I'm NOT Going To Upvote, Follow, And Resteem

Yes, you read it right! But first, let me explain what I mean by that and who "I'm not going to upvote, follow, and resteem," as well as why.

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The thing is that in last few months Steemit members users base grew a lot. Many new fishes are swimming now in this Steemit sea which every day more becomes a real ocean.
(If you are following @penguinpablo and his daily reports or @elyaque and his daily reports you already, probably know that.)

Only in past seven days, over 12,000 new accounts have been created on Steemit, what makes it an approximate average of over 1,800 new accounts daily. OK - some of them are fake or duplicate accounts or bots, but still.

No matter how those new members find about Steemit or by whom have been invited and encouraged to join, I'm sure, besides a bit feeling like Alice in the Wonderland, they are all very excited to start posting, gaining new followers and earning, as valuable as possible, upvotes and resteems that would fill their Steemit wallets. Congrats to that! We are all on the same page regarding that one.

In other words, I can assure you, my dear new fellow Steemians that even the oldest Steemit members are still excited about that and every day is a new challenge to succeed in that direction as for you, same for them too.

But there is a good and a bad way to achieve that, to all of us common, goal!

^{Image 02}

I don't know why, but as it seems, many likes to take or at least to chose as first that 'bad way,' wrongly thinking how they found the shortcut to success. And then, as most often, that first article doesn't attract thousands of people, they figure out there is something else they should do. Comments! Bingo! Then it starts this comment foray and crusade on other member's posts with comments like:

• Nice!
• Like!
• Good!
• Upvoted!
• Resteemed!
• Amazing!
• Cute!
• etc.

Nothing happens again! - The one-word comment apparently wasn't enough, so here it goes the two-word comment foray crusade.

• Nice post! (photo, shot, image, article or what so ever)
• Good post! (photo, shot, image, article or what so ever)
• Upvoted & resteemed! (or reverse order)
• Nice tips!
• Good tips!
• Looking cute!
• Amazing post!
• Nice photo!
• Good shot!
• etc.

More or less, nothing happens again! Still ZERO in the wallet, some eventually strayed upvote and same scammy-spammy comment back. Then they would try three-word combination.

• Nice post! Upvoted!
• Good post! Resteemed!
• Nice tips! Upvoted!
• Good tips! Restemed!
• Amazing photo! Upvoted!
• Shocking news! Resteemed!
• etc. combinations

It seems like they still don't get it they are not on Face Book, neither on Twitter nor Pinterest or... so, it comes more brutal ones, straight to the point like:

• follow4follow
• vote4vote
• upvote4upvote
• resteem4resteem
• etc. similar BS

By then some of them would realize that Steemians basically ignore such comments finding them as pure scam and spam, so they tweaks. Advanced versions of all the above scammy-spammy comments would arrive in the following or similar to them compilations.

^{Image 03}

^{Image 04}

In their self-marketing attempts, some would go even one step further and to such comments even add their post's featured image, so the comment would look something like this.

^{Image 05}

Not much success again!
Can you imagine on this "stupid" Steemit nothing works? Good old scammy-spammy methods that would perfectly work, e.g., on FB Groups or other network's similar places here don't apply. Can you imagine?! There must be the other way! And yes, there is!

^{Image 06}

By that point they usually discover Steemit.chat. Woohoo! Here it is! They just found the secret door to instant fame! But, did they? No, of course not!
But someone "smart," told them: "Go there, post your links all over the place and tell the community you arrived!" - Yeah! Right!

Back on task and here starts another commenting, link dropping (no matter in which channel, as of course in every), and private message bullying foray crusade of every single member they came across or could find.

I am "especially fond of" those last ones that usually starts like innocent "Hi!" or "Hellos!" immediately after to be followed by the promotional link to their newest posted article.

What follows next?

^{Image 07}

Yeah! Right! - My dear, you just get BLOCKED!

Yes, the person you just tried to terrorize with your post links promotion, blocked you. And most likely every next one would do the same!

Do you know, what else?
All those users who blocked you, in most cases, wouldn't see your posts never and ever after, no matter in which channel you are going to promote them!
Woohoo! What a great marketing achievement?! Haa? - All in one!

Then, some of them (especially, if they already didn't) would try to approach and solve the problem from the opposite side.

^{Image 08}

Now, they would follow (or even resteem) everyone and everything.
You know how it is! If they don't want to come to you, then you would go to them. 😜

That's how the new episode of building an enormous list of following accounts would starts. Many and especially newcomers would bite that 'being followed bait' and would follow back, not realizing that this person is not interested at all in their writings even less in upvoting that content.

Likeminded individuals of that kind would have no problem to jump in that 'follow4follow' circle. That's why we can see many new accounts with several thousand following user base and almost the same amount or a bit fewer followers user base. But when you take a look at their posts you would also see that the earnings still averages around few cents.

^{Image 09}

Sooner or later they will discover that this clowny puppet-monkey-following-automation scheme business doesn't work on Steemit.

Therefore, for those, for some reason, maybe still tempted with that option I would like to throw some pure logic through the following questions.

Do you really want to follow a member who is already following several thousand other accounts?

~ and ~

What are your chances, that your post would pop-up among first (visible ones) on that member's feed?

~ or even better ~

How likely is that this user would pick and upvote your post (between all the other several thousand of them)?

How likely that is, especially if we know that we have about 10 votes available per day at 100% power, or 20 votes at 50% power, or 40 votes at 25% power, and so on up to at the most of about the 850 votes at the minimum available of 1% power?
All of these in case that member doesn't want to drain its voting power down to zero.

But even if such member wouldn't care to deplete its voting power (in which case it wouldn't be able to vote for some time at all) and cast out the whole amount of available votes it wouldn't be able to cover with it the whole following base.
So, again - what would be your chances in that case scenario?

The other aspect of the same example comes out with the following question.

How much would that vote worth?

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If all of this still didn't convince you, and you still think my mathematical logic is fuzzy, let me draw for you another picture through another very vivid example.

About a month and a half ago, I came across the member who has been on the platform (at that time) something less than two months and already managed to follow (as you can see from above screenshot) 55,555 other users. That's over 900 following clicks per day. Quite a job! I have to admit that.

Keeping that same click-collect-following ratio, these days it's approaching to the number of 90K following user base.
On that whole collecting journey, this member manages to gain about 10% follow back (what would be pretty good percentage in marketing terms).

However, about 9,000 members out there bite that bait at some point. Unfortunately (for that member) over 30% of them became dead followers in the meantime. So, we can say the member still has about 6,000 somewhat active followers.
Great! Isn't it? Who doesn't want that? Right?

But, as almost always, here comes one big BUT!
Despite all these big numbers as from the 'following side' (90K) same as from the 'followers side' (9K total or 6K active), the posts of that member hardly reach the earning of $2 or $3 at most.

As this is one of the most extreme examples that I came across, I think it wouldn't be wrong to conclude that on Steemit aggressive methods of any kind don't work. It might still not be enough for some.

After some while, some of them would, however, start scratching their heads, asking themselves how it's possible that so much marketing, hard & heavy self-promotional efforts ended up with almost no results. Their posts are still earning a cent or two, or at the best few more than that (excluding above extreme case).

Most of them wouldn't realize that the answer and cause lie in them and their previous actions. They would rather blame everyone else even Steemit platform itself and especially its "such a stupid" configuration.

Some would even rather believe that there must be some conspiracy behind where the "secret society" of 'big Steemit fishes' spread the wealth of their high valuable upvotes only among themselves. Yeah! Sure!

And here becomes another story, where those strongly believing in such possibility would come to the following brilliant idea.

^{Image 12}

Let's join the forces and show all the rest we are better than this!

In this case scenario, we would see such kind of like-minded individuals forming teams and different groups on all kinds of chat platforms available out there in the effort to support each other.

By that, another exchange-votes (more or less) closed circle would be formed, members of which would upvote each other like crazy. But again, as this crazy Steemit, can you imagine, really sucks, without some big or even bigger success.

Posts of the members of such groups would earn 10 or 20 cents more, at most a dollar or two and the whole story ends with that.

How could this be possible?

Well, if the group is mainly formed by newcomers (what mostly is) who are all just a small Red Fishes (not Minnows) whose vote at 100% power is worth $0.01, and by significantly increased voting actions decreased to $0.0who-knows-how-many-zeros-01 amount, that's the expected outcome (at least to those who understand some mathematics essentials).

In case you don't know who the Red Fishes are, please feel free to find out through the following post created by @arcange.

The question that remains still is:

Why some Whales, Orcas, Dolphins or even bigger Minnows don't vote on those posts?

If upon your arrival to Steemit, you have read Steem WhitePaper or at least Steemit FAQ, you would know that copy pasted content (no matter if text, photos, images or all of that together) is not something that would be evaluated here. Quite in contrary! But plagiarism same as all the other sorts of copyright infringements are one big topic for another complete post.

However, and to summarize, Steemians tend to support originally-created content and especially if such content brings additional value as to Steemit network and community itself same as to a broader community audience too.

Therefore, for all those Steemit members who tend or plan to start or continue with above (more or less detailed) described scammy-spammy actions, same or similar, as well as to all upvote, follow and resteem beggars out there, my message is:

I'm NOT Going To Upvote, Follow, And Resteem You!

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In the past year, I have been helping everyone and anyone who approached me this way or another asking for help, advice or what so ever. Some of them became quite successful or even much bigger fishes in this Steemit sea than I am currently. And I'm glad, even proud of them! Despite the fact, that it would be much wiser for my own pocket if I invested that time in the creation of my own posts, I don't regret.

I'm also not saying I wouldn't do the same, for some others in the future. But, for those of you who have recognized yourselves in above descriptions and who are planning to continue to act the same way in the future, I can say upfront you are pure time wasters and complete fake and don't even bother to contact me. No use! I'm not going to spend a single second anymore on any such one.

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Posted on Friday, September 8, 2017

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Sources:
_{Image 01 - own derivative work with illustration and photo from Pixabay. Credits to annegordon for Piazza Navona photo and HypnoArt for Fake News Illustration, both used in creation of this image under the CC0 Creative Commons license.
Image 02 - own derivative work with the image from Pixabay. Credits to geralt for meadow image used in creation of this image under the CC0 Creative Commons license.
Image 03 - screenshot
Image 04 - screenshot
Image 05 - own derivative work with screenshot and the image from Pixabay. Credits to stux for carnival image used in creation of this image under the CC0 Creative Commons license.
Image 06 - own derivative work with the illustrations, images and photos from Pixabay. Credits to geralt for the startup and speakers announcement illustrations, to 472301 for social networking keyboard image, and to Javier-Rodriguez for marketing-advertising-propaganda image, all used in creation of this image under the CC0 Creative Commons license.
Image 07 - own work
Image 08 - illustration from Pixabay. Credits to Clker-Free-Vector-Images for the animals illustration used under the CC0 Creative Commons license.
Image 09 - illustration from Pixabay. Credits to OpenClipart-Vectors for the following orders illustration used under the CC0 Creative Commons license.
Image 10 - screenshot
Image 11 - illustration from Pixabay. Credits to Clker-Free-Vector-Images for the chimp illustration used under the CC0 Creative Commons license.
Image 12 - own derivative work with the illustration and photo from Pixabay. Credits to StockSnap for the people photo and to toyztechworld for the group think big idea, both used in creation of this image under the CC0 Creative Commons license.
Image 13 - adaptation for Steemit network of own derivative work with photo from Pixabay, previously posted on another platform. Credits to annegordon for Piazza Navona photo used in creation of this image under the CC0 Creative Commons license.
Divider image - own work}