The Bad Content Issue (#1)

The Problem: Quantity Instead of Quality

Me & Steemit.

I am not a professional writer nor am I an experienced blogger or social media user. I am on Steemit only because of my interest in cryptocurrencies. That's my reason for being on a new platform among it's famous "first million" users. The idea of writing a blog and sharing my thoughts has never been so intriguing as of now. Steemit is a good project that attracts many new users from all corners of life, offering a different kind of experience.

Consistency.

While reading articles about "How to use Steemit" I've noticed, that the most shared rule is consistency. Being consistently active is and has always been the most crucial step on the way to success. And that's exactly where Steemit's problem lies. In general (outside of Steemit), you will be successful if you contribute great work on a regular basis. Some people claim that you could be successful even without quality, just because there are many successful people on the internet who contribute close to no value to the community. But that is more then questionable.

Daydreaming.

On a network with close to 4 billion users it is no surprise, that many people made it even without any skill or quality contribution. But if you look closely you'll quickly find, that among all those internet users (business people, bloggers, instagramers, youtubers, writers, designers, programmers etc.) mostly the good once thrive. It's only a "few lucky" online superstars that give us the strange feeling that one could get rich without any knowledge or skill whatsoever. It might be true for some but certainly not for most of us.

Down on the Bottom.

Like everything else in the "Crypto-Universe", Steemit works differently. On here, quantity comes first and then you need quality later. Quantity makes you famous and quality increases your earnings. I find this very troubling! It can be very difficult in some categories to find something valuable, especially within the "new" tab. Since everybody at the bottom just trades upvote for upvote or uses bots to get visibility, it is not required to publish anything of value. More than half of your page visitors don't even read the content, they just smash the Like-Button and expect the same from you. The "new tab's" on Steemit are trashed with stolen newspaper articles, bad English, pictures without any text or shady malicious links. I know that not everyone (including myself) knows the proper perfect way of English articulating but that is not the problem here. It is users who don't even bother and not even trying to spell their words correctly. I mean. Come on people, Microsoft even tells you how to spell words it's a matter of minutes.

My Answer.

I have no idea of how to solve this issue, but I trust the community that we'll find a solution over time. My first answer to this problem will be a weekly promotion of my favorite 5 Steemers of that week. I'll furthermore use every Sunday to unfollow everyone who is not even trying to contribute something useful and replace the unfollowed by new users from "introduceyourself".

I know that this won't make a huge difference considering my low visibility as a new user, but I hope to inspire at least some other newbies to weight quality over quantity.