Hey there
I joined Steemit some time ago as I was looking for a place to blog about my adventures in cryptocurrency investing and trading. Initially, I was filled with fervour about writing posts on a platform that appeared to be community driven and all about supporting people making content with value. Unfortunately that feeling was only brief as I became more familiar with the regular posters and the users that appear regularly in the trend feeds.
I'd written two posts, and read a hundred more, upvoting those I felt gave me insights, and hoping I might too find a place in the general community here. Instead I seemed to go down the rabbit hole and find that users are guarded with their upvoting, you get many views and some comments that your post was good (but no upvotes). The glow started to wane a little.
Reading the feeds became frustrating... Always the same users splashing their upvotes in the same pool. The feeds become pointless as the top trending posts are usually rubbish, rubbish with hundreds of dollars of upvoting, driven by a seeming plethora of users circle jerking each other. Whales delegating SP to obvious business partners and using the platform to generate cash for themselves by scamming other users into believing there is value in the posts. Hell there must be value, right? Look at the upvote count and massive funds attributed to the post... It is mostly false.
The passion for steemit dims further... I've now spent weeks reading of the in-fighting and flagging wars that rage on. Finding the gems is time consuming and seemingly pointless, you can find better content elsewhere with much greater ease.
I'm probably opening myself up to some of this flagging and flaming now. I've read tonnes of posts of this ilk by frustrated publishers, and I think many join Steemit with the same passion I had only to walk away disappointed. The general idea of Steemit is good but the gaming of the system comes at a cost.
I'm not going to give up just yet and I'm looking into how this community might be fixed. The governance behind the platform I'm not yet familiar with.
Peace all. This is just my 0.2c :) Take care of you.