have different expectations is part of the mass adoption process.
The apps that have been developed for the blockchain are doing a good job at eliminating the stigma of short content, but we also need to be a little more flexible with our steemian culture, sort of speak. So that new ideas, new applications that cater to the short form content land on fertile ground.
What do you think? Do you stand with Mr Merit more, or with Mr Skill?
