#original-content - My story on steemit, Bots and Community

Hello everyone.

For a matter of privacy I will keep my true identity hidden, but you do not need to know who I am to understand what you're about to read.

I have created my account on steemit the last month. I looked at steemit as some sort of blogger, where I could post and advertise content much like any other social platform on the web. I was dead wrong.

As you can see by my post history, I have been posting news from various crypto news websites. This is because it is what I do. What I have learned in my years of working for advertisement agencies and for companies dedicated to creating content to generate views and subscribers.

It was not with a bad intention that I did this, but when I looked at my steemit feed and only saw posts that were clearly automated or advertising things on other platforms, I tought it was common behaviour on this platform...

At first I was happy posting these news. I had a bot running that posted the most recent news from different websites, I was slowly upgrading my bot to have better content and better links as well as disclaimers (it was never my intention to pretend to be posting original content, I only wanted to advertise the content) and I was making small amounts of money from it (my best post was only worth 8$ tops) which was more than enough to encourage me to keep posting.

It was only after a week of posting that I started noticing that my posts kept being greyed out, one by one, and I was loosing revenue on them (not that it mattered to me, I was only making 1 cent on each of them). I noticed that a bot called @steemcleaners had been downvoting my content, flagging it, based on the behaviour of @cheetahbot.

At first I was pissed at this - I tought some kind of Digital Mafia was trying to mess with me because I started making 1 or 2 cents per post. I checked steemit's ToS and there was nothing disaproving my actions and the content I was posting, so why was I getting flagged?

I got in contact with a member of @steemcleaners, called @guiltyparties, that was actually a really nice guy. He explained to me that the community of steemit frowns upon what they consider "spam" or "plagiorism" - basically any content that does not come directly from steemit should not be in steemit. He explained to me that I can contribute in other ways, and proposed that I should invest my time in the project @utopian-io with my software developing skills.

I thank him dearly for this advice, and I feel like I will contribute towards @utopian-io in due time, as well as trying to provide original content from different hobbies and areas I have knowledge in.

However, this isn't a post just to thank others for their actions towards me or my bot, or even to show how I learned from my mistakes. Instead, this is an appeal to Steemit and its creators that something needs to change.

@Cheetahbot is not perfect. I have seen it linking towards certain news it believed to be the original based on google results, when in reality the original news came from different medias. I tried downvoting this bot and replied with the correct link, only to be met with a certain feel of disgust, when I noticed that not only was @cheetahbot's comment worth more than my entire post, it was also earned on the fact that it linked to the wrong website. On top of that, my downvote was meaningless, because soon after I had downvoted the @cheetahbot's comment, his comment got upvoted by a secondary account belonging to the creator of @cheetahbot called @seraph.

@Seraph claims to exist to upvote comments and posts that were wrongfully downvoted, but lets be honest - there's no way @seraph could possibly be such an advanced bot that would know when to or when not to upvote "wrongfully downvoted content". Its sole existance relies on it upvoting content that was downvote from one of its "parent" or "sister" accounts, just like @cheetahbot. The whole existance of @steemcleaners, @cheetahbot, @seraph and others based on downvoting and punishing other "bots" gives the entire website a feel of control. The lack of control imposed by the creators of steemit gave space for these "private police", that were clearly created with good intent, but now feel like they are used wrongfully for their own personal gains.

I feel like the community of steemit should come together to better curate steemit as a platform. This means that a lot of things would need to change in this website.

First off, the feed of news should be better organized. Tags alone do not allow for a good enough navigation. People should be able to point out what topics they are more interested in, and receive only posts about those topics.

Secondly, the upvote and downvote of the posts should be left entirely to the community, and not to bots. That means stripping bots of their ability to post comments and upvotes/downvotes, as well as their ability to post content on itself, like my bot was doing, to stop this exploit.

My last suggestion is that Steemit should improve upon its ToS and its community guidelines, to better guide new accounts. As anyone can guess, I would never have known that bot posting was frowned upon in only a couple weeks of using steemit until I was stopped by @steemcleaners.

I'm not posting this out of "spite" of having been stopped by @steemcleaners. If I really wanted to, I could keep creating other accounts until I found a way to bypass the @cheetahbot. I genuinely wish to grow with Steemit, and i hope Steemit keeps getting improved upon and becomes a better place for original content.

Have a good one, Steemit, and I hope we both grow from this.