The Future of Steemit -- Not If I Can Help It

So there are a lot of people thinking that

should allow referrals and ads. Well what do you think steemit will look like with people spamming referrals in every post? Do you think it will stick to specific tags like bitconnect, mining, freebitcoin? There is already a huge problem with some people spamming their referrals. Several sites are being advertised heavily on steemit. If you have seen the @steemcleaners logs you can see just a fraction of the spam there really is. A fraction because many spam cases also fall under other abuse types such as copy/paste and plagiarism. People just rip stuff off the internet and put their referral on it. Also many of the abusers are already on @cheetah or they have multiple spam posts and only 1 per day is logged. Also @steemcleaners doesn't handle all referral posts. I flag a good deal of them myself using voting power that could go toward curating good content to try and keep the spammers in check.

Now I'm not saying all referrals are bad. Write a good quality post about something and include one referral link to what you wrote about and there is no problem. The problem is most of these people are just out for the referral they don't care about steemit at all. It's all about money for them. The more referrals they get the more they make. This is apparent by 2 of the top spammers/scammers on steemit: @craig-grant and @trevonjb who even have sponsored posts. They spread the word to bring other spamemrs and scammers to steemit. You will see referrals on almost every post they make. The problem is they have too much steem power and upvote themselves which makes it impossible to do anything to them. They drain he reward pool and are paid to do it. People upvoting them are contributing to a major problem on steemit. Not only does it give them more incentive to continuing spamming but it encourages others to do the same. Many people flagged use the but they can do it excuse. People should be flagging them instead.

Now why do I consider these referral posts so bad? Regular scammers who post copy/paste and plagiarized content do hurt steemit and they hurt it bad. These referrals spammers/scammers not only hurt the reward pool and take away from good content creators they are also potentially getting people to loose their money to these scams while they profit from the referrals. If they really believed in what they are pushing and could make money legitimately they wouldn't care about those referral links and would post without them. A few even do but out of the hundreds that have been flagged only a few will post without them.

If you think it's easy to try and keep these people in check or be a member of @steemcleaners you are wrong. I have been attacked, flagged, and spammed so many times I don't' even bother to keep track. I've been called everything from a Nazi to a child molestor and even had my life threatened on one occasion (it's on the blockchain).

That does bring me to one last thought. For those participating in known (onecoin, the billion coin, etc) scams and in possible future scams the blockchain is a permanent record. I hope all that evidence is used against you one day and you end up broke and in jail (preferably with a 300lb dude named Bubba that makes John Holmes look small).

So I leave you with the future of steemit if these spammers/scammers get what they want.

BTC: 1KXcTNYKNfSpSBixvs52sB3C6y3PtKY8GR	Doge: DMbvrKUPi9MR3ziaPDNJi47K9gn9B2ausu

Not pretty is it. Imagine that after every copy/paste youtube vid on steemit.
Note I purposefully made those non clickable (with the exception of the steemit one) with no referral. I also included an NSFW site to prove a point.