Have I been conned by my new followers?
I thought we had deals set up. They said “follow me and I’ll follow you”
OK, I didn’t actually follow any of them, but some of them followed me so I thought we had a long term thing going on.
And then when they started unfollowing me, I was so totally bummed I started checking out their accounts to see what I could do to avoid offending these hard won new followers.
I know I was just bleating about new followers only five days ago but I have just had another realization.
Selfie of @sift666 having a realization
You know those intense experiences where you wake up and think something like “if I go round whale's posts commenting awesome insights like ‘your post are amazing’ they will be overcome with love and make me the next whale mascot”.
Maybe it’s more of a theory than a realization, but some of the people who are unfollowing me have thousands of followers and they have followed tens of thousands of people. Even though they have only been on Steemit a few days, and that got me thinking.
OK, so here is my theory: A newb follows 14220 people and for some reason 1757 of those punters follow him back. Then he unfollows those poor chumps and follows another 10000 different people.
And he repeats the process each day. After a few days he has thousands of followers. He doesn't actually post anything original, and none of his followers have much money anyway, but soon he will have more than 75 cents in his wallet.
In this example it's been hours, so it's time for him to unfollow about 12424 people
And in just a few days he is a big time Steemer with thousands of followers.
Is this what everyone is doing? It must feel really awesome! The downside is that when he promised to follow me, I promptly dedicated all my attention and voting power to his posts, but has he really just conned and deceived me? I’m so confused…
To make sense of all this I did some art and got in touch with my inner beast.
MY MINIMALIST STEEMIT SIGNATURE
For more info, see MY WHOPPING BIG STEEMIT SIGNATURE
Wow, what a great idea!
Just kidding, this is more evidence that supports my hypothesis that about 90% of people are worthless idiots. I think this cuts across all lines. No social media group, racial or ethnic group, or biological sex is immune. The thing I can't figure out is which one am I? Do I fit with the worthless idiots or not? At least I know which one I want to be. It's a powerful motivator.
I can understand why people would constantly upvote themselves or post endless variation of the same post if they got paid say $1000 a time, but all that work to earn 45 cents is really weird!
Sorry that you are getting dumped so quickly!
Your heart will mend. ... ha ha ...
You should like satire, don't you?
I'm starting to wonder if it needs to have warning notices because so many people think all is deadly serious!
I actually have a theory about this that you may have similar thoughts on.
Basically that a general modern trend is increasing levels of low level Aspergers, and a symptom of that is not recognizing humour (or humor). You know where I'm going with this, but that wouldn't be funny...
Either that or my posts are so woefully unfunny that everyone thinks I'm serious - sometimes I am serious, but not today :)
I don't know, but I certainly did notice that several people seemed to think that you were serious.
Honestly, the spoof intro post you did was harder to discern if one didn't know you. For a moment on that one, I thought that your account had been hacked.
But this one was extremely obvious to me.
I don't know.
You should probably post a "Warning -- Satire is Coming" pic at the top of these posts.
If I ever start doing posts about how to use the Hyperledger Fabric v0.6 to build, run, and execute smart contracts, or chaincode, written in the Java language, you will know my account has been hacked!
ha ha ... okay. good to know.
And for something completely different - you probably have already covered all this but I thought you might find this article I was just reading of interest:
http://drsircus.com/general/mmr-vaccine-from-hell-court-rules-measles-is-not-caused-by-a-virus/
I have seen people doing this, and while it certainly increases your number of followers into the thousands, it is very clear that it is doing very little to increase their earnings or success in the platform.
Most users who use this strategy make less than a dollar per post even though they have literally thousands of followers. This is mostly due to two things:
So why even bother? Just follow whoever you want ;-)
Followers are the meaning of life!
I post stuff that interests me and try to make it attractive to the viewers/readers. Getting followers who like my interests is the problem. I have over 300 followers with most in name only. It's hard to get a whale or dolphin to follow you and upvote unless by accident. So I just do my thing and look for people with similar interest. Like you Dude.
Cats can get things going!
Good post! I have been unfollowing some people lately. Because I found my feed difficult to keep up with, and many I followed for seemingly whimsical reasons. My follow count is under 200, and I need to be able to find the content that is pertinent to my steem-life.
I may not engage with you all the time but you have my follow for life @sift666 <3
"Follow for follow? Nah, Follow fo Lyfe!!!!!"-@inquiring
Thanks - I keep my feed down to under 200 as well - sometimes I go on a ruthless culling spree and bin two or three in the same day...
Haha, a bunch of noobs are on the followers page clicking the follow button on everyone that follows them.
This guy didn't even need to spam the comments. He just followed a shit ton of noobs with no followers and they automatically followed him back.
Maybe I should be doing that? lol.
Yes if you want to make 45 cents for only eight hours boring work :)
more like 2 cents.
Holy fuck the spammers are out tonight.
I have just written my new spam comment.
Now I need to find a geek who wants to do a bot for me for 10% commission
@wakeupnd Excellent Tale. Awesome you ended up in the position to hustle your way out of your respective position.
Well you never know. It's because you never know, that things like Steemit are based on trust. Here's what I do as a newbie: I post good content, or at least write as I've always done and try to find things that will interest and inform others and on the odd occasion write something someone finds amusing. I get good replies. One of the first things I do every morning is look at my replies. I try to be a good curator, but that's mostly built on personal preference. I don't necessarily follow people if they ask me to. I follow those who I believe deserve it. It may be their first post or it may be something I find interesting, or it may be someone posting that I already follow. I don't measure that side of Steemit. I love being on Steemit and it opens the world in a completely different way. Try and see it as a community and your follow thing will go away. Good luck. I'm going to follow you when I see one of your posts that interests me.
Great - I think you may not be a bot - all the best on Steemit!
Thank you for your good wishes. Sane to you and now I'm following you for discovering I am not a BOT!
Yeah idk man. I don't do that. I don't really see the point in following people if I don't dig their stuff and I don't like it when people comment and just say like "follow for follow" without n reading my stuff. I haven't really been focused on following legions of people. I've just been writing funny post and hoping the following builds organically. Should I do this differently?
Not at all - I think a lot of new Steemers don't realise just how long established users have been blogging to build up a following, and how meaningless most of the new followers actually are - it used to be hard to get 500 followers and it meant something - now there are people who have been here a week and have 1000 followers.
But ultimately bots don't count, and all this has to be about the content you want to see and post yourself.
Keep being funny, Steemit really needs more funny!
Followers it is just a number, I quit paying attention to it. :) I loved the way you presented this though. :)
I'm not losing much sleep over it really, I'm just kidding... :)
Is @izbing your follower, s/he has this thing down to a fine art!!! hahahaha
I was just filling out an online survey - it asked which gender I identified with - male, female, or OTHER...
I think bots identify as other and s/he is probably an offence to their gender identification!