IS HAVING MORE FOLLOWERS ALWAYS A GOOD THING?

Like almost everyone on Steemit, until very recently, I thought more followers was all good.

In fact I thought that if I gained enough followers I would become a sort of Steemit guru, and that I would then get hundreds of upvotes and earn thousands of dollars.

So essentially I was just like half of Bangladesh and I might as well have started posting those “Nice Post, Follow me and I’ll follow you back” comments

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Over the past two weeks a couple of things have made me rethink that.

When I started out on Steemit over a year ago, I aspired to gain 666 followers. In fact I even long ago phototoshopped the fake header with 666 followers that I still use as my signature. Now I have nearly 777 followers, which is pretty cool.

What used to happen is that I built up personal relationships with a lot of like minded people on Steemit. We became friends, we read each others posts and commented on them. And if I thought someone was a dickhead, I didn’t follow them.

I never followed anyone to gain followers myself, or to make money though curation, or to gain power or influence. In fact I naively thought that all following was about, was getting a feed with what I wanted to see on it.

But then it slowly dawned on me that each time I did a post about some of the sort of stuff I often do, namely conspiracies or satire, a bunch of people unfollowed me. My photography and general interest posts mostly didn’t have that effect.

The people unfollowing me were mostly new Steemers who I wouldn’t know from a bar of soap. In some cases they were neither like minded, nor were they ever likely to become my Steemit friends. I don’t follow them, and I have no idea why they started following me.

That is all fine, until they start freaking out about my posts, flagging and posting angry comments.

When I originally chose the name @sift666 I thought I was making it pretty clear than I’m not a conformist, a Christian, or a mainstream sheeple. If Christians or sheeple want to follow me that is fine, but if they want to call me a tool of satan, yes I might amuse myself trolling them. Maybe I really am a tool of satan…

Or maybe I’m just a tool. As I say in the link on my footer, I post all sorts of stuff, and I have no idea what I’m going to post next. The main thing is that it’s always the sort of stuff I want to see myself.

Generally I prefer to avoid disagreements – sometimes I just don’t go there because I don’t really care: for example, I seldom mention religion because I’m an atheist and have no interest in it, while several of my Steemit friends have very different ideas on that, and that is fine, we can have different beliefs, Steemit is not a cult.

At the other extreme, I’m passionately anti-vax, as are most of my Steemit friends. I actually think vaxxers are worse than pedophiles, because they are also destroying children’s lives, but on a scale of millions rather than thousands of them. So I’m not going to get into polite debates with vaxxers. I’m more likely to tell them where to go. But that is not the way to change anything, so I leave that subject to the infinitely more patient and wise @canadian-coconut.

http://www.frot.co.nz/design/health/vaccination/

So the first thing I realised is that having hundreds of followers who are not actually into what I’m posting is not an asset, it’s a liability. 666 real followers would be more than enough for me.

And the second thing that got me thinking was a post by @intelliguy in which he explained why having 1500 followers doesn’t actually pay that well.

https://steemit.com/steemit/@intelliguy/got-400-followers-what-about-800-what-about-1200-followers-what-about-1500-i-can-explain

And it hit me that oddly enough my motivation for what I do on Steemit is not really payouts. I like the payouts, but my real bonus money comes from crypto investing. I’ve just made over 500% on Bitcoin investments. The payouts from my Steemit posts and comments are bugger all for the time I spend on them.

http://www.frot.co.nz/design/computing/cryptocurrency-101/

What is important to me is to be able to say what I really think. And if that costs me some followers, too bad! And I realised that I’m sometimes holding back a bit on Steemit. I let loose on my website because I don’t give a toss if it pisses people off. And that gets millions of hits but pays nothing at all.

http://www.frot.co.nz/design/

So now I’ll say up front, I not only think vaxxers are worse than pedophiles, I also think that every "terrorist" attack this century is a false flag, that nuclear bombs are a con job and don’t actually exist, that man made climate change is another massive scam, that “flat earth” is a moronic load of bullshit, that the entire mainstream health industry is a plot to make people sick and profit from them, that the "moon landing" is nearly as moronic as flat earth, and I hold at least another dozen opinions that totally freak the sheeple out.

And bugger it, maybe it’s time I stopped trying so hard to conform and just said what I really think.

http://www.frot.co.nz/design/sift/conspiracies/

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