You made a post. You poured your heart out into it, carefully proof-reading and re-writing it. Your fingers ache from typing for fours hours straight. You have inserted all kinds of suitable and witty gifs and images into the post. You feel like this one is your magnum opus. It has got to trend. You decide to glance over it for the twelfth and final time. You scroll up to the beginning of the post and slowly make your way down the post, checking each comma, each period, the grammar, the sentence structure and et cetera. You realize that this is it; the ultimate money-making machine. A cash cow. For a second you close your eyes and visualize how it's gonna be up there with the Tahitian travel posts, with the big-dogs. You open your eyes and click on "Post". You immediately close the so as to not "jinx" your chances of getting to the top. You shut off your laptop, go watch a movie and maybe even take a little nap. Writing things for many hours tends to be tiring.
Your eyes open and you realize you have woken, free from all the stress that you took with yourself to sleep. The first thought that comes into your mind is the amazing post you made. You get butterflies in your chest, the little kid inside you jumps up and down with excitement. It's the most fun he has had in a while. You power on your laptop and think about that money your post would have made while the laptop boots. You stare at your own reflection in the black screen of the laptop; you see yourself smiling. You open your browser and type "s" into the address bar which instantly brings up "steemit.com" which seems to happen because of you visiting that site every 10 minutes. As the page loads, you feel nothing but excitement. There's a part of you that feels like your post has tanked but you ignore it, hoping for the best. You don't see your name on the list of the trending posts on the front page. You brush off the negativity, the disappointment, thinking that "it is nothing to worry about surely my post would've made a couple of thousands at the very least." You keep your chin up and suddenly you start to show a smile. You click on your portrait beside the "Submit a Story" button and then click on "Blog". Unexpectedly, the page loads very quickly. And it hits you like truck...
$0.07 | 5 hours ago by ( ) in Steemit
You have barely made any money. Your jaw falls open as you scramble to see where you went wrong, what you did wrong. You decide to compare other posts with yours.
You reach the front-page only to see that an effortless story has earned more than $5,000 while your original article has made almost next to nothing. The $5,000 post is being showered with more and more money. Whereas no one has bothered to check out, much less comment on your masterpiece of a post.
So why did this happen?
Well, the Steemwhales know which posts to upvote and which ones to not. They knew that if they upvote the $5,000 one, the people will tell their friends and relatives which will then tell their friends and relatives. They knew that the success story will be posted on Facebook and Reddit and Twitter. So they didn't bother to upvote you. They upvoted the post which they knew would be better for the platform. The Steemwhales knew that upvoting that kind of post will get them huge exposure and as a result large amounts of people would be interested in Steemit and that's exactly what happened, much to your dismay. A few people did upvote your post but not the ones with huge amounts of Steem Power. You feel let down, disappointed; you slam the lid down and go out with your friends.
An ending note
This post is definitely not meant to be a rant. Rather think of it as criticism. And a constructive one at that. Steemit should implement at least something to congratulate and compliment the original and honest material. The internet is filled with copy-pasta as is. Originality is very important for the survival of this social media platform otherwise, what is the difference between a crap-tier social media website and steemit itself?
Thanks for reading! Hope you enjoyed this post.