How Unnecessary People Affect Steem

As a reader, writer, and curator on steemit.com, I peruse a lot of articles. I've seen some very interesting things and recently there has been a lot of unnecessary articles (aka spam). After investigating, I saw some articles talking about people trying to get money and make a living as a steem writer and how some of them have had very disappointing results. I believe this may be due to all the people who have been made unnecessary (the unnecessariat) through automation. It's as though they are trying desperately to make money doing anything, so they try their hand at writing on steem, uploading youtube videos, etc.

What they fail to realize is that nobody wants to read what they write, so instead of writing something interesting, they try to game the system to make it look like they have a lot of followers, have written a lot of articles, etc. They use catchy headlines like "10 things every cat lover should know" and when you read the article, it's just a big waste of time.

So without further ado, I will explain to these people how to get with the program. If you encounter one of them, please send them to this article so they can learn and help make steem great. I will give 3 perspectives of the people who will read these articles: readers, professional writers, and curators.

A Reader's Perspective

As a reader, I like to get my information as efficiently as possible and then move on. Many of the articles written for steem could be reduced to one sentence, but instead they are dragged out to 300+ words and mostly contain boring writing. Multiply this by 10,000 articles and steem can be a real pain to read and highly inefficient. Please don't waste everyone's time with bloated writing, click-bait, self-promotions, etc.

I also like to have my information be relevant to a topic I'm interested in. When I click on "science" and find an article about fashion, it wastes my time. This comes down to proper tagging of articles. Your tags need to match what your intended audience is searching for.

I tend to only follow good writers that write about my topics of interest. I don't care if you're the best sports writer in the world, I'm not following you because I'm not interested in sports... so putting "science" as a tag on a sports article will probably not avail you.

A writer's perspective

I use steem to communicate thoughts and ideas that I think other people might be interested in. I can't do that if my writings are drowned out by noise. If you write 500 useless articles about crypto-this or crypto-that so that you can generate hits and maximize your revenue, it takes readers' eyes off mine and 499 other people's useful articles and bores that reader and they get discouraged. You're effectively sabotaging yourself and every other writer on steem.

A Curator's Perspective

Imagine being an English teacher that has to read 100 300-word-essays that students wrote as an assignment. That's what it's like to be a curator on steem when people write stuff that nobody wants to read. Ask yourself if you would be interested in your writing if the situation was reversed. If not, then go back to the drawing board. I can assure you that all it takes is one long, boring essay and nobody will follow you.

Conclusion

Stop trying to make money and get rich quick on steem. You'll find your niche, if it isn't writing. Consider your audience and peers; realize that you need both to be successful on steem. This isn't a competition, it's a cooperative. If we all write awesome, interesting articles, we all get paid and have interesting, awesome articles to read. If we all write useless click-bait, nobody gets paid and nobody gets read.