Hello steemians, I'm @sqamemal aka xXxDankMemeLordxXx.

I've been on steemit for well over four months now but had never done an intro post so decided to give it a try. However, this intro post is going to be quite different. I want to share my experience with the steemit platform that I've been exploiting to make money, in the form of steem.

source:https://www.orange.k12.nj.us/Page/15002

The not-so humble beginning:

When I first joined in March, I was looking for tags and topics that I can relate to so that I can post about them. I found the 'meme' tag and was really excited because that's one of the things I enjoy looking at and creating. My first few posts were just a meme with no context or additional caption. Those posts were getting a few upvotes but that was mostly by minnows like me. Some posts made 0.1 to 0.2 dollars in total, while most made nothing at all. I was disappointed, but did not give up. I tried exploring the community and other posts to find how other people increase their follower count, gain reputation and how their posts make a lot more money than mine did.

Finding a gold mine:

I found a post about the minnowsupport project and decided to make a discord account to avail its free upvotes. After using it a few times, I realized that I had found a gold mine. I would post a meme daily and make minnowsupportproject upvote it after a few hours. After 12 hours, I would then use the bot to upvote a low-effort comment I would make on a random post. That way, I was making almost 0.5 SBD and 0.5 SP everyday. I could not sustain this for long because once the summer break was over, college and assignments became of higher priority and I was only able to use the bot once daily.

Interacting with other steemians:

Because I had to comment at least once or twice a day so that I could use the msp bot to upvote it, I was unintentionally getting into conversations with great authors. Some of them would even upvote my replies which would result in an additional income of 0.1 - 0.7 SBD and SP (the prices were very similar 3 months ago). Eventually, I kinda felt guilty using msp to upvote those comments, to me it was a sign of disrespect towards the author of the post I would comment on. So I stopped using the msp bot to upvote my own comments.

Stumbling upon abuse:

While using the upvote channel of the PAL discord server, I would occasionally read other posts and upvote them. I found that some people's posts would be upvoted by msp through someone else's discord account. I thought that it was a kind gesture by another steemian. After digging deeper, I found that that steemian had created several discord accounts to exploit msp's time restraint of 12 hours. I reported it to the PAL mods and they were quick to take action. @gmuxx and @sammosk, mods of PAL, even gave me some SBD as a token of their appreciation.

proof-of-transfer (learnt this from @papa-pepper)

I was motivated to find and report more abuse but then something struck me.
It was the first time I thought about my actions on steemit, I was being a hypocritical cop, posting memes taken from reddit and 4chan just to make some free money, while reporting cases of abuse on the same platform. Somehow, I didn't let that thought haunt me for too long and continued plagiarizing and reporting others. I eventually, discovered other forms of spam and abuse and reported those to steemcleaners.

It felt really good, it felt like I was compensating for my shitposts by doing a few good deeds but without stopping the my own bad deeds. To make things worse, I also began using randowhale, bellyrub, minnowbooster, and treeplanter to increase my post payouts.

A few weeks later, I saw @sherlockholmes and some of his posts and was really inspired by his work. Simultaneously, I felt really guilty for plagiarizing content. I kept telling my self that what I was doing is nowhere close to how other steemians were abusing the platform. I seriously decided to change at that time but it was not until this week that I actually stopped shitposting memes.

Moving forward:

So that was a gist of my * negative * experience on steemit. Moving forward, I won't be posting as often. I will still be posting memes because after all, I'm xXxDankMemeLordxXx but I will be the original creator of those memes. If you go through my blog, you'll see a few resteems of games and contests that I take part in on steemit. I will continue to play these. Additionally, I will also continue to help fight spam and abuse by helping @steemcleaners and @sherlockholmes as much as I can.
Did I tell you that I'm also a programmer? I've recently been experimenting with the steem-python library and trying to create an application or bot. So, if you see some random comments and self-votes on my steemd page then please don't panic and doubt my intentions (I'm looking at you, @sherlockholmes).

On a side note, I'm going to need some help with python and my experiments, so if there's anyone who can help me, pm me on steemit.chat or discord.

tl;dr: I plagiarized and now I feel guilty and have since stopped doing it, trying to do something better for the community now.

On another side note, steem is cheap now, buy it: