The tough part in regards to Steemit from the perspective of a new author is gaining exposure while wading through the shit pond of garbage posts in order to gain a following. There are so many junk articles out there it can be off putting to find your solid effort in writing an engaging and detailed post swallowed by a sea of bullshit articles consisting of regurgitated links and unoriginal thought that are for all intents and purposes spam.

I find it particularly frustrating when the aforementioned bullshit articles are nothing more than an aggregation of links copied and pasted from various sources such as Google news on a topic. It reminds me of Magpie, the old content aggregation code that we would use to vomit key word relevant articles into a feed on a site in order to move of the SERP and game the Adsense system.

This unfortunately creates a situation where talented authors or those that have the requisite grey matter between their ears to write solid content must debase their character and engage in link spamming comments or whale posts in the hopes of getting some love.

I’m not quite sure what the solution to this issue is. Perhaps a category of up and coming should be created where new authors are featured based upon a ratio of positive feedback relative to posts; though even that would not work as it again fails to address the issue of initial exposure in order to gain the needed positive feedback. Perhaps a metric needs to be applied to number of words vs. links, or number of words total. Longer more engaging articles would receive a multiplier based on the likelihood of them containing good content. Whereas posts of aggregated links would receive a penalty as they likely contain nothing of substance.

This may even address what I as a new user have come to see as “lazy whale syndrome”.. I’m a whale, I made it.. I’m just going to post articles full of links with the mentality that the legion of dung beetles following me will upvote in the hopes of gaining curation manna the turd I just produced.

I’m not sure what the actual solution is so I’ll just keep lurking in the shadows ambushing whale articles with link spam until I’m all grown up and can venture out on my own.