Did you just join? I think if you have been well established in the early days you had a much better shot of being successful than most. I'm definitely not saying you don't deserve to be rewarded for joining early. You do. It's very hard these days to blog your way to success, especially in a sea of shitposts, and that's not even the point. The point is not just that it isn't easy to do, it's that you don't even have to do it.
People don't want participation awards, they want money, and they can make it right now. I'm not saying it's right, I'm just saying. People have an opportunity to make money by shitposting, we can all plea with them not to shitpost for the good of the platform, but they don't care about the platform succeeding, not until they have significant SP on the line. As long as people can easily make money by shitposting they will. Working hard is a great aspiration, and when you have to work hard to earn something, it's important to be able to work hard. When you don't have to work hard to get something, there are going to be people who don't work.
Hopefully I'm being overly pessimistic here, I dunno.
Hope you have a happy new year as well.
I joined, when I joined. Started with nothing, didn't know anyone, it was the same place, but without people selling votes. So imagine this for a second. That made it HARDER.
Why does it have to be easy? Since when is life easy? What's wrong with a challenge? I grabbed this thing by the balls! I climbed this mountain! I got to the top! I looked! There was another damn mountain!
Kept going.
Shit post this, shit post that. I don't post shit posts. I've had a few flops. I just kept on going. I don't care about shit posts. They don't bother me. They are not my competition. They are shit posts.
You're being way too pessimistic. If you scroll down to the bottom of my blog... you'll see how I struggled. For some reason you folks see us folks and want what we have. You want it NOW. You don't look to see what it took to actually have what you want.
Hard Work!
If you're here for money, but don't feel like working... you came to the wrong place.
I think we're probably just talking across from one another at this point. I'm not saying it has to be easy, I'm saying it is easy... It's easy to do it the wrong way. There is a huge amount of money to be made with bid bots. Way more than anyone just starting could make by writing quality content. You say you don't care about shit posts, but you should, because shit posts are making 10x what you're making on your legitimate content. They're robbing it from the reward pool and dragging the price of steem down with it.
It's not as simple as convincing people to grab the challenge by the horns for the sake of pride. It's literally convincing people to work hard for scrap instead of cheating to make money hand over fist. People don't much care about pride in that sense.
I don't look at you and want what you have NOW. I look at you and I see a lot of hard work to build a lot of value that people are now robbing from you.
I know what those shit posts are doing!
That's why I'm a little bit ticked off. Pardon me.
I'm not working hard for scrap.
Even if I earn less, I'm still doing better.
I don't want to sit and argue back and forth with long boring essays about nothing though. All apologies. I'm done here.
Understandable, sorry if I came across in an offensive way. I don't think we really disagree, and I do see and respect what you've built for yourself.
Have a good night.
You're not offending me. I just get defensive. This post pisses me off. The names on that list do not respect the arts. They do not respect the platform.
No true artist in their right mind would buy a vote. That is like buying the Mona Lisa, putting it on your wall, and acting like you're an artist because you have art.
I need eyes on my work. That's how this works. That's the only way this works.
If some goof came along and tried to tell me they were steemit's most popular and successful artist.. and I go and see that they've purchased votes.... They have become steemit's most popular and successful art fraud.
No matter how much they earn, someone from the art community will find out the truth some day.
Imagine being on television during an interview and the host asks where and how you got your start.
"I bought my fame on steemit!" They won't even tell the truth. They would be so ashamed.
I'm so fucking done talking about this.
I have to agree, I'm rocking along just fine, have not purchased a single vote or bitched for a participation ribbon. I go around and comment on the articles of others, engage in controversial topics, pick my battles, battle with whales on occasion etc. but most importantly I put in the work and I write quality content and engage my audience. I try and answer ever reply I receive, I put in the work, I am consistent and I provide my rapidly growing 300 followers consistency. This platform is about work and effort, nothing more, nothing less. Hell less than 40 days and I hit a $200 article out of the park.. Work, work, work, consistency, find topics that sell etc.
Do the vote bots suck? Yes.. they allow shit to float instead of sink to the bottom as it should.. do they need to be eradicated? Yup.. Go after the bots, the users, if a user spends 1SBD for an upvote, downvote them 2SBD..
Go after the infrastructure, burn the fields that grow the wheat.. fuck em''' If you are buying votes your a dickhead anyway and should be down voted simply based upon that.
The only thing I do not like is that there is one MAJOR PLAYER (Vote seller) MISSING FROM the list.. R A N D {...} A L E (I dare not say the name.. its like saying Beatlejuice 3 times, it appears and downvotes you 100% of 500,000 SP). I know that seller is an early adopter, I would hate to see this as a situation wherein the OP is simply eliminating the competition for a friend/ fellow early adopter etc but doing nothing to solve the problem.
I missed your comment somehow. My inbox has been a little busy lately. I don't normally involve myself in these battles. I saw this post, thought it meant they were trying to eliminate the vote buying altogether. Then I see contentjunkie's post and literally lost my shit. Normally, that member scams the system by posting copy/paste. I found that out later and I hope they aren't using those bought votes later on to reward that garbage.
His post was a perfect example of a shit post being up high in trending for no reason other than someone felt like feeling important so they bought their hero ticket and boarded the jet.
I'm glad I snapped. New people can at least now understand why such garbage is trending. People see that stuff up high and think it's there because it's good. Then we all look bad, because the post isn't good. It's just someone trying to be a hero, trying to make money out of a situation he has no control over changing.