How we can all help Steemit
How annoying is it when you see a great piece written by a new Steemian offering good advice or an interesting perspective, only for it to be getting absolutely zero attention? No views, no upvotes - nothing. Very! What is even more galling is to then see a picture of a flower which has garnered $20 or more. Is this the road Steemit wants to go down because the way I see it, this platform will die if it doesn't support all of the community: and that means new members too. Supporting new members will help grow the platform, which in turn is like free promotion of Steemit (word of mouth amongst friends/family) as well as helping push the currency rates upwards.
The powers that be at Steemit have to decide and true to real life, that is out of most of our hands. Only a select few with the wealth and voting power can decide this but I would suggest if all of us refuse to use bots hopefully some of them will disappear. I initially did sell my vote briefly a couple of times when I first joined Steemit but then realised this was a mistake as I was helping to contribute to the promotion of these bots and the slew of plagiarised and low quality content adourning the hot and trending pages. I have now decided that I will no longer use bots or sell votes because it isn't good for the platform. I realise though that money goes to money and that you will never stop people using these bots but I hope that in time people will realise that they are helping to destroy the platform and stop doing it. People can choose to take a moral stance against this, as a quality post made by a new Steemian which they spent a lot of time and effort making which is dwarfed by a pic of a flower which probably wasn't taken by the poster is just wrong in my opinion but hey ho, Steemit, it is in your hands. Who am I to judge? Let the market decide as they say! What are your thoughts on this subject? Please leave a comment below. Thank you.
I think steemit is a great example on how money corrupts our minds. People suck up to the big guys or are being dishonest to get rewarded. Just like in real life. That's not going to change. Ever. I'd say it depends how you use steemit. I have found quite a few people who are not in it for the money but to connect with others, that's good enough for me. As a truther platform I find it pretty useless. You are either preaching to a (very small choir) or get no attention at all. But since it is currently not being censored on a large scale, it's a good place to vent :)
Thanks for your comment @herrleeb . I came here because I was excited about a decentralised 'social media' platform because I was sick of the censorship and bans that the likes of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were dishing out. You're right. From a truthers perspective, Steemit is useless. There are better places to vent and be heard like Gab or even Reddit! Though Gab can sometimes resemble an echo chamber and echo chambers achieve nothing.
Agreed. But it also looks like as if you either have to be in an echo chamber or you will get attacked viciously. We are already so polarized, that discussion and exchange of ideas becomes almost impossible.
I for one have stopped commenting on posts I disagree with. You cannot convince anyone anymore. We live in a post fact society, opinion matters. If you disagree, you are a shill, a troll, a racist, an idiot or an antis****e. Certain subjects are better not discussed on steemit as well, if you don't want trouble :)
Good for you Anglo! For me it was a matter of deciding which advice to follow. One fellow who joined only 1 month before me and seemed to be making some headway (he's now at 59 reputation compared to my 43) told me how to use bots while my son who's been on here 2 months longer (with a rep of 53), and a few others, including a whale, said don't use them, they are a waste of time and money. I went with my son's advice, for one reason because I really didn't understand how they worked but mainly they just seemed to work against incentivizing quality. I'd see posts getting a bunch of upvotes, way more upvotes than actual views!!
I've been hit like that with a couple of my posts and figured, "Hell, what does this have to do with the quality of the content? They don't even read the post! It's all a matter of luck."
One thing that could be done is to remove the upvote button from the feed so people have to at least take the time to scroll to the bottom of a post to be able to upvote it. I suppose a bot can be designed to do that but I wouldn't be surprised if many curators just go in with their 100 upvotes per day and spend as little time as possible in curating which means all they do is read the feed and upvote from there.
But that's a minor issue compared to how much influence one can have by simply investing their thousands of dollars into steempower instead of just buying steem. I don't think a guy who invests $10,000 of his own money should have 10 times more influence than someone who invests $1000. He should get 2x, not 10x the influence, and the guy who invests $1000 should only get 2x the influence of someone with $100. Mitigating the influence of the whales will increase the relative reward that goes to good content. Only about 4% of the 30,000 active users have more than 5000 Steempower and I'd venture to guess most of them didn't get it with their quality content. Am I saying whales don't curate based on quality? I'm saying they can, but they don't have to, there's nothing preventing them from promoting crappy content or just ignoring, or not seeing, good content. There just aren't enough eyes with SP watching for it, and the bots are only exasperating the problem, near as I can tell. I'd sure like someone to explain to me, with math, not just opinions, why I'm wrong.
Thanks for your enlightening comment @kirbyhopper. I like your idea of issuing influence in a fairer and much more balanced way in order to level the playing field somewhat. The problem with that is there will always be those that say you need those bigger investors who were willing to dive in with hard cash when the platform was just starting out and so by investing and risking their money in the early days deserve more of a reward because they were responsible for stabilising Steemit from the start. It's a tough call but something needs changing, that's for sure.