I discovered steemit yesterday after nine hours of trying to buy some bitcoin. You have no idea how hard it is to buy bitcoin if you're a U.S. citizen traveling abroad with no SIM card and no drivers' license.

Site 1: needs drivers' license
Site 2: needs drivers' license (all passports acceptable except U.S. passport)
Site 3: needs mobile phone verification, and unlike nearly every other site you have to send a text instead of just receiving one
Site 4: does not serve U.S. citizens whatsoever
Site 5: would have worked, except that my Moneygram transfer was mysteriously canceled.

But I stumbled across steemit in the process, and my first impression was: This site is great. It's like reddit, except for instead of the site profiting off the work of others, the users profit from their own efforts.

Just one day later, the site's flaws have become apparent. It's much less like reddit, and more like twitter. On reddit, no one knows who anyone else is (outside of r/AMA), so people just upvote what they think is good. No one subscribes to other users, they just subscribe to categories. Upon posting, no person begins with a better chance of getting to the top of r/aww than anyone else—their success depends upon the cuteness of their puppy.

On steemit, the popularity of a post depends almost entirely on how many followers the poster has. Of course, followers can be gained the hard way: solely through quality posting. But the number of followers you have is also a function of how many people you've followed, owing to the social pressure of "following back". This effect is insidiously amplified by the monetary involvement: Oh, you're helping me make money? Sure, I'll help you back, whatever you post.

All of the focus is on how many people you can agree to have back-scratching sessions with. I don't think the platform was intended to be this way; there are many design decisions which indicate that it was meant to be more than just another twitter. But the variables have played out in such a way that this is the reality of the current environment.

I'm seeing 200 SBD posts riddled with lazy writing, typos, and grammatical errors (the kind that can't simply be dumped into the 'descriptive linguistics' category). The common denominator of these posts is that their authors have a huge number of followers. If I may give a specific example, the user 'adsactly' posted a short story yesterday. I saw it in the 'trending' section, and, excited to read a successful piece of writing on this new media, I dived in. Aside from the numerous examples of very questionable grammatical choices, the writing is downright juvenile. For those of you who (wisely) are skeptical enough to want me to define juvenile writing: if you consider yourself a good judge of writing, just read it and you'll know what I mean. Otherwise, ask any literature enthusiast to read it and tell you what they think. But here's the key: adsactly has nearly 7k followers.

Meanwhile, any first post is going to get no attention at all—be it simply the word "meritocracy" or the next King Lear. You can see this by browsing the 'new' section. Most posts get nothing. Most of them are shitty. A few of them are very good. The posts which get upvoted, however, can either be shitty or good. It depends on the number of followers.

It is a hilariously 'rich-get-richer' situation for something so economically upending as a cryptocurrency.

The fact is that new steemit users don't face the task of producing worthwhile content, but rather the task of following as many people as possible in hopes of a followback. As someone interested in seeing the best content at the top of a site, I must move on.