The Paying for Upvotes Scam Via Steemit Chat

In Steemit Chat lately, I have received messaged from accounts asking me if I would be willing to pay for upvotes, claiming their accounts have lots of weight, and their upvote would make a me a lot of money, more than I pay them.

First of all, it is not true. Those people who have tons of “power” in their upvotes are highly unlikely to care about the 5 SBD they are asking me for (and the fact they they are coming to me desperately, lowering the price gradually, doesn’t add to their credibility). They have the money they put into the site as an investment, or have plenty of money they earned on the site from writing or curating quality content. At least that's how I understand it.

Second, and this is more important, even if it were true that you could pay someone to vote on your post and you’d make a bunch of money, Steemit’s integrity would be compromised. I get it that maybe not all those with whale or near whale power in their votes necessarily care about the integrity of the site, but I would imagine most do. They put a lot of time and energy and faith into the system, and for it to continue to be successful, corruption can’t play a role. The whole idea of the site and system they go by is to reward and push up quality content, to make the site as a whole of high quality. If people start getting their mediocre or bad content pushed up to the top of feeds by paying, the site starts to lose legitimacy (bad content is not what people are coming here looking for).

I find it sad and unsettling that this is happening, weasels trying to dupe others for personal gain, though I can't say it is surprising. Corruption is around every single corner, in every state, including this one. In such a free system, as cryptocurrency in general and Steemit are by nature, people looking to take advantage of others can’t be avoided. However, I think it’s worth it to talk about it so that maybe those people looking to sabotage and delegitimize and spam the users of the site get discouraged. Of course I am not the only person this is happening to, so let’s call attention to it.

The accounts that messaged me asking me for money in exchange for upvotes are:

@steem.
@up-vote

Hopefully, this will get cleaned up! In the meantime, fellow Steemians in Steemlandia, don’t fall for it. Don’t fall for it not only to save yourself the money and personal embarrassment, but also because you have respect for the system. You realize that paying for upvotes is a clear compromise of the integrity and legitimacy of the platform, something that will cause the quality to be reduced to unreadable, spammy, fake garbage. Caring about Steemit as a place to come together, to introduce people to the beauty that is cryptocurrency (like it did for me), and to learn, means that you do what's right.

*a small caveat

@shadowbot brought up a good point to me, stating that if you value your content enough to pay for it to get seen, not only is that a respectable thing to do, but it is also just the way life works (and we must work within the system, after all). I agree with this, but there are unfortunately people out there willing to pay as a way of cheating, who have not working hard on what they're doing, and that is ultimately unfortunate for the system. Alas.