Quality Standards versus Seeking Perfection
I've read some interesting tips for being successful on Hive from @achim03 here. All of them deserve attention, but I want to focus on this one today:
If your content is not interesting, people will stop following you. It's important to be consistent but this doesn't mean that you have to write a post every single day. Keep the quality of your product as high as possible and make it more interesting by making it less abundant. Always remember that the people following you maybe can't be online every day and maybe they also don't want to comment your content every day...
This paragraph gave me the idea for my post for today.
Absolutely! If the quality of your content is on a descending curve of quality or if it no longer reflects the interests of the person who hit the "follow" button, they might unfollow you.
Ideally, the quality of the posts should increase over time, not plateau or decrease.
Where I see a risk is in setting a too high standard of quality for your posts, and not publishing anything until you find the right topic and the time to make the post look exactly as you want to. On one side, sometimes a higher standard means it addresses a narrower audience these days (not always). But that's not what I want to discuss in this post.
Quality is important, but seeking perfection is often a mistake. And it's a balance many don't reach: when trying to improve the quality of their writing and the message delivered, themes approached, etc., it's easy to fall on the side of seeking perfection.
Being constantly unpleased by your work and wanting to improve it (seeking perfection) can affect creativity, inhibit oneself, and maybe lead to a block. Not a situation a writer or content creator would want to be in often.
Publishing content regularly doesn't leave much room for perfectionism, and that's a good thing. Conversely, if someone uses this as an excuse to drop the quality of their content over time, that's unacceptable, in my opinion. Unless, of course, they want to completely change the niche, in which case a good part of their followers may not choose not to follow them for the new type of content.
We also have to keep in mind that content creators of any kind may have good or bad periods too. It may be related to their inspiration or lack thereof, or to events they have in their lives you won't know about unless they share the details.
If someone waits for a bad period to pass, first of all, how will they know if it passed if they don't test the water? Then, at least on Hive, we often have seen situations when posts we were proud of didn't receive the recognition we thought they deserved, and other posts that maybe we thought were kind of average generated serious engagement or votes.
And finally, when someone reads their feed and doesn't see your name today, tomorrow, the following day, and so on, at first they might wonder what's going on with you, but after a while, they start to forget and create other connections with authors they read and engage with often. Sure, you might post twice a week, and they might be very good posts (but not the kind that gets on the trending page), but they may get buried in the feed and your regular reader starts missing them. And then, we are back in the situation of being slowly forgotten.
Want to check out my collection of posts?
It's a good way to pick what interests you.
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Most of the time in seeking Great and quality perfection, the quality standard is been set
Always before us, @gadrian, are questions of this type.
What matters is what the "market" thinks of our content. And, even then, there are a lot of permutations as to how that actually plays out (related to "quality content"? 🙄) on any given day ... As you well know, so I am probably ... "preaching to the choir" ... 😉
I hope you are enjoying a good day over in your part of our big, wide world! 👋
Hmm, that's debatable. Even the greatest writers haven't come out only with masterpieces. For every prolific writer, at every masterpiece (if they even have one), there are enough failures. Some published, others not. Attempting to produce a masterpiece every time for most people (apart from a few geniuses, maybe) doesn't seem like the best choice.
In my interpretation, precision is quite different from seeking perfection. A higher being can be thought of as perfect (maybe?), but not precise. See the difference? So precision and perfection are distinct and can be achieved (or not) independently from one another.
Absolutely. But it's not always that. Sometimes curation habits of others or when you publish it matter. It can be a tiny thing that can make a whole of a difference.
I wish I did... more. But these days we're painting. Just moving stuff/mess from one room to the next. Hopefully, by Friday it's over! But these were some tiring days, on top of every other day dentist appointments I have after my surgery.
That sounds rather serious there at the end. I hope you are okay and on the mend, if not fully recovered!
During recovery. Still have to cope with surgical sutures in my mouth that haven't fully resorbed, and the sensation of wounds healing, which sometimes can be painful or, at least, uncomfortable.
Okay, well, glad to hear you are at least on the downward side and healing!
Thanks!
One thing you wrote here and I also noticed it in my account is the power of consistency
It makes you to be remembered and known by so many people
You also do something that makes people remember you: you comment a lot and in many places. Compared to your early comments, they improved and are more on point.
https://twitter.com/LovingGirlHive/status/1762941529587409103
Thanks.
This is good advice. Consistency is important in a lot of different things, especially when you are catering to an audience, whether it is in consistent good quality, or the rate of posts. I think balancing these things is very important.
That's true. What's even more important than the quality of content and the rate of posts is how we balance them. If the posts are frequent, you can't have a long streak of heavy, deep topics or they will become tiresome to the readers. If there is a long streak of easy topics or themes they are not interested in, they will get bored and stop being interested.
I think it's tough to really decide because it is subjective. Personally, I think it's better to just post what you want to post and if it's something that you are at least satisfied with. I think consistency is better though because if you aren't consistent then it is easy to just stop and disappear.
If we were to half-joke, depends on what you want. If you want to "disappear", then you should either abruptly stop, or slowly fade away.
Seriously now, yes, it's obviously a choice. And there is an audience for people who post less regularly. Depends on what you write about and the relevance of your topics. Someone like Blocktrades will always be followed, even if he posts once every 6 months, it doesn't matter. If you play a less prominent role in the ecosystem, the quieter you are, the harder it is to come back, almost no matter how good your articles are.
It's like a balancing act between quality and consistency. Achieving consistent quality is probably hard but I think it's more attainable that achieving perfection. In a way, when we're consistent, the quality of what we create can increase over time, given that the more we do something, the better we get at it.
Yes, I agree, it's a balance. Perfection is rarely attainable. It is desired, a process or goal, but not realistic in most cases. I am a perfectionist in some ways. If I keep one of my posts too long without publishing it, I always find something to improve, tweak, polish. And if I read it after a while, I might not like it at all and wouldn't publish it. The way I deal with it is to not spend more than a few hours on a post, and certainly not leave it for the next day, or I'd lose a few other hours rewriting pieces of it or trying to improve it.
Definitely. There's always something to improve when we keep revising our work. I think not spending too long on a post is a great way to minimize the issue of not wanting to publish a post. That's what I do more or less, get it done, revise and publish.
Thanks for the mention and happy my post gave you some inspiration :-)
It's indeed a difficult balance to find between upholding your quality standards and producing enough content that people don't forget you. I think that we souldn't drop below two posts per week but I definitely don't think that we need to come up with a post every day :-)
I think it's also a matter of habit and the other things you have to deal with every day or occasionally. Sometimes it's difficult for me to write a daily post, and I'm sure I'll miss some. In fact, I am quite surprised I didn't miss any during this latest period. I suppose the power of habit and consistency is quite impressive sometimes.
I have also been working hard on this platform for the past two years and I am also trying to improve the quality of my content in the same way and post one post a week.