Frustrated New Steemit User
I joined the Steemit community about a week ago. There are things I love about Steemit, and things that are starting to frustrate me.
What I Like
- I had never written a blog before joining Steemit, so I'm loving that aspect of it. The ability to instantly get an audience is amazing.
- I can search for topics and find like minded or opposite minded people. It's great having access to different perspective on things.
- Steemit makes it easy to keep up with what's happening in the crypto world. With so many users posting about news and events, it's a one stop shop.
- HF19 was amazing. Seeing payouts and voting power increase over night was great motivation to keep working on growing my follower base. Making the payouts linear balances the power, which is the whole point of decentralization.
Why I'm frustrated
Spam
There seems to be a decent amount of spam on Steemit. I tend to stick to the following tags; Money, News, Steem, Steemit, Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, etc. That is what is on my mind, so I look in those categories. I find great posts there...along with spam. By spam, I mean people doing lotteries and other fund raising posts.Nothing wrong with contests/lotteries, and I understand that it's a way to build your user base and get up-votes. But it's also spam when categorized incorrectly. The users that hold a lottery every once in a while or for milestones is not an issue. I'm talking about users that post 5 lotteries a day...this clutters up every category. There should be a hashtag for lotteries and fund raisers. People that want to participate in them can go to that section. I know Steem is decentralized, but a bot that monitors spam could be a good thing. There may already be one out there, but all categories are getting bogged down with spam.
Voting Bots
Voting Bots are a minnow's worst enemy and what frustrate me the most. I didn't know what they were until I saw some youtube videos last night. I'm not going to mention names of the youtubers, but they have a lot of followers on Steemit. These guys are using voting bots that auto up-vote specific people as soon as they post. You can also specify who to vote for and how many minutes after the user posts to auto up-vote. Doesn't that defeat the whole purpose of reading and up-voting blogs that are actually good? One of these Steemit users had a video where he described how he picks people to auto up-vote. Actually reading the blog was no where in his methodology. I was actually following these guys on Steemit too....no more.Is it possible to add captcha or some other way to prevent bots from voting? Just defeats the whole purpose of Steemit. It's supposed to be a decentralized platform...these bots make it harder for minnows to move up the food chain. And if you do manage to move up and become a whale, then you're competing for votes with auto up-voted whales that post a bunch of garbage. Some of the whales are literally posting a picture of a wall and getting auto up-voted to hundreds of dollars.
Just for clarity, I'm not talking about @randowhale. I've used it before and that does seem to actually provide a service to users to get their blogs going.
It's only been a week on Steemit for me, I'm happy to be here...but wanted to vent on some of these issues. It's still the early days, so I'm sure there will be growing pains and adjustments. But...these voting bots are ruining the whole point of Steemit!
Do you think Steemit still has a bright future with these bad things?
Absolutely! I guess some negative things can't be avoided in any decentralized system. I still prefer the decentralized hurdles vs a centralized site like Facebook. And there is definitely a steep learning curve on Steem.
I could 't agree more with what you said. I'd really e interested in knowing who does this sort of behavior, but guess that warrants my own Youtube research :-)
Yeah...not hard to find though!
This is actually a very good post, and yes, STEEMIT is pretty much a centralized system. Hardfork is an attempt to keep newcomers signing up and using the platform... but man, like mining, posting is becoming useless for newbies. :(
I like writing posts so I'll keep doing it....but yeah, it's not profitable until have over a thousand followers.
yes the spam should be dealt with in some way, but the benefits for us minnows are still quite incredible aren't they?
No doubt!
The Welcome bots are really the only ones I personally approve of. These are the ones that give minnows a chance to get established, although they don't do much for content curation.
As for SPAM ... it's everywhere ... I personally don't upvote lotteries, beggars, or content that doesn't contribute to the value of the community. If that means I gain reputation more slowly and take longer to become a "whale" so be it, I feel that I'd rather be a whale that curates gold than one who upvotes everything!
As for tags, you can put your content under any tag you want. If you want your topic to be supercalifragilisticexpialidocious go for it! You might not get readers though, so even if all the lotteries were tagged "lottery" people wouldn't see them outside of the brief time they spend in "new".
Yeah, I'm avoiding them like the plague. If there were some sticky categories on the main page, people might use them more.
Sticky categories sounds like a great idea ... I don't know how to pose that to the devs though.
My suggestions would be
#help
#introduceyourself
#steemit
And possibly a way to customize what sticks on your own personal sidebar
Very interesting info. I actually watched a youtube video regarding auto voting just yesterday while sitting at a Starbucks. I set it up and am auto voting three writers that I really like and would upvote anyhow. I'm just getting going here on Steemit and trying to figure it all out.
Doesn't benefit you financially to up-vote blindly what those authors you like post. You have to be a whale to make any money up-voting. And doesn't help those writers get better if you up-vote what they write automatically.
Got to take the good with the bad. That's just the nature of the game.
Hey for any sort of medium there are ups and downs of them.Hanging on for longer time will give experience on makeing utility out of the medium.Hope new steemers get a good beginning