Hey guys, iv'e only been on steemit for a few weeks now(almost 3 to be exact) and i wanted to share some thoughts on Steemit.
So a friend of mine got me on to steemit and before i knew it i was hooked, i was incredibly interested in the platform and the people on it and the prospect of making a living wage from it was even better, so for the past 3 weeks iv'e pushed out content as much as I possibly can and tried to make it the best quality i can give.
However there are some massive downsides to this that iv'e noticed, let me be the first to say that i'm not afraid of hard work to build a following and i love writing so this is the perfect fit for me however I find that some things on the site go unanswered, especially from minnows who post great content but are practically ignored by the community in favor of pretty vapid articles from dolphins and whales.
My self being a fat minnow i experienced this and essentially have had to dumb down my content down sometimes into things people are actively looking for just to get my steem power up, and I have no problem with that as a whole, it's a free market you go were the money is.
However i fear it diminishes the site as a whole when someone writing a 1000 word original piece on a subject makes 3 cents but someone copy pasting "Top 10 things you didn't know about watermelons!" ends up making $300, again, it's a free market but it doesn't have a dampening affect.
There are also numerous people on the site that don't contribute anything at all and instead raid the comment sections of trending posts begging for up-votes, again if it works it's good for you, but it doesn't contribute anything and lowers the quality of the site.
Steemit, is in essence a popularity contest the more followers you have the more likely they are to read your articles and increase your bottom line but for some people who don't like being disingenuous with what they post, myself included, it poses a problem to either change what you're writing about, or soldiering on releasing original content with little to no reward.
This may seem like sour grapes to some, i'm not saying my content absolutely deserves $500 a post simply because I exist, but there are many content contributors that are simply over looked for buzzfeed style articles that really serve no purpose.
Do yourself a favor if you're reading this, go to the new tab and refresh it every 10 seconds for a minute and watch the articles that make the most money and the articles that are drowned out in a sea of hashtags, being liberal about it i'd say it's roughly 70/30% in terms of low quality vs high quality.
I also want to stress that this article is solely aimed at minnows, not tunas and whales.
There are a lot of people on this site that deserve the money they're getting people like (if you don't know her you should) or my new buddy
(he deserves more though :P) but there are also many, many minnows that produce amazing quality posts that are being lost in a tide of inane content and "follow for follow" articles that inevitably lose confidence and stop posting all together.