Be Careful Out There Kids!

The Internet Can Be A Dangerous Place.
And then there's Steemit Inc. & it's "Big Dogs".

You can choose to take the next thing I am going to tell you any way you wish. You can call it spam. You can say it's an attack piece. You can even agree or disagree with it until you're blue in the face. You can read it, watch the video posted within it, and decide, "Hey, that sounds great! I want to try that," or you might say to yourself (what I consider to be the ethical thing to do), "Wow! That's just wrong!". No matter what you choose to do, or not to do, after watching the video, I believe you might owe it to yourself to read what follows after it (especially if you are new here and are thinking about investing your money into the steem system).
Please watch & LISTEN to what is being said in this video. And know what he is saying is not theoretical, it can be done (and probably is being done, if not by bots then by people who only use steemit in the way he describes the bots could do it).

Video Source: Courtesy of @craig-grant's YouTube channel "Craig Grant".

Did you comprehend what is being explained here? And before anyone decides to defend the producer of said video, I will say now that I understand he is using the term "hypothetical" to soft sell the concept that this is not something that he is actively participating in. To leave the observer to believe this is just an idea in his head and nothing more. And yet he is encouraging potentially thousands and thousands of people to attempt to code and run such a bot. If you think this is good for the blockchain, think again.
Think of it this way. Your new to the steem platform and don't really understand the game. After the first week or two you're struggling to understand why you aren't getting much exposure, how your posts only pulled in a small SMALL portion of what you see others pulling in. In addition, you start noticing single upvotes worth anywhere from $1 up to $40+. So your thinking to yourself, "How can I reap such rewards and have that kind of voting power?" and decide to look into it. Chances are all the other steemit blogs on the subject tell you, "BUY STEEM! Invest more than your time and content. In order to increase your voting power, and your potential for exposer in the process, you have to put your money into it".
Excited in the idea of such power and profit, you immediately purchase hundreds (or, even worse, thousands) of dollars in BTC to exchange/trade for STEEM. And you do see an immediate increase in voting power and a slow increase in exposure as well (more followers, potentially more upvotes from others).
Sounds great, right?
Not exactly. Enter @craig-grant, and other malicious Whales or even bots now.
You know all that money you just put into this thing? Well, guess what. The majority of it goes right into the rewards pool and is being sucked up by these kinds of accounts by a thing called self-upvoting.
You see, these accounts have been around for a lot longer than most of the rest of us. This whole project began with 0 users around 4-11-2016, and by 7-09-2016 it had approximately 10,00 Registered Users (and at that point less than half of them were active - and today it is gaining new users by the hundreds and thousands each day, approaching a total user base of almost 250,000). @craig-grant joined somewhere around June 2016 or sooner. These are the folks that pumped a bunch of their own money into the start-up platform and blockchain. Sounds like we should be thanking them, right? Some of them, YES. Yet some of them, NOT AT ALL.
In fact, we should all be researching them - and praising them or calling them out when appropriate (it's not a transparent system for nothing people, would you hand a pile of your hard earned cash to a complete stranger on the street based solely on their promise it will make you more influential and wealthy? You know, because BLOCKCHAIN. I doubt it).
What I believe these accounts/users are doing is baiting all us newcomers into investing real fiat currency. And then using techniques described in this video they are draining the rewards pool with malicious intent with their so-called right to self-upvote.

Image found on Pinterest
So all that money you put into this thing.... it will force you to make a choice at this point. And your choices are:
"If You Can't Beat Them, Join Them" and concentrate all your voting power on yourself (self-upvoting) and upvoting a selected group of your friends who are doing the same thing - being sure to give out just a few pennies here or dollars there to a Red Fish or Minnow so you can justify bragging how much you help others and are good for the community as a whole. And even then, if your lucky you just might break even or see a bit of profit and success. But keep in mind these other users are a lot older and more powerful than you, so they will always get a bigger piece of everything than you (bearing in mind you only invested a little bit, investing some insane amount like $500,000 would be a game changer for all those fools).
OR
Respectfully reserve your upvotes for others posts and comments while only upvoting very little of your own. If you're lucky you just might stay ahead, but your content better be out of this world. Even so, with some Whales habitually self-upvoting they are still not leaving much in the rewards pool for the rest of us no matter how good our content is.

Same user @craig-grant here in this next video, this time explaining how to maximize his profits by flagging (takes the value of his upvote power AWAY from a post - essentially taking any money people like you & me many have contributed to the post and putting it back in the rewards pool, where he and his kind can drain it from with their powerful self-upvoting value). He even says he flags not because he thinks it's spam or undeserving yet because it's profitable and popular [but not his?] !!! WT_ !?!?!


If your content is good, you shouldn't have to resort to lies, manipulation, and what nearly amounts to criminal fraud in order to be profitable and successful here. That is, so long as it's not too late and these malicious types are now just to big and too well connected to prevent them from taking all the worms and leaving the rest of us with just the castings (worm poop).
Fortunately it seems there are still enough righteous, honest and true Whales left out their to keep the scales somewhat balanced (here's looking at you @gentlebot 😇 and @randowhale 🐋).
If "earning your fortune" includes convincing people to invest real money knowing you are going to get most of it through your "hacks" and "techniques" and "style of being Da Man".... sounds like criminal fraud to me (if it quacks like a duck....).

If you agree or disagree, please be a part of the conversation and voice your opinions in the comments. And please be sure to & even give it an if you can "spare some change".

Here I am, those who will defend this concept of "earning". And I'm not afraid. So blow me (blow me a kiss).

Video Courtesy of Mutoid Man.