This is a Public Service Announcement

I've been on Steemit since last summer, sometime around July of 2017. The platform has always been great, but has really grown and matured since then. I love this platform and would really like to see it grow in adoption and become one of the core social media platforms right up there with Youtube, Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest, among others.

That said I'm not one of these Steemians who likes to bury my head in the sand and act like Steemit is perfect. One of my beefs with Steemit is that it's really difficult to find quality content and we lack a lot of niches. Part of that is that this platform is new and growing, and part is that the search function isn't that great. We also face a problem of shitposting. Shit posting is garbage content that adds nothing to the platform so for example someone who posts a single stock photo from a site like PixaBay. They make no comments, add no commentary, etc. This not only adds no value to the platform, it also means there is that much more shit to sort through to find quality content. It also exaserbates the problem of quality posts getting lost in the "new" section.

In addition to well possibly well meaning people just posting shitty content, we also have people using bots posting garbage content and we have others manually posting garbage content every 10 minutes in an attempt to rack up money. I wish people would realize posting one quality piece of content is going to get you a lot further than posting 100 pieces of shit content.

What's even more frustrating however is seeing shit content get lots of upvotes and oftentimes earn lots of money, while quality content sometimes goes unnoticed.

The above piece of content is a perfect example of shit content. I have a suspicion that this was posted by a bot because of the formatting and the shittieness of the post. This post basically took an excerpt of a couple sentences out of a Forbes article and posted it. Not only is the snippet from the article not interesting or informative, the poster didn't bother to add any of their own commentary. And while this post only earned $0.23 cents, it did manage to get 35 upvotes. Who felt that this was a quality piece of content that added value to the platform and decided to upvote it? The above comment I found while searching Busy.Org looking for articles about Entrepreneurship.

Then we have posts like the ones above from @uscallgirl which I seem to be posted by bots, again look at the formatting, it looks like something reposted by a site like IFTTT, however I know there is a real person behind the account because after I flagged a post or two of hers she stalked me around on a few of my posts commenting on how I downvoted her...

I could go on and on and on and post dozens of shitposts and bot posts from today or even the last 10 minutes alone, but I have better uses of my time. I'm sure you guys know what I'm talking about though.

in my early days on Steemit I was VERY hesitant to use the downvote or flag button because I really don't want to hurt someone's account or hurt someone's progress, but at the same time posts like this make Steemit itself look cheap and stupid, and it makes it that much more difficult to sort through poor content to find quality content.

These days I'm going to start using the flag feature ALOT more. I'm not going to downvote opinions I disagree with, that's not what the flag feature is for. I'm also not going to vote content if it looks like someone has put genuine effort into a post or if someone has added value in their own way ie adding commentary or doing a write-up.

However poor quality content that takes 0 effort and which clogs up Steemit making it more difficult for people to find quality content is going to get a downvote from me. Bots or real humans reposting stock photos with no editing, no commentary and no write-up will be getting downvotes from me.

I'm only one person and honestly my account isn't even that powerful, but I'd like to encourage others to step up and be the gatekeepers of this platform we call Steemit. It has the potential to be a great platform, however due to the money incentive it also has the ability to become a huge shithole of spam. Let's all do our part to keep this platform quality.