RE: Minnows & Newbies: You're No Less Important To The Steemit Community
False Promises?
I've been told many times to "just keep at it. Your efforts will pay off in time" by people whose efforts have been rewarded over time but I never really know if it's true. It's kind of like Amway, or most any Multi-Level-Marketing where you learn about the ones fulfilling all their financial dreams and you are told, "Just keep at it. This will be you." But that's all based on personal anecdote, not statistics. For every one who does quite well there's probably one hundred who work and work and work for a long time and get nowhere, and the whales are banking on all that effort based on a false promise. Is it the same with Steemit? Not knowing for sure whether all this effort actually will pan out is frustrating. And if it does work out, is it only because the value of Steem has risen exponentially? Would it be a better use of my time to deliver pizza and buy SteemPower with that money instead of trying to earn it through posting in these early months on the platform and save my content for later on? There just isn't as much information as I'd like to see to base these decisions on and that's frustrating for me.
Bots In The Recipe
I appreciate your encouragement as I know it's possible to have a major impact while only getting a handful of eyes on it. My off-chain blog gets a hundred page views a day and I have no idea who they are or what they are getting out of it except for the very few that comment but at least I know it's probably going to people who are actually interested in what I have to say since most of them come to my blog as a result of doing a Google search. But if I were getting 100 views a day on Steemit it would seem like most of them are there just to be a part of this big game we play trying to eke something out of this system and if I do get a bunch of upvotes that translates into a decent payout is it because people actually benefited from the content or is it because I got lucky and got hit by one of those bots? The whole bot thing I find frustrating because it seems like they work against actual content curation.
Both very valid points. I always appreciate what you have to say. Hard work is just only one of the factors that goes into someone doing well on Steemit. It's no different than an actor who spends 15 years at their craft and never getting in a blockbuster film but someone who has never been in a film before lands a blockbuster role. Much more than hard work is at play.
The bots are heavily abused. I've seen this. Some try to get around making their content better so they just pay to have themselves in the trending sections. This is a problem. I'm not sure what can be done to alleviate bot abuse.
Election of Witnesses that pledge to do something about it. Tough row to hoe.