5 Reasons Steemit Is Being Mocked
If you are in the crypto world for more than one year, you noticed a consistent trend in which people of all walks of life, from beginners to influencers, are taking their time to mock Steemit. "It's a Ponzi scheme!", "It's a scam!", "It's worse than a scam!".
I confess that I'm not discarding completely these people, as I truly believe that anyone is entitled to his own opinion on this Earth. And I respect people who stand by their opinions, especially when these opinions are rooted in facts.
So it's because I did listen to all the discarding comments about Steemit that I can make now some sort of an X-ray analysis of this trend. After almost a year of being on this platform (tomorrow it will be exactly one year since I joined Steemit), I think these are the top 5 reasons people are mocking this platform.
1. Ignorance - People Don't Understand The Technology
With all this FUD being spread about cryptocurrencies, it's easy to throw the blanket of "scammers, douchebags and thieves" over yet another crypto project. Add to this the highly inflationary specific of Steem, as a currency, and there you have it: "printing money out of thin air!".
But these people are ignoring the fact that fiat is printed out of thin air each and every day, and they don't have any control over the process. It's in the hand of governments and central banks, and, more often than not, this process hurts the majority.
Steemit combines content publishing, cryptocurrencies and consensus in a very, very different way. It's not easy to understand it, so ignorance accounts, in my opinion, for at least 80% of all the bad stuff written or said about Steemit.
2. Fear - People Understand The Technology, But Fear Its Consequences
This type of discourse comes from people who are usually well situated on the digital space - publishers, bloggers, influencers. Some of them are getting a glimpse of this technology, but, for some reason, they choose not to get onboard. Maybe it's too difficult for them to start over, maybe they already have a lot of assets in the traditional content business (big mailing lists, huge traffic, hundreds of thousands of subscribers).
Fact is, they fear, consciously or not, the disruptive potential of Steemit (and of any blockchain-based, consensus-enhanced publishing platform) and for this reason they are rejecting it. Their stance is usually more contained, but nevertheless discarding.
3. Competition - Yet Another Social Network? Oh, My!
Another source of discarding comments about Steemit is coming from social network themselves, which are implementing all sorts of "walled garden" practices. One of this practice is isolating Steemit links from their network and throttling them down. I witnessed this consistently on Facebook: links to Steemit are treated differently than links to internal posts or just individual blogs.
This approach snowballs into creating the false impression that "Steemit is a joke, it has no weight in the market". False.
4. Contingency - Somebody Said Somebody Bad About Something, Let's Jump In, 'Cause It Feels Good
Many beginners are just borrowing half-digested opinions from so-called influencers and then re-spread them, because it reinforces their social status. It makes you "cool" to retweet some stupid sentence pulled by some "influencer" who spat that out between two bites of his turkey sandwich, in a gas station. And that's how you create "viral" stuff about stuff.
Contingency is not related only to Steemit bashing, it's a deeply human trait which asks for social status reinforcement, no matter the facts.
5. Impatience - I'm Busting My Ass For Six Months, And I'm Still A Minnow!
A lot of well intended, educated and disciplined people are joining Steemit and doing their job day in and day out, for months. But, for some reason, they can't generate the revenue they're expecting - or the revenue they see at other content creators and they get bitter.
I have to remind them that, before Steemit, the minimum inception time for a decent blog was - and still is - two years. The first two years you don't even think at revenue, you just write. Write to hone your skills, write to generate links, write for SEO, write for sponsored posts, write, write, write. And you get nothing. On Steemit, at least, you get a penny or two. Don't mock that penny or it will go away from you.
Steemit is still in beta. It's largely an experiment and, despite the fact that it already generates a lot of wealth, it's not yet mature. It's by no means perfect, or even complete. It's changing deeply every few months and some modifications are good, some not so good. But it's a living product, based on a revolutionary technology and it's still kicking.
That's why I still choose it every day, while I do my best to listen to all the naysayers.
I just hope they're listening to what I write too. Otherwise, they miss out.
A lot.
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.
https://steemit.com/~witnesses
If you're new to Steemit, you may find these articles relevant (that's also part of my witness activity to support new members of the platform):
I haven't seen people both mocking it and knowing the technology of Steemit, only those who doesn't know anything about it mocks it.
Thank you for words about 2 years inception, I just caught myself being impatient and demanding my revenue, thought I'm worse than others.
Now I'm going to find my style)
that's the way! Keep it up!
yep, i think you smashed it outta the park with this. one thing i will say is appearance too. i'm hoping that the new condenser is a lot more up to date and polished or at least gives us better UI options and features, i know that for me when i first got here it felt like a forum. people don't do forums in the general public normally but yet take part in bullshit conversations on a facebook comment -- something about that 'other person is typing' is kinda a hook to wait for the person to response.
i don't know how realistic some kind of ajax waiting to submit to the steemit blockchain 3.5 second transaction time that would make sense but we need to bring the look and the styling up to date with current web interfaces -- the current style and trend at least.
i'm often really surprised at the fact that a lot of other bloggers have not got on board too, a lot of times people just don't want to put in the work. being a person that works remotely on upwork i see a lot of people posting jobs for bloggers to MANAGE their content for them and i think there also lays the problem, people are going for the super short terms wins and paying out to people maintaining a faux persona through their blogs.
on the back of that a lot of blogging platforms get either hacked, spammed or no engagement at all. if you are a small business that's been told to 'blog' and had no results it's very difficult for them people to return and because they don't trust it or had little from it before they don't want to put in the time to see it work.
i'm working on a new project called amplify, picking 10 people at a time, spending 60 steem setting up accounts, sending them 32 little courses for content creators and emailing or speaking directly to onboard them until hf20 arrives -- mainly selfish because i want to bring the people i like on other social channels here but also because i know collectively they have already done audience development on their respective social sites. if we can get even a 10% slices of viewers following them here that's a nice bump in signups which helps the ecosystem.
thanks for this thought provoking post. needed to be said!
It's the inertia, IMHO. I talked to high profile bloggers about Steemit, and the first thing they asked me was: "but can you build your list off of this platform?" which signals to me that they are way too hooked to "old" (feels weird to name a mailing list an "old" way to make money off of a blog) ways to monetize their work. They kinda don't get it, yet...
sounds like a very nice one, good luck with it!
thanks man. and you are right, they need to get off that 'mailing list' crap. we live in an on demand, real time world. building lists just so they can bombard them every few months with a 'product' is not the way forward. i guess some high profile bloggers only care for the 'business' end of profit and fake the community bit. if that's their world so be it. lonely at the top! ;)
exactly :)
Sorry to burst your guy's bubble, but it is a known fact that pay-to-win systems never last,and that is precisely what Steemit is my friends.
Someday soon, only the whales will be left, dispatching their bots, to give their whale buddies some votes, and so on so forth... in an infinite loop.
It's not their fault either, it's just the way the system was built.
That's an interesting opinion.... since I've never purchased a single steem, and now derive more than 50% of my income from blogging and participating here. "Pay to Win?" Not in my experience.
Glad you're making it, but sadly, the great majority of peeps out there are not like you, hence the active user numbers here on Steemit. Plus, you're probably listed on a bunch of bots auto-up-vote lists at this point, hence the fabricated success.
I agree a lot with what you said. I am pretty new to the platform. Just from my observations, the page layout could use some redesign. It is plain right now. Also, I see a lot of 'spam' posts, which ideally, would be beneficial to get removed.
I couldn't have said it better! Change is not always welcomed, especially by the people who stand to lose power in a way. I'm turning one year old in ten days and I couldn't be happier that I am part of this. I've spent years writing and trying to make a living but when I saw Steemit, read the Steem whitepaper and gave it thought, I saw a genius product that will change online publishing forever!
I wrote a post yesterday about communities and how they will change everything for Steemit, taking it to a whole new level. Lots of benefits are in store for authors readers and curators. I can't wait for the update! :)
There was a bit of a viscious startup with the mining not functioning and many passive liquid steem investors probably lost a lot of money with the initial huge inflation. A good start is half the victory so it takes some time to make up for a not-good start but victory will be ours at the end, for sure, hallelula :-)
Yeap, as I said, it's not perfect, far from it. But since the start we had 19 hardforks without a chain split. We went a long way...
Steemit is not easy.
Facebook is easy
Steemit pays you for creating value for your followers and the greater Steemit community
Facebook loves that you create value for them by sharing the things you do, where you go and who you know.
I think I'll stick with Steemit.
#keeponsteeming
If you're not paid for what you do, then you're the thing being sold.
When I first heard about Steem I thought it was a scam too, despite being in the crypto currency scene since it's early days, I don't remember when exactly but back when Bitcoin was worth cents (sadly I never mined it, or I'd be rich now!).
I think my main reason for thinking that Steem is a scam was that I saw people get thousands of dollars for posts I didn't feel are worth that much. It sounded way too good to be real. Now this is much more rare on Steem since there are so many more users compared to its early days, so the posts that get so much money tend to also be of a much higher quality compared to before. And more and more people talking about Steem then made me check it out again.
And with the now saner rewards for posts, it finally began to click in my head. Of course there is value in people writing posts. It's journalism. Journalists get paid. Of course writing articles is worth money. Facebook makes billions with people posting about their life. Why shouldn't you be able to create a system where that money goes back to the content creators and not the big company controlling all of it?
So then I finally signed up for Steem in April and I was still wary in the beginning, because it took me a long time to figure out how Steem really works (it's quite complex to understand, the witness system, the three currencies which made no sense to me until I understood the system behind it and why every single one of them has it's unique function), but I read as much as I could, started playing with it's programming API and now I could kick myself for not having been part of Steem way sooner :)
Once you get that right, it will all click. As for not joining sooner, well, there's never a better moment than NOW :)
Oh yes, it's not that I am now too late for Steem or anything like that, I just wish I wouldn't have wasted so much time on Twitter and Reddit that I could have better spent on Steem :)
Sometimes people who know little about crypto currency think that of Bitcoin for example. "It's too late, I missed my opportunity, now Bitcoin is worth so much it is too late for me to buy it, why should I care about it now?" is something I've heard people say.
But I came late to Steem, had zero followers, and still made a few posts which received hundreds of votes and therefore dollars. I didn't even need to have a big following to get to the point where I'm making money. And now after just a few months I'm closing in on 200 followers already.
Compare that with YouTube for example, where you need to work for a very long time, often years, to build up your channel before you can even hope to ever get something in return, especially now with the change they made that you can only monetize your channel when you have at least 10,000 followers. On Steem, at least for me, I was rewarded instantly, as soon as I had written my introduction post about a month after I signed up. If that isn't the future, the future is silly.
Well said , your followers must reesteem this blog .
I often find it superfluous. I'm not playing to follower count.
I resteemed this one, though, because I want to remember it in the future.
The day I found Steemit was the first day of the rest of my life :-D
like your article and its very true, i have read a lot about steemit and was critical to join but after some research about cryptos and block chain i joined immediately and have not regretted