Shouldn't SteemIt Encourage Beginners Instead Of Punishing Them For Mistakes?

I'm a beginner here at SteemIt, and a couple of weeks ago I started with a lot of enthusiasm. Unfortunately, most of that is gone now, and I'm considering leaving the platform.

Why?

Because I feel like there's no room for beginner mistakes. It is true that there are a lot of encouraging posts for beginners here on SteemIt, but when it comes to posting articles, there's no mercy nor consistency.

For a beginner on a site like this, it's all about trial and error - just like in real life. That's my opinion - let me know if you disagree.

In a different life, I used to be a teacher. When my pupils made a mistake, I tried to teach them that people make mistakes, and that you can't know everything when you're just starting. Instead of putting them down, I encouraged them to learn from there mistakes and often gave them another chance by letting them re-take a a test after tutoring him.

If a pupil scores 0/20 on a test in the beginning of a semester, it is not only going to affect his total score at the end of the semester, it's also very discouraging and it will be hard to get the pupil motivated again.

And to be honest, that's exactly how I feel.

Let me explain...

My very first blog post was a promotional post, containing an affiliate link. I didn't add a warning for people to tell them this was an affiliate link. I assumed it would be OK.
Apparently it was, because no comments appeared, and no downvotes were given.

My 5th post was also a promotional post. This time I added a disclaimer and again, no spam message and no downvotes. I even got 23 upvotes.

But then, my 6th posts (also with an affiliate link, which I removed afterwards) received a downvote from the blacklist bot and a downvote and spam message from Steemcleaners. Since this spam message always contains several options why your post has been flagged, it was not really clear to me what I did wrong.

This brought my reputation score back to 13!

I did a lot of research, especially about posting affiliate links, because you see them everywhere, and made a couple of posts again. Some were plain informational posts, other posts did contain affiliate links.
From the 5 posts that contained affiliate links, 2 passed, and 3 were downvoted. leaving me with a reputation score of 11.

	I don't know where to go from here...

I'm completely confused about why some were downvoted, and others were not and I feel like I'm severely punished for trying out and testing a couple of things. This low reputation score tells other people to stay away from my posts, so how on earth am I going to be able to build up this reputation score again if no one is going to read my articles?

In my opinion you downvote all or none if you want to make a message clear. Now it feels like a dice game...

I won't be posting promotional posts for a while, and see what happens. But - to be honest - at this moment, the SteemIt-fun is over, so maybe I won't be posting again at all. Why should I? No one is going to read those posts anyway...