Greed on Steemit from a minnow's perspective
So I happened to notice someone I was following doing something on pretty much every single post over the last couple of days that really got under my skin. To the point that I ended up unfollowing them over it. And the person was actually posting some really good content. And getting good rewards for their posts ($100+ per post consistently, often several hundred dollars per post). But then they started adding a comment to every post they made giving links to their previous posts. You know, something that pretty much everyone else actually puts as part of their post. Why this bothers me? Well this person is pulling in some fairly decent rewards for their own posts without doing this. Apparently they aren't content with that. They are upvoting every single post they make. They then proceed to turn around and post one of the first comments to their own post (not in response to others, just links to their other posts). AND they're liking their comment every single time as well. So not only are they getting paid for writing the post, they're getting rewarded for curating it as well. On every single post they make. And they never seem to resteem anyone else's stuff. To me this just reeks of abusing the system and greed. And they're being rewarded for it by their followers. I get that they're being smart about maximizing their own rewards and that some of you may not have a problem with it. But as a newbie minnow, watching the people with thousands of followers gaming the system like this, instead of giving back to the community, AND getting rewarded for it, is kind of aggravating. Is that really the kind of behavior we want to be rewarding in the Steemit community? I get that most of us are here in some form or fashion because of the money. But having popular members hoarding the rewards like this, isn't healthy for the platform. I may not have much influence on my own, but I refuse to participate in rewarding someone who isn't contributing back to the community. The platform isn't going to grow if the rewards are being hoarded. Isn't it better to spread the rewards around, helping to grow the community, because it actually means more money for everyone in the long run? Like more members of the community is going to translate into more followers for people posting quality content, which is going to equal more money per post in the long term, right? So wouldn't it behoove all of us to actually be trying to spread the rewards around to entice people into staying on the platform and drawing in new members via their friends, family, and social networks? Seems a bit short sighted to me. But then, what do I know, I'm just a newbie minnow.
Yeah, I do see that, and honestly it made me mad, but hey, there are always those at the top who do what they want with there power. when me or you get to the top and people flood this site, we can make change, and give back. Lets learn from there mistakes.
I would't really say it made me mad. But it definitely made me not want to contribute to rewarding that person anymore, despite them posting some pretty good quality content. And if they were even doing something as simple as resteeming other people's posts, it wouldn't have bothered me as bad. Just seems like they're taking from the community but not giving anything back.
I've been seeing a few similar things my short time here so far- I think if you've got above a certain threshold of influence or steem power it shouldn't count when you use it on yourself- if you want to pay to promote your posts, but upvotes should be used to support others not yourself
I agree. I'm hoping that this is an exploitation that gets addressed before steemit leaves beta.
Me too- unfortunately I think the bigger problem is the people reposting 150 copy/pasted Wikipedia articles. Just adding noise and trying to work the system that way. It's becoming super hard to find people who actually have something to say !
I've actually only come across one copy paste, and it was a CNN article.
I can understand posting news articles from some other site, at least to some extent. It's that they don't write anything to go along with it that I find disingenuous. And when they post 10-20 of these a day, to me it's just spamming the system.
Right like I can see linking to an article and then maybe giving your opinion or discussing it. But just to post the news article does seem a bit disingenuous.
Oh goodness I found someone copying literally the entire encyclopedia cubject by subject 😑
Oh good grief. Hopefully they weren't getting rewarded for it.
I am new to steemit.com myself and noticed these same things. I am hoping that since this site seems to still be in beta that they will figure out to minimize the payout for self votes and other things but we should pass feedback to somewhere.
I have been trying to catch posts that talk about habits on steemit, do's and don'ts, and how to do better and i feel your post did that for me. I appreciate your post and will follow you for it :) good luck
Thanks! And welcome to the site. I checked out your profile (? is that even what it's called here?) and saw you are into cryptocurrency stuff which is still a foreign language to me. I gave you a follow. Maybe I'll learn something from you lol
Yeah, totally happy to try and help explain it :) i've been involved with bitcoin since 2013 so feel i have gone through some of the craziest ups and downs (hopefully no more crazy downs like at the end of 2013, yikes). I trade it, mine it, and use it when i can :) I'm gonna try to post a few posts a day but still need to learn how to post video's.
For posting videos, you can upload the video to youtube and then put the link to it in your post. It seems the most common way that videos get posted on here.
Thank you. i did that finally and now posted my first two video's to youtube of my electric car on my blog. Sorry, don't mean to try and advertise on your post, just want to state i finally learned. Thanks for the help :)
No problem, I'm glad you got it figured out.
I've tried reading up on cryptocurrencies but it's still mostly just a bunch of technobabble that goes over my head lol
Well the fact that you are trying to learn means you are already ahead of most people around the country. We are in an exciting time and it will only get better. I won't claim to know everything, but i definitely have learned a lot of what not to do... sometimes.