Now, there has been a lot of conversations about building a middle class on the steemit blockchain to ease the stress of the few whales who are saddled with the responsibility of disturbing the wealth on the blockchain. It's obvious that the whales/dolphins/orca/minnows cannot attend to every redfish. Even the few they are able to help have to fend for themselves at some point because the whales/dolphins/orca/minnows have to attend to another set of redfishes who need help also. Most times this support doesn't extend to a sufficient period of time to allow these said supported new users gain ground on the platform to be able to stand on their own.
There are various initiatives by many top users to add value to the steemit blockchain, like delegating steem power to active new users, upvoting quality posts, building communities, etc. However, no one really talks about resteeming that much. I believe it can help build followership, which is vital for every new account.
When I joined steemit about a month ago, I got about a hundred followers on the first day. Unfortunately, these followers are either bots or alt accounts that hardly engage. I made a mistake of following some of these kind of account of my previous account.
For a new users who is followed by alt accounts and bots, there is not real chance of surviving on the blockchain after the benevolent acts of the whales/orca/dolphins stop. So you have users who have built a reputation through engagement but have little steem power and when the said aids from the top users stop, they are out in the cold and it takes guts to continue after this happens. That's why we have poor retention rates on steemit. However, this is where steemit communities come in.
However, many young users would rather interact on the blockchain than in little groups on discord. Though this is not advisable, but it is the reality. If I'm to be honest, it's easy to get carried away with chatting, and before one knows it they're neglecting their main objective which is to grow their account.
So on the issue of poor followership on steemit. Yes, even top accounts face the same problem of having inactve followers who make the bulk of their followers, however, they enjoy the attention of my active users notwithstanding. And to be honest, we have a poor culture here of not following each other on steemit. People will leave nice comments on your post(s) several times but will never follow you, I wonder why? Is it this same popularity concept on other social media platforms, where people rather have more followers than follow other accounts?
Currently, I follow about 61 accounts. That's a small amount compared to the number of followers I have. This is as a result of what I said earlier--inactive accounts who hardly engage. Trust me, if I comment on a post(s) made by a certain account more than twice I am following because it has the kind of content I fancy. It doesn't matter of they follow or not, but this doesn't help state of things on steemit. We can't hope to find all the great contents on trend section. We need to discover new accounts that make quality content and follow, so we can keep track of their progress and help if we can.
I believe resteeming can be a tool used to curb this problem of poor followership that has bedevilled my new users. Now, imagine a whale/dolphin/ocra resteeming a post made by a redfish several times. They might not upvotes but what they have done is worth more, as they have helped improve the visibility of the content and the account. This in turn will lead to boost in the number of really engagement and followership of the said account.
What do you think?