Hi Steemians,

It’s been almost 2 full months since I’ve been here and I’ve tried to be as much as active as I could.

When I learned about this platform from @jedy and @xtrex, I’ve tried to learn as much as I could about how it actually works and how to get the most of it. Along with some tutorials in YouTube I could not notice how many “guide”, “tips and tricks” and other great posts for beginners there actually are here on Steemit:

@hobbitjerry’s A beginner's guide to Steemit

@donkeypong’s Simply Steemit: Your No-Nonsense Guide to Getting Started

@sykochica’sAnswering Common Questions: How do I get more Votes? - Part 1: Meeting People and Building Relationships

@emancipatedhuman’s Tips for writing engaging and popular posts

@cryptoctopus’ Why You Are Not Powering Up...

And much, much more !!!

But as I browse through more are more posts every day I keep seeing a tendency of spam, misunderstanding and begging for something (mostly in the comment section).

People keep doing things, which are not included in the guides as useful and progressive actions.

That’s why I’ve decided to contribute with “non-guide”, which will include why you should not do certain things on Steemit.

Communication

Posting meaningless comments

Posting meaningless comments like “Nice post!” or “Very informative, carry on!” is not only absolutely pointless, but it may be considered disrespectful.

“How?” you may ask.

Well first it’s disrespectful to the author. By posting meaningless comments to posts which you haven’t even read is kinda offensive because you didn’t even bother to actually understand what the person (the author) wants to say to you (the audience) and you just insert a meaningless comment and expect to be rewarded or followed. Really? Do you think that this person is so stupid or blind?

Secondly its disrespectful to yourself. You produce no quality content on this platform and you expect to be upvoted by “passive activity”.

Of course there are plenty of ways to show your love to the author and the post without making a sophisticated comment or whatever. But as the title says this is not-a-guide, so go read one!

Begging for follows and upvotes

This is another aspect of the meaningless comments but this time it’s even more stupid to do, because you might get flagged.

Even if you achieve your "goal" to be followed by that person, why would you think he or she will actually actively follow you and reward you?

I won’t even speak about the offensive part here, because I think it kinda self-explains it.

Self-promoting yourself in the comment section

Again - disrespectful and you risk to be flagged. If you want to promote yourself, there are a lot of more delicate ways to do it - go read a guide !

Ignoring your audience

By creating and posting a quality post, you’ve only done half of your job as being an author on Steemit. Whenever some other person actually invested their time to read your post and to reply to it with an engaging meaningful comment or question, why would you not bother answering? Or at least upvoting?

Of course depending on the time you spend on Steemit, there might be limitations for you to read all the comments on your post, but the most cases, which I’ve seen are on contrary – Whales and dolphins (which are expected to have entire “pages” of comments under their posts) tend to be more responsive to their audience than other people.

Again, if you are short on time, the least you could do is to upvote the comments which are related to your posts and somehow contribute to it.
How would you expect to get more active followers if you ignore them when they try to reach you?

Following too many people

You should not follow too many people if you don’t actually mean to follow them and to see what they are up to. Don’t become a “ghost follower”.
Of course again we limit ourselves by the time we have. Nobody expects you to be active on someone’s every single post. Just don’t disappear.

Not following people

Not following anybody or less than 10 people could actually mean few negative things about you.

• You might not engage with your audience.

• You are not seeking communication with others.

Content

Posting unstructured and plain content

A lot of new posts which I stumble upon are like 90% wall of text, written with a lot of mistakes and no clear structure.

You can’t expect someone to torture himself while reading what you have to say and in the end to reward and follow you.

A well structured posts reveals that you’ve put some time and effort in it. So even if you failed to write a good title (if it’s a text post), a good structure could always attract more readers and resteems.

Think of the structure of the text as it’s “package”. You won’t even look at something in the store if it’s packed poorly, right? So why would someone even bother reading your post if it’s obvious that you haven’t invested some time and thought in it?

The struggle with the good structure of your post is common to every Steemian. Luckily you could always use sites for markdown, to understand and improve the way your posts should look like - read a guide !

Posting plagiarized content or content without sources

Define what’s your Steemit profile is about. If your idea is to just copy-paste some things, just ditch it – you won’t earn anything above a few cents.

Copy-pasting is frowned upon in this community. Not only it will not produce you any benefits but you might even get flagged and muted by people. Keep that in mind!

Abusing hashtags

This is a common problem at the moment for all of us. And if you think about it we made it a problem. By posting content which is not related to the hashtag:

• First you decrease your chances to be actually seen. It sounds counter-intuitive but it actually is true. If everybody wants to be seen and posts in the “most read” hashtags, content which is not related to it, they would simply get “washed away” by other posts with the same purpose.

• Secondly you decrease other people’s chances to be seen also. Even if they post their article with the correct hashtag they get “washed away” the same way as already mentioned.

Conclusion

I hope the "Not-a-guide" guide to Steemit was useful for you, or perhaps to someone you know. I would like to say that it's an open project so if you would like to add something or to discuss it with me, feel free to do so in the comment section !

Pictures