Something that struck me from the first day was the lack of spicy language, flame wars and controversy. In real life, I swear like a sailor. Most people do. Sometimes I write like that, but am keeping it clean because of the reigning culture.
Yesterday I stumbled upon my first antagonistic posts and comments, predominantly whales who are pissed off at at voting bot abuse and reward pool rape. If I had popcorn, I would've grabbed it. Utterly entertaining and educational for a fresh minnow.
Personally, I don't use upvote bots mainly because I normally don't have SBD to bid and pay. I also don't want 90% of comments on my posts to consist of "Congratulations, you got a 38% upvote from Bot X". I do have some class and restraint. Not that I'm against using bots and other tools to help you stand up, because on your own as a noob, you will get nowhere without the odd resteem.
The tools I use are the post promotion sections on a few Discord channels and a single resteem per post. I have also set up Steemauto to upvote about 5 people whenever I have 100% VP. This is free. My posts have to fail or succeed on its own merit. I myself am from a "developing country", along with large part of the community. This why you see this desperation to make actual money as quickly as possible. Life on $200 per month is no joke. I don't even have that, but I do have my pride and dignity.
To get back to the flags and response wars, it gets quite heated with some choice insults thrown around and that makes me happy because you can't just have rainbows and unicorns all the time. And when people are at their worst, they tend to become funny and creative with their insults. Yet, I hope it doesn't spread. I used to spend my life on forums, Reddit and Facebook and I would never want Steemit to degrade to that level, but if I'm going to speak more naturally now, within reason. Expect the odd fuck and shit from me. Where I come from, the word "cunt" is basically a term of endearment, but it seems like it's quite the bad word in the US. So I'll refrain from using cunt, even thought I've met some awesome cunts on here.