IS STEEMIT LIKE A COUNTRY BEING FLOODED WITH IMMIGRANTS?

Things have been a bit strange on Steemit for the past month or so. There has been a massive influx of oddly dressed people with no reputations. Most of them don’t quite fit in, and some of us are getting a bit stressed that the immigrants are behaving in culturally inappropriate ways.

First and foremost a lot of them keep posting comments like “Nice post, follow me and I will follow you back” (except that they don’t spell that well). And yes that is pretty irritating, but it’s also safe to say that nobody with more than $2 in their Steemit account is following them.

To feel better about everything I highly recommend having a look at some newby wallets – lately I’ve been seeing stuff like comments by new experts offering crypto currency advice, who turn out to only have 37 cents in their wallet (Yes, that is a real example!)

Living in New Zealand, a country with no native human population, I’m used to seeing people claiming to be one of the original inhabitants. But like New Zealand, Steemit is only about a year old, so really we are all new here. This is not Fakebook, we can’t claim a history stretching back to the caveman.

New Zealand is not exactly awash with Muslims, but @kiwideb and I live over the road from a mosque. (The biggest mosque in NZ) Pretty much all Muslims in NZ are new immigrants, and when the mosque first opened we would watch as hoards of them turned up in their crappy cars and blocked up the whole street every Friday afternoon.

Over the years they have gotten better cars, and improved their parking skills a bit, especially as they have learned that parking on the footpath really doesn’t pay. But many of them continue to barely speak any English, and some still blatantly treat their women as second class citizens. Actually, very few of them even are NZ citizens, so it’s probably more accurate to say they treat their women like second class immigrants.

New Zealand is long renowned for being a country where women have been able to claim their fair share of achievements, so the whole making women dress like curtains and use the back door of the mosque, is not considered very cool here. And not learning to speak any understandable English is a bit of an issue as well. So it’s safe to say until they sort out these two behaviors they are not exactly going to become whales in this country.

Which brings me back to the flood of new immigrants on Steemit. Hanging out with a bunch of other newbies and squawking “follow me” at everyone is not going to work well in the long term. As many other people have already said, to get anywhere on Steemit, you need to actually post some quality content and comments.

In every old country that has a bit of history, and an established culture, things can get stuck in a rut, and some new blood can help shake things up. But a key thing is that new immigrants need to be a very small percentage of the overall population. Otherwise, as been happening in Europe recently, when the portion of immigrants becomes too large, rather than fitting into the existing culture and enhancing it, they try to turn it into the craphole they have just fled from.

In terms of new Steemit members, the sort of crapholes they are fleeing from are Fakebook, Twitter, Reddit and Youtub. Yesterday I saw a comment from a new user with a rep of 32 who was saying that in order to get more users, Steemit needed to be more like Fakebook (except he spelt it Facebook).

Even though right now there do seem to be a lot of Fakebook loving twenty fivers on Steemit, I’m confident that most Steemians are not aiming in that direction, so I’m not panicking. A bunch of people are discussing whether it's best to flag or mute spammers. I'm just ignoring them and not worrying about it. Hell, I use email everyday too - and even with a good spam filter half the emails in my inbox are spam.

Over Steemit’s long history there have already been some dark times: Eight months where the value of Steem went lower every day (from a peak of $4 right down to a low of 16 cents). And a hardfork where the average payouts for my own posts dropped from around $2 to about 2 cents, which didn’t exactly fill me with joy.

The stuff that is going on now, I look at as another growing pain that will settle into a better balance in a few months. The ability to have rapid growth and development is one of the many cool things about Steemit.

Yes, right now there are way too many new people posting utter crap, but lets face it, 90% of them are going to give up and bugger off in a month or two, and out of the 10% that remain, a whole pile of them may turn out to be awesome.

(Photos by @sift666)

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