Too Much Spam!

I think that we can all agree that there is simply too much spam on the blockchain. Many new users don't really understand the concept of quality over quantity because they believe that content with low rewards should also require low effort and vice-versa, leading to posts with little to no work put in once they see how tiny their payouts are. The way that Steemit was designed essentially gave first adopters a huge advantage which leaves the rest of us to fight for the scraps- not only in terms of the rewards pool but also of followers because people only have so much time, attention and voting power to give. This results in tons of low quality content from small accounts, all scrambling to get a piece of the STEEM pie.

We all need to do our part in combating these low quality spam posts by taking advantage of the new separate down-voting pool when we spot abuse.

Great Content Gets Lost

In this flood of non-stop spam much of the good content seems to get buried. Fear not because most engaged content creators will find a way to promote or boost their posts in order to stand out and get the attention they deserve from the community. However, what generally what happens to people that are new to the platform is that they get less attention and quickly lose interest or feel discouraged. Additionally they are competing for rewards for spammers who are trying to game the rewards pool and maximize what little STEEM Power they have. It takes hard work and consistency to slowly build a loyal following plus some knowledge about how Steemit works in order to take advantage of different avenues of post promotion. By reducing spam we can all do our part to help good content shine through.

Auto-voting Abuse

With the use of auto-votes and curation trails some users have found ways to get rewarded for low quality content, or posts that are barely worth noting. These are posts that get zero comments from real people and usually contain very few words and perhaps a picture or two. Do you think that these posts deserve to be up-voted by their followers who trusted them to create quality content and not spammy posts? I don't.

So to prevent and combat this I suggest regularly checking out the people who you are auto-voting (which you should be doing anyways). I stopped auto-voting this person because of their lack of effort.

New System, New Strategy

Hopefully with the new changes to Steemit that are about to be implemented we will see a shift in the behaviors across the platform. I am looking forward to seeing the effects of the curation/author reward split in addition to the separation of up-vote and down-vote pools.

Effectively when they change the way that rewards are split it will incentivize more curation and less posting. This should in itself reduce the number of spam posts while increasing the number of spam comments and re-steems theoretically.

The separation of the up-vote reward pool from the down-vote pool is a huge step towards giving power back to Steemians because we don't have to take away from our Voting Power in order to penalize spammers and plagiarists. This is something in my opinion that should have been done a long time ago but I understand why they did not, since this mechanism can be abused to bully and harass others with flagging. We shall see how things turn out soon...

Join in on this challenge:

• Develop your own post about supporting honesty or fighting abuse on the Steem blockchain. Your post should be as detailed as you want it to be.

• Make your own challenge promise statement and banner

• Tag the post with #supporthonesty

• Nominate 7 people to attempt the challenge

I nominate @djohan, @eveuncovered, @steemcryptosicko , @chesatochi, @chbartist, @stackin and @crypt0