Today, I'll speak on my experience with Steemit and 3 things that could be improved upon on the platform.
- Bots
A big problem with the trending page on the site is that it is filled with content that has been upvoted by whale bots (bots that have high Steemit power, which awards high amount of money to the content creator upon upvoting) which creates a page filled with self-promoted content as you can pay the bots to upvote your content. With an influx of self-promoted content on the trending page, it makes it absurdly hard for actual content creators who are doing the right thing to get upvotes and views from active/actual Steemit users as the self-promoted content is overwhelming the trending/hot tabs. A positive in the situation however, is the amount of Steemit users that have created users to flag those who have used the bots to boost their content, by having users who are flagging the content it allows those who are doing the wrong thing to be punished although it isn’t enough due to the vast number of users who are abusing the whale bots. - Stolen content
There is one thing that annoys me and that is having my personal content stolen (which hasn’t happened on Steemit but has on others) which isn’t great so I know how frustrating it is to see blatantly rip content off other media platforms in an attempt to gain upvotes due to the success the original content had on the previous platform. What this creates is an ecosystem that is filled to the brink with plagiarism and appears fractured. - The search functionality
Now this one could just be down to me, but the search functionality absolutely sucks on Steemit. The trying to search for tags is annoying as you have to scroll down a long page full of every tag on the Steemit platform as you try to find the one you are looking for, or instead you can use the annoying built in google search function that doesn’t feel uniform and fluent with the website to use. Instead, the Steemit page should have its own search function that allows for quick searches for specific tags and users instead of the sidebar or the clunky google search function.
Although there are some negatives to the platform there are also positives too and I do enjoy the concept of this platform and will continue to use it. For this to be a functional platform to compete with other media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook or YouTube it needs to be more fluid in the way you move about the platform and ultimately remove the bots and plagiarised content.