Well I am sorry about the title, I just thought it was funny because so many users are asking me to join the “Secret Voting Ring”, the truth is that there is no such ring. Let me explain what is actually going on.
Steemit is a platform where you can make money online and as far as civilization goes where there is money there is problems, seems like fighting over money is inherent to human society.
Lately I have been accused of being part of a secret “Voting Ring”, I never heard that term before but I think it means being part of a voting circle to game the system and receive profit. To make that assumption, user 
The real reasons why some Steemians are successful
I believe many new users could be seduced by this emerging conspiracy theory, so I wanted to quickly summarize why his logic is faulty and the “Voting Ring” concept is inaccurate:
- Many users of the “ring” have been on Steem since the beginning, so it is logical that we follow each other and as they appear on my personal feed I tend to vote for most of them, a very good example of this would be
,
or
. I vote for them because I have read them for over a year now and I like their content.
- Because some authors consistently make good content, they tend to get high pay-outs, because they get good payouts a lot of curators will vote them to get more curation rewards. This is a circle of course, but it is the way Steem is designed, you are encouraged to vote for posts that will get you good rewards.
- Some of the members of the “Ring”, like myself, have written over 1,000 posts, have over 500 followers and hold a reputation above 60. With this combination, isn’t logical that they will get high payouts?
- People vote on users who have similar interest. In my case I write and vote a lot of crypto related posts and I assume people who vote me are into crypto as well.
Hiding payout amounts
I believe it would be a good idea to hide the amount of money posts are making. To begin with, I don’t think its beneficial to be attracting users only based on the amount of money they can get on Steemit; secondly, some highly paid authors are becoming targets because of their payouts.
On my last post I got a comment that stated “This post is not worth 300 USD because…”. I have also seen lots of conspiracy theories surrounding well-paid authors, which makes me think: