RE: Steemit ponzi? Or not ponzi? I call on devs to review this post on Pinterest I found titled "The Ugly Truth Behind Steemit", most convincing argument I have seen so far calling Steemit a scam
Looks like the competitors of Steem are pushing forward their ad campaign.
I am the "drays" user mentioned in the Pinterest post you refer to. I know a lot on how Steem was launched, as I was there from the beginning. Yes, it was not easy to figure out how to mine this. Yes, indeed, an effort was needed to mine it, and a lot of time needed to understand what this is all about. Truly saying, I invested not enough of my time, and so mined a bit less than I could). But I don't try to blame the developers for that. You cannot make money out of nothing, you should invest your knowledge and your time, and this is exactly what Steem developers ("thereverseflash") requested. The source code was open - so someone with enough skills and time could read it and understand. The ones who did not have the skills and/or time, were not rewarded. Isn't that ok? You always get paid according to the time and skills, at any job, so I think its ok for Steemit developers to do the same.
To summarize this: while being hit myself by the absence of information during initial launch, I do not complain, and I completely understand the Steem founders. They mined the lion's share of Steem, but it is only fair - as they are the ones who invested a lot of time, talent and work into this project. At the same time, they really gave the chance to others - a chance to get something according to the time and skills they invested at the time.
Nice good to know from someone who was there since the beginning! This was most likely just a post made from someone that was mad their posts only make .01 on Steemit or someone from the Yoursnetwork. I hope that's not all whales are doing just upvoting themselves. They have upvoted me like 4 times so I should not be complaining right? Hopefully it's not just a scheme but I was just wondering what Devi thoughts are, thanks for your input!
Those Steem 'whales' are just people like you and me. I suppose they mostly they care for two things: a) making some profit (as almost everyone on Steem network, right?); and b) making sure Steem becomes popular, as that is in their best interest. Both goals can be achieved by upvoting the content which could become popular. So they do that :)
Few of them use bots, because they do not have enough time to read everything, and actually prefer to spend their time programming those bots :) But some really read stuff and vote accordingly. This is up to their personal tastes and abilities.
It is natural there will be many people who are not happy because they got not enough votes. But thats the life, thats the humanity. If you ask me, I would honestly say I do not believe really good things could become popular, and I personally do not like 'popularity' to be used for valuing content. 'Popular' does not equal 'good' or 'quality'. Many people believe it is, but it is definitely not. Steem is not the only platform making this assumption; actually every platform nowadays is based on this, and that is genuinely wrong. As a result the most valuable things will never be noticed, as they are often hard to perceive and to understand.
Anyway, enough complaining :)
Cheers!