The Problem with Spam: Why I May Not Reply to Your Comment

With every price increase, there's a traffic increase - and with every traffic increase, there's a spam increase.

The amount of spam always works as a grim reminder that Steemit is not a sincere social media/blogging site like some others.

People spam posts without reading them in hopes for upvotes, followers, etc.

Steemit users have widely accepted this, but I'd like to combat that a bit, and here's why.

I feel that the spam comments actually do more harm to Steemit than most realize; the idea behind Steemit - blog for easy magic internet money - is already shady as it is, and most intelligent people tend to have a skeptical attitude towards something like that. So, let's say a smart person checks Steemit out, what does he or she see?

A lot of idiotic spam comments that look like an intellectually challenged monkey wrote them.

That's an instant turn-off.

And when the smart people turn away, what are we left with? The people who look at spam like that and go "Hey, that's a great idea!".

No, the spam is not the biggest problem with the community and not the worst atrocity that currently goes, but my tolerance for this spam is decreasing by the day. I'd hate for good quality users to look at the site and think that it's a site for a bunch of morons.

This is also why I think that too much emphasis is being put on the amount of people joining when more emphasis should be put on the quality of users joining.

Also, I have a dilemma of my own with the spam.

I really appreciate people engaging and commenting on my posts, especially my story chapters. I genuine comment on a story chapter, for me, is even more valuable than a whale upvote, because those posts are very personal for me, and I like to know if people are enjoying it and whatever the fuck.

But it's hard sometimes to differentiate genuine comments from plain spam. I don't want to reply to spam comments and encourage more of it, but I also don't want to not reply back to genuine comments, which I really do appreciate.

I know a lot of those are just bots, so it's useless for me to ask for them to stop, but if you are a new user, a new human user, and are reading this: spam won't get you anywhere. All of us older users think it's annoying and a waste of life.

Read the posts, leave real comments. Don't be afraid to leave negative comments, either. Disagree with me? Awesome, tell me why. Think my story sucks? Great, tell me why. You don't need to kiss my ass for me to like you.

If Steemit is to succeed as a "social media", the users need to be more like real people. Forget the money, forget the upvotes for a second. Just be a human being and engage and this thing becomes more fun for everyone.

Regardless of the rewards and upvotes.

I also know English is not everybody's first language - it isn't mine, either - and that makes it harder to identify good comments, as well.

I will try to reward good comments in the future, but if I don't reply to your engagement, it may be because I falsely identified it as spam.

One rule of thumb that I have is that I try not to reward comments that were self upvoted, so there's that.