Steemit's Single Biggest Threat

For a little over two months I have been on Steemit.

In that short amount of time I have come to love the platform and have met some amazing people to share that love with.

In my opinion Steemit is precisely the right tool for the transitional period we are in.

There are many changes happening simultaneously in these exciting times we’re living in. Our current economic system is based on labour, oil and debt. All of which are in the end of their life cycle. We are going towards a free energy economy, where robotics replace most of the work force. A system where human value is not merely determined by working hours but much more by how much people affect and interact with each other, what their footprint on society is.

Debt will be replaced by a Universal Basic Income based on crypto currency. After all, in order for people to keep buying all that stuff robots are going to produce, people are gonna need some kind of money.

And Steemit is smack in the middle of all these developments. Steemit can be a platform for human creativity & interaction, a crypto currency and a Universal Basic Income all in one. On the other hand, it could be gone in a few years. It’s up to us to if Steemit becomes the next big thing or not. We can either make or break it, depending on the choices we make and how we choose to develop this amazing platform.

Since I came here I have heard the following two complaints over and over again.

1. Most of the Steempower is in the hands of a small group of whales.
2. Voting bots are bad and drain the reward pool.

Curiously enough, I hardly hear people complaining about what is in my opinion the biggest problem Steemit currently has, the alarming rise in content farms, plagiarisers and abusers.

But let me start by explaining why Voting Bots are a good thing and why we should count ourselves lucky that the majority of the Steempower still rests with a small group of dedicated Steemians.

We all want Steemit to be a platform where people are rewarded for posting quality content. In order to attract serious content creators, Steemit has to provide a profitable model for content creation or they won’t bother to put the time and effort in to keep making great posts.

And that’s where Voting Bots come in.

They allow content creators to add value to their own posts and gain exposure at the same time. Brilliant right? A profitable voting service in theory leads to more authors, better content and an increase in new Steemit users. And there is another huge benefit to Voting Bots for Steemit as a whole. They actually create a mini-economy within Steemit where users set their SBD to work, making Steem the only crypto that is used as an actual currency.

As far as I know there is only one established voting service that gives you a guaranteed profitable upvote and that is Minnowbooster.

When I started using Minnowbooster they gave a 2.75 upvote for every 1 SBD send. Amazing right, I invested 1 SBD and after 7 days and curation I had 1.05 SBD and some Steempower to boot. Of course these 1.05 went straight back in my new posts and 7 days later I had 1.125 SBD and even more steempower.

My enthousiasm went through the roof. What a concept, In the difficult start that I am sure every new user goes through, Minnowbooster was just the incentive I needed to keep posting my work and actually allowed me a means to build my account.

And I was not the only one who noticed. Between the avalanche of new accounts there were many users who used Minnowbooster heavily to upvote their posts. The difference was that a lot of them posted many posts per day and that their posts were for the large part just plain shit. Single pics, non-sensical text, in short posts without value and clearly made without effort or purpose.

Many of those new Minnowbooster users were from countries like Bangladesh, Myanmar, Pakistan and other third world countries. Which makes sense, because where a few SBD might be spare change to you and me, it’s a day’s income in many other parts of the world. I noticed that many of these new users used similar formats for posting and that many seemed to be working in groups. I grinned thinking about 3rd world sweat shops, producing content instead of 3$ t-shirts.

But I didn’t grin for long.

I found it harder and harder to get a decent vote through at Minnowbooster. The only way to get my upvotes seemed to be to make a lot of smaller transactions. So I started making only 10, 5 or even 1 cent upvotes, which meant much more transactions.

And then I got black listed.

Apparently Minnowbooster was flooded with automated requests by bots who were buying up all the upvotes. No wonder my votes didn’t come through. It turned out that my repeated attempts for an upvote triggered a bot Minnowbooster made to weed out bot requests. This was fortunately only a temporarily inconvenience, as the Minnowbooster staff were quick to acknowledge my blacklisting was undeserved and lifted it after taking a good look at my account.

But from that moment I realised that abusing voting services for the sake of upvoting alone is Steemit’s biggest threat and I decided to do something about it.

Abusers, scammers, plagiarisers and vote-farms are the ones that drain the reward pool, because they don’t invest back in the platform and they reduce profitability. Even worse, the content they create is of low to none quality and this reflects on Steemit as a whole. It makes good content harder to find, browsing less fun and in the longer run will demotivate serious authors from posting quality content on a regular basis.

In the 2nd part of this post I will share some of my ideas on how to deal with abusers and I wiil explain that when it comes to fighting abuse it is a good thing that a few whales still own most Steempower.

If enough of us dedicated Steemians take abuse seriously, we can solve these issues and make Steemit stronger by tackling them. We are all early adopters, we are all the new 1%. But we also all have to take responsibility and do our part for this platform.

If you appreciate my thoughts, please upvote, resteem and follow me for part 2 of this post.

If you like the cartoon art in this post please check @news-today or @elohibaluk for more.