While the increase of active users is great for Steem’s value it also comes with great disadvantages. The less users interested basically in anything (there are exceptions – mainly radical communities), the cleverer and more committed to the cause the base is. Therefore with growing numbers of users more stupid and reward-horny-only people will be joining. The wealthy people aren’t seemingly affected, because they have already build their supporters base. The only affected users are then the new ones that honestly try to contribute to the community. That is truth only if the “value of Steem” is in no way affected by the “value of content”.
The issue
I’m strong believer in Steem, but I also think that its potential (until another projects or accommodations start accepting Steem or SBD) lies mainly in the quality of the content on Steemit. I think that most of the investors are mainly interested in self-income from curator’s rewards. That is totally understandable now, but any future HF will have to implement solution to this problem (if I had one I would have already written post about it).
The quality of the content and the way the curator’s rewards work now is not compatible though. Investors are more likely to vote for a post that they know will receive a lot of votes afterwards and they don’t really seek “good” content (whatever that means to them). Often times they do not even vote themselves but rather use bots. Of course there are exceptions like @acidyo. He actually inspired me so much that I’m already planning my own curator’s campaign. First I need to get known at least a little though. I’m getting mislead this is a different story anyway.
The Spammer
So one of the new users that is intentionally spamming the same introduceyourself post over and over again has had some success. If I only knew earlier in the beginning that it takes EXACTLY 10 introduceyourself posts to have 100+ bucks post :D… Her name is @celinee.
As I want to have some kind of experience before I launch my curators campaign I try to seek the good, but also the bad content from my perspective. I’m not that type of guy who would spam “Hello sweetheart!” comments on every chick’s post that shows part of their tits. I actually always check the sources and previous actions of every user that I’m inclined to up vote, or down vote (Long live Blockchain for enabling me to do so!). Lately I decided to take actions against new users (those are the only ones I can battle alone) who spam non-contributing comments (like “Follow for follow”) 40 times a day or those that simply copy paste stuff and try to earn easy money.
Solution
@celinne actually managed to get value of 140 bucks on her 10th introduction post and that was way over my influence. So I advocated against asking the biggest contributors to remove their vote. I was very pleasantly surprised that @blocktrades listened to reason and immediately removed his up vote decreasing the value of the post to 25 bucks. That is still hell of a lot though!
In my opinion though such users have to be shut down completely. Only negative reputation is the solution and that can only be achieved by flagging. Flagging is here to be used exactly in those situations to permanently remove the spam content from the site and make curators’ job easier.
Only way to do that is to SPREAD THE INFORMATION across Steemit. That’s what the site is best at anyway. Most of us are seeking here information to get better in basically anything. At the same time though we are all investors and we SHOULD CARE what receives good rewards and what doesn’t not, because those posts ultimately determine how will the site be perceived to anyone who doesn’t know it yet.
All I can do is to ask the community for giving the helping hand in a quest to remove spam from this site. She has managed to create another “unique introduction” while I was writing this post, so now you can choose from 11 more, or less, same posts to down vote.
Edit: Unfortunately @trafalgar and @xaero1 has added their valuable votes against our cause :(. We need the Flags and the Resteems if we want to save those rewards for more deserving content!
Or do you disagree? Let me know!
