Is Steemit ‘Pay to Play’?

Forgive me if this post comes across as idealistic, I’ve got my own thoughts and feelings on this but I’m curious to know what the people I interact with think about this one. Just genuine, honest feedback.

Because I can't have a post with ZERO images!

Steemit has been fantastic for me this year, it’s motivated me to write more than ever before, to shoot with a renewed vigour even when I’m not on a paid job and, most of all I’ve met some incredible people along the way. People who have upvoted, commented and resteemed my work but most importantly people who have taken a genuine interest in my posts. I immediately click on posts by @schmidthappens – a fascinating guy who has taken some incredible photos around the world, mostly on a smartphone - and @ilanaakoundi – whom my wife and I both love following, one of the most genuine Steemians we’ve had the fortune of meeting who always takes the time to post meaningful comments as well as her own incredible adventures. There’s influencers like @markangeltrueman – who was one of the first influential Steemians to drop me a message of encouragement and support – and @eveuncovered – who has her own huge audience yet still takes the time to read up on my photography articles and help out other Steemians. There’s a whole host of people well above me in the Steemit hierarchy who have taken the time to support a newbie like myself.

Honestly, there’s far too many Steemians to list here, but for me that has been what’s really kept me going with Steemit.
I was chatting to another of my ‘Steemit Besties’ (To steal his own term!) @aussieninja recently. Adam epitomises everything I love about Steemit. We’re all a part of something that by all accounts is still in it’s early stages, yet somehow, within a week or two of joining Steemit I’m chatting away to a fellow photography enthusiast who just so happens to have competed on Ninja Warrior just like myself. Seriously, what are the odds? Anyway we were talking about the various curation accounts on Steemit and got onto the subject of paid upvotes.

When I first joined Steemit I had comments from bid-bots and similar accounts and was aware that, should I save up a little SBD, I could pay for some upvotes. Honestly at the time I didn’t know much about what it all meant, so I carried on doing things the way I thought they ‘should’ be done. I assumed that, given the public nature of ones wallet and upvotes, that paid upvotes would be frowned upon. After all, doesn’t it defeat the whole purpose of the rewards based nature of Steemit?

I’ve not been without success on Steemit up to now, I’ve been lucky enough to have a couple of posts upvoted by curation accounts and I’ve woken up to see one of my posts at the top of the trending page. A pretty special experience after you’ve slogged away at a 2000+ word article. I’ve gone from 0 all the way to nearly 400 followers in a month and a half and I’ve got my reputation all the way up to 54. I was stoked!

Then another article popped up by an account I follow. The user posts great images, not too many articles, but had amassed over 1000 followers in less than a month. His reputation was well above my own and Steem Power through the roof for such a new account. Then the seed was planted in my head, is the whole system rigged if you don’t want to ‘play’ the game?

I don’t want this to sound at all bitter, I’ve got massive respect for anyone that really commits to the platform, and success is success, I can’t argue with that! I’m really writing this to see what everyone thinks about Voting bots?

Let’s set aside the other inequalities of the trending page for a moment. Yes, I know there are people constantly on the trending page who essentially own their own whales, that’s not what I’m talking about here. I don’t feel like the ‘we should pay for upvotes to level the playing field with those guys’ excuse really holds much water here. After all, if we ALL paid for upvotes the playing field might be levelled, but the only people that really profit are the upvote bots right?
Personally, I’ve always felt that Steemit was a platform that rewards good content. So the idea of writing 3-4 big articles a week, at 2000-4000 words a pop was fine by me, even if it was more than I’d written for my University Dissertation! The problem is I’ve also come to realise that my big articles go one way or another, they do well, get noticed and occasionally curated by some influencers. About 70% of the time they slip by, curation accounts can’t afford to give away many votes, especially not on the same people! In fact most of the time I’d be better off posting an image, with a few good tags and a short description.

On the other hand what I am doing is building a following, people who aren’t just jumping on a bandwagon because I’ve paid to be on the trending page. You see I feel like I’ve seen this whole ‘buying votes’ thing before with Facebook business pages and Instagram. For years we worked away at our social media following (when I say we I mean the business I run with my wife) with little impact, struggling to be seen on a platform with literally millions of other images every single day. Then, over time we did start to get noticed. We never got instafamous or anything, but we got a good solid following of nearly 10 thousand followers. A number that still sounds absurd to me.

At the same time we saw friends and competitors skip the hard work phase by paying for followers. Sure enough after a month or two they were in the 5 digits. The problem was those followers didn’t care about the posts. Unless a post was promoted it got as many likes as if they had just a few hundred followers, essentially all of those ‘paid votes’ were empty. And I can’t help but think that’s what we’re seeing here on Steemit.

While paying for votes may be acceptable I wonder how long it will go on for. Personally I tend to unfollow someone when I notice they are paying for all of their upvotes, it still just doesn’t sit quite right with me and I feel it cheapens the time and effort the rest of us put in. But maybe I am way off base here, maybe I’m just being old fashioned.

So, my Steemian friends, what do you guys think? Where does it all go and what is ‘acceptable’ in your eyes? Am I missing a trick by being so righteous about ‘rules’ that don’t even exist, or do you think the masses will start to rebel against those who use paid votes to ‘game’ the system?

-Chris