So most everyone agrees Steemit is far from perfect. In fact it can be quite confounded. The stats show that most new accounts become inactive very quickly. Heck even the founder of Steemit doesn’t use Steemit! So why are those who are active users still here? Well I would say it mostly boils down to a few camps with one ultimate end point. Those camps are large accounts that typically got started early and between their own SP and their friends SP make money posting while getting the benefit of reaching a descent size audience that typically aids their work on other social media platforms. This group is quite loyal to Steemit but are also optimizing their accounts (taking enough out to not be at full risk of loss) and are not very vocal about problems with Steem. They don’t need to rock the boat as near term gains are most important. Then there are very active members with large accounts running businesses. They are often whales and believe in Steemit but can be blinded by their own success to how fragile Steemit is and how many problems it has. Then there is a large group (myself included) that at some level think Steemit is worth some time and effort because there is a chance it will evolve in the right direction and the value of the platform (hence the price of Steem) will rise. I probably didn’t word that exactly the way I wanted but I’m in a hurry and you get the point.
Steemit doesn’t work like it should but it could. In the meantime users are being resourceful in trying to keep themselves alive using various methods to create value. When you really do the math bots are breakeven at best but help build followers so that maybe someday you don’t need the bots. If you want to help a fellow minnow who has made a good post you comment and resteem or at least it makes you feel like you helped them. Really that does very little because most of the attention is going towards material produced or promoted by whales. So until a fix comes along if you really find a post that you really want to help you should pay to promote it. It’s not ideal but you would be surprised how much compounding could occur for the minnow community if every time one of us saw a post we liked spent 0.01 to 1.50 SBD with our favorite bot to promote a another’s post. It would be a much more accurate form of curation, leverage your Steem much more than just directly giving it away, and be somewhat of a counter to the scary aggressive side of steem that many minnows experience early on. A lot of stone throwing by some of the big guys here. Anyhow, I could go on but .....another time perhaps 😀