Steemit Open Mic is growing exponentially with an entry every few minutes from all around the world. This is amazing to watch and fun to be part of, but it also brings with it some problems.
Many people who are new to the contest and some who have been here a long time are getting impatient when they don't get upvoted as soon as they post. My chat box on Steemit chat and Discord is filled with direct messages from people asking me if I have seen their post yet and wondering why I have not upvoted it.

The answer is, no, I have not seen your post yet but will soon enough.
You don't need to keep messaging me and delaying me even further or make blog posts about your frustrations, or as my friend @mithrillweed says while he watches me do this every day, Steemit Open Mic People Need To Relax --- by @mithrilweed
Yesterday I spent 15 hours listening to Open Mic posts before I finally got through them all and today it took 8 hours to get caught up. I do not have the time to respond to your DM's.
Some have double posted their post fearing the delay meant I did not see it. When you double post it takes even longer because I have to send you a comment explaining not to double post. Double posting is not the answer, patience is.
To make it worse, the Steemit platform is doing some strange things lately. For example, when I go back a day or two in the OpenMic feed, many posts that were not there before suddenly are there, like 10-15 of them. Most of those delayed posts seem to be coming from South America, Africa, and India. Perhaps there are internet nodes there not working as fast as other parts of the world.
I don't know but it adds to the delay of me seeing your post.
In addition, the @openmic account has a bot connected to it to follow my upvotes and it was not working a couple days ago so I stopped voting until it worked again so I can give you the maximum reward. Once it was working I began again which is another delay but one that works in your favor.
I understand people do not realize how many people are entering Open Mic and how long it takes to go through them all so let me just reassure you.
If you followed all the rules and did not cheat, I will get to your post eventually. Please be patient.
We are doing everything we can to get to everyone's post as soon as possible but we are doing it manually, one by one. Just play us some music, follow the rules, post, and wait.
There are so many entries you guys that I will not be able to post them all in the See Who Played posts that I have been doing so I'm only going to post the very best ones. There just is not enough time in a day to post them all. It's kind of sad but it will make that post full of the best Open Mic has to offer so it's a double-edged sword.
The end result is it will be better for you and the judges to hear only the better entries.
Hope you understand.
Thank you.
