Steemit has been growing rapidly, gaining momentum on the interwebs, growing it's userbase and amazing us all. The platform we didn't know existed a few months/weeks ago has become the place where we spend most of our day and where we lay all of our efforts to disrupt multiple markets. And that is great as the community is growing more great content is added which enriches our lives.

But WAIT, things are not exactly like that. WHY you might ask. Well, it's quite simple:

People post fake stuff to make you upvote them and steal thousands of $$.

You will find this spammers and catfishes filling up the #introduceyourself and #travel section of steemit.

It is time we TAKE ACTION and discourage such initiatives. So I call you all to arms today because there is no greater weapon than the one we have in our hands: upvoting and downvoting (or flagging).

We need to take action now and be very careful to whom we vest our votes. Why? Because:

1. They are lying and stealing
2. You're wasting your time voting for them and loosing your Voting Power as other members or one of the whales will see the post, downvote it and no-one gets anything. You just lost your Voting Power (stamina) for nothing

Be alert to the content of the post.

Yeah, stop upvoting directly in the list page after reading just the post title and checking out the amount gathered so far.

How to vote responsibly and avoid scammers&catfishes

1. Open up the post in full view and read the full post!
2. Check if the author has any Social Media accounts mentioned and check them out to validate it's them!
3. Check for videos they made to validate it's them and it's their post. That is another good way to validate it's really them.

To wrap this up:

DO YOUR PART

As a member of the steemit community you need to do your part and curate content. Besides upvoting what you like make sure you also downvote those who are lying, double/triple posting, stealing content, promoting women demeaning (here I mean porn) and other scamming stuff.
Don't worry if you make a mistake. A lonely vote can be canceled through upvoting and the author won't suffer. Please do your part, otherwise all of our work will be for nothing, Steemit will lose it's value and so will our wallets!

There are already users who are taking a stand (like @positive) and also the founders are downvoting bad content making it useless through their power (add them in the filter created by @discombobulated on steemitx.com to see what they downvote).
Until true moderators are enforced by the founders ( @dan, @dantheman, @ned) we need to keep the community safe until they finish making it a really stable and improved platform. #doYourPart

Here's to the true curators,
Anduweb