I think we all like to have someone to engage with here on steemit. It also just nice to have a friend to bash the zombies found on this platform and to build a community. While I don’t intend at this time to game with the people I choose to engage with. It certainly is a nice metaphor to think about with how steemit is. It really can be a zombie-like game where there are those that work together to make it and find a cure or those that die along the way. The cure in my eyes is community and engagement.

The other day I reached out to @paulag in wanting to help out with an amazing thing she working on. She wants to reduce turnover rates and increase retention rates by engaging! An excellent idea and since I’m mostly focused on gaming these days I ask if she would be so kind to provide a list of names. She was very kind in doing so.

Of the 197 names, she gave me I did look them over. For the most part, I did not engage with many as my first step was just exploring what I have and work with and where I want to go from there. I’m hoping by Sunday to get around to a few of the people on the list in engaging with them.

There some reasons why I won’t be trying to engage with all of them. I was not aware plagiarism and socket puppet accounts was such a huge issue in the gaming tag until trying to get more involved myself. So things have been very slow going when I have found the time having to try and work that out. I’ve not done much engaging directly on steemit but I have been using other resources when I find something of note.

My Finds

Some people I really want engage with and others not so much from this list. I go over some of my findings as I explored quite a few different users’ categories. I know not the best approach to already start labeling people but I have to try and make some sense of the data and just how much I have to work with.

First the not so great. I knew it was happening on Steemit. I just did not know gaming particular has a lot of issues with it as I found out with having some conversions with some people who run into this issue a lot . So far at least only two were flat out found to have copy/paste off wiki or stealing content from Facebook of all places among other things. Which makes me a bit sad when something looks like a lot of effort went into it and someone else is acting like it's their own work. With many others, I might suspect of doing the same. More than expected effort will have to go into keeping careful of these things. I rather invest time and energy in people trying their hardest that fit into the narrow focus that created this list of users.

Some others when I quickly looked into it had odd things going on in their wallets (sending earning to account that then sent to another and another in some kind of strange chain.) I should have taken better notes than I did as I did not seem to write those that had this strange behavior. I just don’t care for anything that looks like a sock puppet account. Perhaps their reason why things are happening like that and I just don’t understand.

If I recall 3 where already discovered and two have joined a community I had in mind prior to me getting this list so there where at least people on the list that are doing amazing work. I think having a community behind you and wanting to stay engaged in that why are best approaches for something like this. They were providing some screenshots and explaining things in a way that you could tell they had passion. I love seeing the passion in writing.

I did share several blogs on that list of people in several different places depending on what it was. What is a decent post is certainly something hard to describe. Not much came of it but that was expected as I’m still trying work out things on my end as well. As the standard for quality can be rather high for many. I personally think it’s hard to bring high quality with only a few words or images for a tag like gaming. Things can get rather long and detailed very fast. There are some tags that do really well with less is more sometimes you just need more.

I also directed I think a couple of people on that list of other things they might want to get involved in. Least I think I did for this list or I’m getting confused with another. I do have a few things I’m working on and places I support.

22 appear to be non-English speaking. Will I try and engage them at some point? I have no idea. I always feel bad there a language barrier. I could try to get around that but the quality of the conversion will be lacking trying to trust a translating site. So sometimes it's best to just not.

94 where producing gaming content for dlive/dtube or sharing YouTube videos. Most of them were earning next to nothing and while I was tempted to least give small upvotes to push them over earning threshold. I have no idea if that content was originally theirs or not. Video theft is a massive issue. It's also time-consuming trying to engage with such content so I’m still thinking how I can approach those. They did not provide enough text in the body of the blog to be something that was being looked for. I was hoping they least have some written gaming content. For the most part, many just seem focused on video format. That is at great they least found what they want to do here.

This week I at least want to get around to the 27 or so that no longer seem interesting in gaming content. Those should be rather straightforward with just engaging with them since I don’t have to look into things too much. Many if I recall got into memes. So I might get a few laughs out of the deal! I also have a place to share anything funny too (least I think that person is still looking for funny content.)

9 appeared inactive and I should be getting around to those as well. I got my own inactive I’ve been checking up on and I’ll just include their names on the bottom of that.

There’s 28 I want work with in some form or another. I’ve reached out to a couple of places still waiting to see what can be done. I’m hoping some encouragement could go a long way and I’m hoping on Thursday if not today to get around to some of those. I think they are already creating great content and just need a little more put into their posts and they could go far. I can see it hard in wanting to spend hours or more on a single post when you are not earning anything at all. It’s that issue of trying to find a balance between reward and amount of effort put into something.

On top of that another 18 I’m more confused than anything in what they wanted to do here. I don’t know if they are just not putting much effort at all into things as they are still having a trust issue/understand of this place or what. Otherwise one, for instance, looks like he was trying set up some kind of betting/game/ I don’t have a clue. I didn’t look too much into it. I’m not into gambling so I’ll pass.

4 Where already earning decent rewards from other communities or bidboting for the quality of content they are already producing. If it looks like someone is already has a place to keep them around I’m really not needed. As far as people trying to find shortcuts. Well, I don’t want to be their shortcut.

Naturally, this does not add up to 197! Even more so since many are crossover in my notes as I just used the “find next” to count. Some fell into other categories that I simply don’t wish to discuss. Such as “wtf” among other things. This is quite a heavy list and I would like to make a couple of meaningful impacts on giving back. Since so many have been very kind on my adventure so far on steemit. This simply means picking my battles and doing the best I can. I don’t want to burn out on doing something like this like many has in the past. My own passion, dedication, and hard work here on steemit have given me certain opportunities and I very much would like to see it grow and others are able to enjoy it as well. We can all help make steemit a better place.

Side Note

I’ve also learned I need to take better notes. As I need to back to a few of these and leave myself a better reminder. I did not use the best descriptions when trying to identify people I wanted to make sure I would get around to at a later date. I did not get around to what I wanted over last week. I’m hoping upcoming days I can make more time.

Information

I very rarely turn things I intended for comments into blogs. This one was, however, getting way too long. While this was not entirely what was being looked for this is somewhat of my response to Let’s Grow Steemit Together - Direct Engagement Experiment Week #2. I also did not want to take away from the conversion that is going on over there with this giant wall of text as a comment as it is a little different than what is being expected.

Screenshots taken by @enjar from a game called State of Decay 2