It has been a month since I joined the Steemit platform! In this post I would like to talk about my experiences thus far.
The good:
I have to say for the most part content on Steemit is valuable, especially content pertaining to cryptocurrency, money and investing which is what I am interested in. The ability to find content that has been voted as valuable by others makes browsing steemit a lot easier, much like reddit.
I have been really impressed with the Steemit community, almost all users I have interacted with have been pleasant and supportive. The fact that users can be rewarded/punished for their comments seems to be an effective way to promote community.
One thing you notice straight away is that most Steemit users are here for the long term and all share a vision of fighting against established centralized platforms and power.
This is a big one for me, while I use adblocker most of the time when browsing websites, a lot of sites I visit for content consumption have started to make it impossible to view the site unless you are not using adblock. Steemit is rare in this regard as it does not rely on advertisers to keep the show running.
The bad
It took me just over three weeks to register for Steemit. This was quite unexpected as it was noted most accounts are approved within 24 hours or may take a week or more to review. I understand at the time Steemit was bombarded with new users however there is very little to tell users the status of their account registration. If there was an email advising that your account was undergoing the approval process users mind's would be put at ease. Had I not been looking on reddit and seeing others also waiting weeks I would have thought my account was rejected.
While I understand some bots serve a purpose, it becomes apparent quite quickly that bots have a large influence on Steemit. Sometimes I would view content that has maybe a paragraph or two from a copied article yet has received a large number of votes all within minutes. While I understand content is subjective, there is just no way that a post with such little value, blatant plagiarism and so many votes relative to time can be voted on by a human user.
While most of the whales here do a good job there are some that have an influence that isn't warranted in my opinion. The underlying proposition of those with 'influence' on the network makes sense, however I think a lot of accounts become a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. People upvote accounts with a lot influence not because of their content but rather the potential award for upvoting and commenting. Thus the goal of having a platform where the success of content and users is based upon their contribution to the network is being diluted as the actual content is being voted on for reasons other than being considered valuable.
Overall
I have to say overall I am impressed with the Steemit platform, it is still so early on in the game and I have no doubt as time goes by it will improve. Most importantly for me there is a strong community that want to see the platform succeed for what it is rather than some company trying to lure in users to generate profits. I will continue to post here for the foreseeable future. I believe as platforms such as youtube/facebook continue to have problems the adoption of Steemit will increase.
Thank you Steemit!