A blog by
It's a place for me to give birth to my thoughts. Meta thoughts about "Steemit", external thoughts about life and experiences. My aim is to bring value to people, entertain the audience and craft my writing skills all at the same time. I will write short to medium size blogs because I believe that today more than ever time is money and attention is hard to get.
In my first post I had written about some use cases for Steemit. Here I wanted to describe one use case that I see as negative: Steemit as the new E-begging platform.
E-begging according to Wikipedia is :
"Internet begging, cyber-begging, e-begging or Internet panhandling is the online version of traditional begging, asking strangers for money to meet immediate and other needs (money, food and shelter). Internet begging differs from street begging in that it can be practiced with relative anonymity, thereby eliminating or reducing the shame and disgrace apparent of begging in public."
There are many begging site online where you can ask for money. There are many reasons such as health problems or maybe financial problems that people ask for money. I myself encountered E-begging within STEAM virtual goods market. Young kids with no money begged me to transfer them some virtual goods items in the CS:GO games.
E-begging within Steem is pretty simple; it's the act of writing "PLEASE UPVOTE ME WHALE" type of posts or replies. Praying to god that a whale spots their post/reply and up vote it to gain the lucrative spot at the front page.
In the transaction of E-begging one side profits and one side is loses. The donator loses money and the beggar wins. I claim that Steemit brings a big revolution for the internet beggars. One side profits (the beggar) and the other side usually a whale doesn't loses. I mean it's simple how can you lose when you just up vote a post/reply. There's only an upside for the whale to profit from the blogging rewards of the post.
Here is an example post and replies of "PLEASE UPVOTE ME WHALE" that succeeded: Here
The post is fine but the replies for mr @berniesanders are plentiful:
Am I criticizing this act of E-begging? No never this is the spirit of Steemit, open to opinions and acts. I do think that whales should refrain from feeding the fish. The community must learn that positive value to the community and quality shall be reward.
Shower thought : I wonder if self voting on replays is beneficial.