Practical wisdom case study #2 - Serialization on Steemit

Before I present this case I want to point out some of the changes I will be making to these posts based on some of the feedback and lessons learnt from the last one.

Firstly I will try my best to reduce the length of the post so it is more concise and easy to read for more people (I found it tiring writing such lengthy essays as well). The second is that I will stop providing links to any other posts (including my own) because I don't want to promote any other issues or agendas here. Finally, I will not use actual examples (that would contradict with point two) and instead provide a generic description based on incidents and comments I have read so as to not dredge water that is already under the bridge.

Okay, let's see how the introduced changes will improve the future posts!

A recent incident (that also unfortunately resulted in flagging and comment wars) highlighted the lack of guidelines around the way posts can or should be serialized on Steemit. Interesting enough, this incident was based on a piece of written work that was broken up into very small sections turned into individual posts, and since I wasn't closely involved in the incident this time I will hopefully be able to dissect the implications as objectively as I can.

Serialization on Steemit is something that isn't specifically restricted by the platform, nor is it supported like other publishing websites (e.g. Medium) so naturally there are some benefits and issues as a result. As usual I will raise some issues that will be put forth for a dose of reflective equilibrium, and then see if practical wisdom will help solve them.

From the audience point of view, serialization:

• results in less time and effort per post view
• results in more time and effort to read through to completion (based on lack of support for serialized content)
• results in more time and effort to reward author or curate

From the author's point of view, serialization:

• allows frequent and controlled release of content to the audience
• helps to retain loyalty and readership
• requires management of content for continuity for the audience
• may potentially result in greater payout per piece of completed work

From the community's point of view, serialization:

• dilutes the payout to all authors in general due to more posts being published but not necessarily bodies of work
• creates more effort to curate and manage feeds since there is no support for subscribing to or managing serialized work
• creates perception that authors may choose to serialize their work to maximize payout to the detriment of other types of content creators that cannot easily serialize their work into much smaller chunks (e.g. a painter or model maker)

Judging from what I have seen on Steemit, the community will always accept content of high quality from authors and seek to help them continue by upvoting their work. The fact that upvoting is 'free' (I won't get into the details of why this is not quite as straightforward) means that the effort versus reward for the audience is generally worthwhile, so I can't see this changing even if an author started out posting novels and ends up posting contents of the novel page by page.

At some point the audience may find the effort involved in a platform not supporting serialization to be too time consuming (if not to read or manage then at least to reward each post), so authors do need to find the optimal chunk of content to serialize. Same goes for painters that may release individual paintings in a series, or video producers that may divide a show into segments.

Whether authors seeking an optimal strategy for serialization will help prevent some of the issues caused by aggressively serializing content remains to be seen, but if investors are concerned by this then providing a means to support serialization of content would be a sensible (i.e. practical) way of solving this issue. The perception of using voting influence or flagging to control what might be deemed as inappropriate behaviour when the platform doesn't support or specify how to serialize content will no doubt trigger other issues that are more problematic than inappropriate serialization of content (which I haven't found an argument for just how 'wrong' it actually is).

In conclusion, I do think that there is an equilibrium that can (or will be) reached regarding how serialization is done on Steemit, and if we want to be practical about managing how it is done either as a community or authors (or readers) then again I have already seen people voting with their upvotes (or not providing upvotes), or providing suggestions to manage collections of posts (as I already have through utopian.io) but I think downvoting posts when the general community sees no problems with the actions of the author will invariably result in public outcry.