It's really amazing how much reading and writing we all do now, isn't it? Pre-Steemit (and pre-internet), how often did we sit down with a keyboard or a pen to organize our thoughts and put them down in a format we hoped would be useful to so many other people. This may be the most hyper-literate time the world has ever seen, at least in terms of sheer numbers.
Keeping up with all those words, and all those voices, can be exhausting.
According to British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, the size of our neocortex limits the number of meaningful, stable relationships we can have to 150. I'm following 125 people on Steemit already, and every one of those "follows" was someone who wrote at least a couple of articles I was genuinely interested in reading. This turns my feed into a whirlwind of scattered content, especially when you factor in re-steems.
Personally, I'd love a way to turn the viewing of re-steemed content on and off. I understand that re-steeming is a great tool for curation. It lets us share posts we highly value with followers who have found value in our own words. I've made great connections by following some of your suggestions. But while there are times you want to attend a grand party where everyone's invited, sometimes you want to hang around with a few close friends. And sometimes there just aren't enough hours in the day to pay attention to everybody.
My feed is getting so unwieldy that there are times I come across a post by someone I haven't read in a couple of weeks, and then discover they've posted several great articles over seven days ago. And while I can still read and comment, I'm no longer able to leave a meaningful up-vote on their post. The seven-day payout window gives the place a frantic feel, and it's a shame when so much of the stuff I want to read obviously took the authors hours or days to compose.
Consider what a change this is to our reading habits. Publications used to come out weekly or monthly. Then, if we really wanted to reply, we'd have to post a letter to the editor that may or may not be shared a month or two later!
And consider this: reading a magazine used to require an investment of both time and money! We used to have so much empty space in our lives that we actually spent money to fill it up with other peoples' words!
I'm confident the Steemit platform will continue to evolve and introduce new ways to meaningfully interact with the authors we love and admire. In the mean-time I've taken to using a comparatively primitive tool to keep up with the writers I'm most interested in genuinely following: the browser's Bookmarks Menu.
I'm pretty selective with it. It's for the people I find myself having daily, meaningful conversations with. Steem Power and influence don't matter. I'm not going to go around chasing whales in the hopes of getting a valuable upvote in return. I consider these bookmarks my "magazine subscriptions". Would I pay money to read these folks, if I found their articles in a newsstand? Would I invite these people to my home for a cocktail party? Would I go for a walk in the woods with them, because their conversation would out-value the natural silence? And if they are re-steeming a lot, are they doing it out of a sense of intellectual joy and sharing, or are they just regurgitating everything they come across in hope of reciprocal riches?
Not all of these bookmarked accounts post every day, although many do. And I might not comment or vote on everything they post. But they've become important enough to me that I want the chance to do so in a way that makes it clear I value their contribution. I hope this doesn't sound self-important. I know I'm just a minnow too, with an upvote that's not worth a dime. But I write in order to share and to be read, and this is just my attempt to treat other writers the way I'd like to be treated.
I've taken to starting my Steem sessions by right-clicking on that folder and opening all those feeds in tabs. Even with such a short list, this brings up an embarrassment of riches. But I'll take living in a time of abundance over a time of scarcity any day.
The attention-span is a fickle thing. There are times I come across a long post I'd love to read slowly and digest, and I've just got to be honest and accept that I'm just not in the right frame of mind to do that at the moment. So I've started upvoting longer posts in advance, and then saving them in a "read later" folder. If you're bewildered by a comment from me on something you wrote months ago, please accept my respectful apologies, and know that I found you to be worth the wait!
I still spend lots of time going through the "new" and "trending" page for my favorite subjects, as well as scrolling through my general feed. There will always be more people out there I haven't met yet, whose voices will amaze and delight me. But I've also come to accept that there's a level of serendipity here, and I'll never be able to read them all.
How do you manage wading through all the great content on this site? Do you try to strike a balance between seeking out new stuff and concentrating on your favorites? Research particular subjects? Let serendipity and volume decide? I'd love to hear!