My own stock photo!

As a curator nowadays, I figured how difficult for me to "itemize" and "categorize" spam. Three types of investor in Steem platform, we can safely categorize them as content creator, passive investor, and the last categorize has a little bit of both. Let's grind down to SPAM.

What does SPAM means to curator? I have hard time to tell which is spam, which is genuine, which is serious work, and which is low quality spam post. Initial two weeks, I'm having hard time to make up my numbers. Often I felt frustrated for not being able to give upvotes, partly due to below few reasons.

General spam

Generally, these people does generic post. Photos from everywhere else with or without credit and source. Worst is, I couldn't tell if it's genuine if it's not the language that I understand. No upvote.

Cheap spam

This, is an upfront declined in my book. When you have less than 50 words to describe, I find it hard to convince any curator that the photo in the post is worthy. Can't you atleast spell what camera did you use and why that photo? What do you want your viewer see in it? Come on man, my question worth more words than you can describe?

Stacker spam

There's always this kind of smarter than usual people, know how exactly to cheat the system. I've seen 600 words worth of footer in a post, and the only thing genuinely new is the date and time. "Hi, today is last day of March." followed by a repeated words and footer all the posts from the past 50 years(no I'm kidding, Steem just celebrated it's 3rd birthday recently).

Coffee and pasta

In my home country, we speak in Bahasa. Coffee is called KOPI. So happened it pronounce the same as "copy". Hence, our local fellas like to call copy and paste as "kopi pasta", that makes a perfect meal. But in Steem blockchain, those who practice kopi pasta will get cheetah - "cheater".

Back to basic. What I finally realized is, we can't stop people from doing whatever kind of spam they like. I am spamming the blockchain now, on a daily basis. It really depending on what the readers want. I learn to engage, teach, communicate.

There is a set of guidelines curator need to follow, but they're guidelines! Not law. Sometimes we will just have to accept the fact of who they are. We can't expect everyday see wall of text from every posts. If there's a rule saying word count must be 250, and need to have atleast 2 genuine photos, then the entire blockchain will be filled with one kind of minime. I am not tolerating or lowering my curation standard. In the end, this is a social media platform, there is all kinds of content being spamming in and out every minute everyday. Trust me, I upvoted one post that is really low word count, but the photo in the post really bring tears to my eyes. I make an upvote, left a comment to the author, guess what? The next time I see more words and description from the author.

It doesn't matter how much more spam coming in. They're the good stuff. They're trial and error. They have newbies who throwing in thousands of posts everyday. They may not be all genuine, but we must learn to accept, endure, liberate with them. In the end, communication is the most important part, upvote is just a gesture of gratitude. Don't get me wrong, they're equally important! Try to leave generic comments and not upvoting the post? You'll probably get reported as comment SPAM. ROTFFLMFAO

Let us all find the good SPAM, cook them together and create a good blockchain.