HOW TO GET A WHALES' ATTENTION

Ever wonder how to grab the attention of a highly sought-after Steemian? A whale, shark, or a dolphin perhaps? Me too.

(curtesy of news-entertainment.net)

When an author has 500 comments on their post, and you've only got 130 SP, is there much chance that you'll get your post answered? Well, sometimes - if you ask smart questions. Other times, you make a thoughtful comment and get no response. So, when/if this happens - what to do? Me - I just keep on trying. "NEVER QUIT," as Winston Churchill so eloquently said.

So, there's a lot of SteemIt chatter about "Self Up-Voting" and what to do about it. I believe the conversation has become extremely misguided. People seem to be more interested in telling others how they should be using their wealth, according to other peoples' ideas of what is & isn't "valuable." I'm not talking about Spammers - which are generally accepted to be annoying and useless. I'm talking about me using my SteemIt account as a savings-account: a way for me to grow my own money, to feed my wife, children, and family. Now, it seems that if I continue with these views - I'll be branded a "bad guy" for not giving away all of my upvotes to good content creators.

Here is Hive account@stellabelles original post, which includes my response - somewhere WAY down on the bottom of the other 500 responses: https://steemit.com/abuse/@stellabelle/how-to-destroy-steemit-in-3-easy-steps

And, here is my response - IN MY OWN POST!
Let's see if this works...

Taking away the monetary reward for upvoting your own post will simply cause more people to look for ways to auto-swap upvotes by using bots, joining guilds, and creating secondary accounts.

Next, there's going to have to be another hard-fork to get rid of bots, or change the rules for bots, or flag people out of SteemIt for belonging to certain vote-swapping guilds, and having multiple accounts. (OH, WAIT!!! DAN LARIMER HAS MULTIPLE ACCOUNTS ?!?! BUT...)

This is the exact same problem we have gotten into with the Tax Code in the USA. Now, there are so many rules, only a person who's trained for a lifetime in tax law can even begin to understand how it all works.

You like to use SteemIt for philanthropy, blogging, and the curation of good content. Maybe I like to use SteemIt to provide an interest-bearing savings account to help me take care of myself and my family. Somebody else may like to use SteemIt to promote their YouTube channel about growing weed. Another person likes to spread the "gospel" of their religion using an online presence. Is your purpose for using SteemIt more "virtuous" than mine is, or anybody elses? It's a matter of judgement and opinion. Should one group of people be trying to control how other people decide to spend or save their own money? Do you have the right to tell me what is valuable and what is not valuable, and then implement new rules on my savings account - because I use it to accumulate money to feed my children, instead of giving it to content creators?

Final Thoughts: Why not let SteemIt be a place of many varied uses and interests, rather than a place where one group of people tries to control how another group of people decides to use a diverse and varied social media platform/blockchain/financial instrument. SteemIt is not just a place for Content Creators - it is a place for Content Creators, Programmers, casual web-surfers, financial investments, and 3-eyed Ravens. Why place more limits upon it? Why so serious? Let's not try to make the external world conform to our individual set of values - let's value freedom, for each individual to choose. (Extreme cases of "abuse" can be dealt with by the Whales on a case-by-case basis, as they have been doing all along.)

Hive account@stellabelle Do you remember why people are leaving places like FaceBook and YouTube to search out alternative social-media platforms? Is it because they have such good "rules" for keeping everybody in line? Is it because their rules are so "fair" to everyone? Is it because they allow everyone their own, self-deterministic freedom to speak about & do what they want to??? Has Dan Larimer designed a poorly put-together blockchain here?!?! Are you better at advising the Steem developers what their policies "should be," as opposed to what they are? Did HF19 "fix" everything? Did it make it worse? Is HF20 going to do a better job at fixing all these "problems" than the previous 19 attempts? I don't know - but I do see some huge "blind spots" in your persepective on what SteemIt is, and what SteemIt "should be."