People sometimes forget the 'social' part of social media.
I've been watching the heated debates from the sidelines concerning bots on Steemit. Those for and against them all have strong opinions in favor or against using them and I suppose there's some truth in some of those views.
There is another way to use this platform though that can add value to the community without having to resort to buying upvotes and that is to be social. It is, after all, a social media platform, something I think people seem to forget. Their focus is so riveted on earning a reward that the idea of plugging into a community of people with common interests alludes them.
When I first started using this platform almost 2-years ago I was intrigued by the possibility of being rewarded for posting just like everyone else I suppose, but I could see early on that building a community of people with a common interest, something we are already doing on platforms that don't rewards us at all, was a way to benefit ever-growing numbers of people as they join those communities.
Sure, a new user could pay for a service that gets them upvotes right out of the gate when they first join, but how personal is that? Do the people upvoting them really care about what they are posting about and does the poster really care?
Communities centered around common interests seems more genuine, more interesting, and bolsters user retention. We like hanging out with and interacting with people who share the same interests as we do.
It does take longer for someone, anyone, to start these communities, but in the long run I believe it's better for the platform. For starters, people engage differently in a community of their peers. The discussions are centered around the topics they share, not around the pros and cons of using bots.
I don't feel any animosity towards bot use, per se, but it does bother me to see so many heated discussions around it for the simple reason that it makes the platform look bad.
Every time people argue about bot use, whether you should or shouldn't use them, throwing acidic arguments at each other to defend their positions, or worse, attack each other for their opposing views, it is indelibly written on the walls of Google's search engines forever.
Every new person researching Steemit and considering if they are going to join the platform or not will now see these damning debates and it could turn them off from joining altogether. Or they may start to believe that the only way to get rewarded is to buy bot voting power. Either way, we lose a potential new user.
This arguing in permanent ink does no one any good in the long run. I know the platform is young and youngsters go through growing pains, but try to remember, in the heat of your moment, that this is a social media platform and you are writing in permanent ink.
If you Google Steemit right you'll find a platform that seems to talk about itself a lot.
I understand a new platform like ours needs to work things out as it grows, but we can't just keep talking about ourselves and expect the platform to attract mainstream users. We need to start talking about other topics that have a wide interest to a lot of different types of people.
In closing, I just want to remind everyone that being social on a social media platform and building and joining communities around topics that interest you will have the same longterm effect as buying votes without the cost or the damaging debate surrounding it.