Promoting Steemit the Smart Way - Avoiding Censorship
Many people have suggested that Steemit.com is shadow-banned by big Social Media. This is obviously a problem, in my last post I was talking about sharing Steemit articles, and how to make Steemit viral this way:
It would be really that easy to make Steemit viral, but of course the shadow banning makes it much more complicated. I have also read several people demonstrating it, like this article:
And this is nothing outrageous, we should expect this kind of resistance, after all they are direct competitors, and will do everything to keep their market share. Of course they play nasty, because they use the power of censorship, so we can play nasty too.
Use Url Shorteners
One way of getting around this is to use Url Shorteners when sharing Steemit posts. Assuming you are not banned entirely, which would be easy to detect, I think they have some sort of ban list for different domain names, and I think Steemit.com or even Steem.io could be on them. So by using an Url shorneter to share articles from Steemit, we can outsmart them.
- https://goo.gl - You could use Google's shortener, but I don't trust them after all they have Google+ and much more control that they can lose if Steemit goes viral.
- https://bitly.com - Bitly should be good enough, except it can be used for many spam, and your posts might still be kept shadowbanned if you use them.
- http://tinyurl.com - A good pick.
... And others, find the one that is not shadow-banned!
Use Banners of Steemit with link to Website
Another way would be to share banners of Steemit, with a link to the website on the banner. The banner could show how you can earn money here, and so on. I am not sure if there are official Steemit banners made yet, but it should be a priority.
In any case, we should not let ourselves silenced. These are dirty tactics they use, silencing your opponent just because they are better is a very desperate and cowardly tactic. We should stand up for our own free speech, and let the world know about Steemit!
Upvote, ReSteem & 
Those are good ways to get Steem known.
I think the bigger issue is what Steemit is known or not known for.
What needs to be fixed and its a community effort is to legitimize Steemit posts. By this I mean we need people who refer to articles not for rewards but for the actual information the post offer.
I do not see other bloggers or twitter etc referencing Steemit posts as their source when they talk about stuff. It mostly happens internally.
This is because Steemt isn't a good source for front line information. It's here, for sure, just not enough of it for the entire platform to be know for it. Only current users after some time of weeding know who is doing quality world class posts.
Steemit is full of incredibly interesting articles almost all of them are opinion and regurgitated information. I love so much it all and post it myself. That is Steemit.
Unless we have authors going out and doing their own experiments, collecting data, interviewing people etc it wont be easy, or probably impossible, to become a "legitimate" news website.
But that's not what steemit is anyways and if it wasn't we would see a cultural change.
You might like this post kind of touches this topic
https://steemit.com/censorship/@solarguy/legitimizing-fake-news-and-calling-out-the-crap-in-mainstream-media
Good post keeps us thinking.
Well if people want absolutely factual information, then they should read peer-reviewed scientific papers. But most of the time people just want other people to talk about something and share their opinions with them.
Steemit wasnt exactly setup to be an Encyclopedia Britannica, it was more setup to be a community oriented platform where people can engage with one another.
Most of the posts here are about art, blogging or other performances, and for that I think Steemit works very well.
and for those reasons Steemit will be hard to attract more attention in the mainstream.
I dont think so, it already attracted more diverse people than Bitcoin. We have an almost 50-50% male-female ratio, so it's not that geeky like bitcoin with something like 97% male and 3% female. Most people on Facebook, and other sites just want to chill out and read gossip and things like that. That will be the target demographic of every social media site.
True I don't argue any of that.
I just think Steemit needs more than just getting its name out there. Of the 100k + accounts only about 10k are active. Which means many left. Many of them bot accounts too.
Other than rewards steemit isn;t offering something people can;t get somewhere else.
If people really want to reach the world with their opinion, sad reality is, its not the best place. When other platforms reach a larger audience.
People come here for rewards. If they don't get rewards they can get better response else where.
I remember I got interested when I heard about people making big bucks back in the summer simply posting like blog, so I joined. It's not easy spreading those stories of big bucks these days.
Sure I agree with that. Steemit still lacks many many features, but I see a new feature coming out every 1 week or 2, so it's on the right path of development. Maybe adding a chatbox would boost up the activity levels here. I have been stressing that, we need better communication other than comments.
While I think social media is an excellent way to drive traffic, I would love to see a curation guild or perhaps a group of whales begin to feature content through sponsored links on other sites- perhaps some of the Steemit author content related to history on sponsored links in the History Channel website, or travel on the Travel Chanel website and so on. Perhaps it could raise awareness of Steemit and "legitimize" Steemit author content in the more mainstream media.
Not long ago Wikipedia was not considered a reliable source, but once it got its act together, things changed.
One on the most effective ways to promote STEEMIT is if you upvote/endorse a blog than share it on your Social Network. Most posts I upvote I do because I believe they are quality enough to share and I do so to Twitter✔. The most powerful way to sell a product is to demonstrate to others how good it is by giving examples. Great piece and thanks for sharing. Stephen
That is the internal affairs, but we still need to get more people, and given that we have multiple media channels at our disposition, it is really lame that other social media sites are censoring us.
We could grow by orders of magnitude faster if that weren't the case.
Totally agree. I just keep knocking and knocking and knocking until I am in..!! Stephen
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Social Media sites are working hard to keep eyeballs on the site. That is why they do not like links on their posts. Two ideas here:
. What I do on Facebook is make a post with a catchy image and allude to look for a link in the comments. Here is a sample from earlier today
I have tested this out with URL shortener - Facebook for one looks through these to the redirect when they do a preview .
. I notice in Steemit when one presses on a link it opens up in the same window. Now a user may never come back to where they jumped off. Maybe Steemit should look to making the default behaviour for a link - new tab or new window. At least then Steemit is still open on the device.
That is interesting, but if they censor the domain name Steemit.com, then its all in vain.
It's really sad that we have to go our of our way to promote ourselves, because the conventional ways are blocked. I guess the entire DNS system is not good enough if websites can just be banned like this.
I think only a decentralized internet will solve this ultimately, with some kind of posting fee, so that spam would be limited, however no website would be censored.
Now that the DNS is in the UN's hands, expect much more websites to be censored like this.
A solution is already here. You can access Steem posts over Tor. The easiest way is to install the Firefox Tor Browser then goto http://usteempccoapgood.onion/. This bypasses DNS. Although I like the developer and discussed his work, it is always better to be very careful about giving a site like this a private key. A browser signing plugin may be available one day to help with this issue. Of course most users will not do this, but if we ever had a major problem with the DNS users could go this route.
You can use DNS to get a preview (this is cheating): https://usteempccoapgood.onion.to
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