Steemit: What the End of the World Looks Like

in #steemit7 years ago (edited)

I've been on Steemit for about a week. This place a hot mess.

I wanted to sit in my corner, produce fiction and make some nickel and dimes here and there.

But I can't stand the bullshit.

The features are absurd. Tags? That’s it?

No groups? No direct messages? No way to designate rewards beyond votes?

Curators (whales) are supposed to ‘find’ ‘quality’ content. Yeah, sure. Why would they do that when they can upvote themselves? Or their friends?

The site design itself buries content within ten minutes. It's a flood of spam and trash, of blogs full of stock photos and mind-numbing content.

Imagine a collection of the most vapid and banal sentences possible in the English language, set alongside basic-bitch stock photos. That is the flood that is /new/

I’d rather cut my eyes out than sort through it all.

Hell, this will probably get buried before anyone sees it.

The voting pool is dominated by bots and vote-rings, by mafioso scammers and ponzi schemers. There's like, what, twelve people that try to fight that? But they can't because the site design prevents them from actually DOING anything about it. You get flagged, you lose everything, you get the threat message:

Dont Fuck With Me Or Else.

Those are your curators.

The wealth inequality mirrors failed states and the worst that capitalism has to offer.

The mafia’s mediocre content gets paraded as high culture. The bar for quality drops into the sewer.

For capitalist profit, Steemit’s content becomes a coterie of the dull.

"Great Post" "Excellent" "Like Me" "Follow Me" "Wonderful" "So Amazing"

This is the limit to self-expression in the 21st century. A wet sponge offers more to the conversation.

Obsequious masses bend over, servile, hoping that a whale might give them a dollar. They can’t actually DO anything because, again, the site’s own fucking design prevents them.

Walking into Steemit is discovering a dumpster fire.

It's an anarcho-capitalist nightmare. This is what happens when you monetize social media.

Enjoy the pennies or throw money into bots. Build a ponzi-scheme to compete with the ones that dominate /trending/.

Hear that? Sycophants. Don’t worry, they won’t actually read this.

What’s needed is a proper guillotine. What's needed is whale hunting. But don't worry mafias, we can't actually threaten your profits. The site design keeps it that way.

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I know it from the inside. I have adapted to survive over here, believe my dreams of making pennies out a post were sent to the tomb before hitting the first submit button.

No groups? No direct messages? No way to designate rewards beyond votes?

Join Utopian-io and ask for those features. Is open source.

The site design itself buries content within ten minutes. It's a flood of spam and trash, of blogs full of stock photos and mind-numbing content.

Indeed, trending are dominated by the same people every day. All you do is put 30-50 SBD a post into bid-bots and you are set or ask your whale friend for an upvote.

The wealth inequality mirrors failed states and the worst that capitalism has to offer.

Same sh*t different day. Camuflate and work against it, don't go full Bandana now, it will make you an easy target.

Is not that funny here, but I will keep working to provide quality content. For 1000 shitty memes and only 3 sentences one pictures post, there will be one diamond. I hope to be part of the latter.

Do not go against the whales now, wait for that later. It makes no sense now to do it and you risk to be placed in a downvote oblivion.

The problem is we can't actively combat this as normal users. For example, I researched one of the whales that regularly posts derivative content for $500 a pop, and in my opinion I think they promote 1) a ponzi scheme 2) a possible cult 3)display mafia behavior.

But if I call them out by name I'll get flagged.

look for me on disscord, @santana33#2022 and send me the info there please, just curious.

I hear you man. It's so very flawed. It's by design made so that the cashed up whales have actually more visibility than anyone else, plus when people see lots of money in the payout for a post they'll pile in to get a bit of curator kickbacks. Don't make me laugh with the curation as well, it's so pitiful what you get plus you are really very restricted with how many things you can upvote. If you vote more than about 10 times a day you run out of voting power. Not that your 3 or 15 SP vote amounts to anything to begin with, anything below $0.06 or something like that you don't even get a payout at all. So either somehow get in the good graces of a cashed up whale, or somehow get like 1000 people to upvote you that aren't whales. To do the former, basically join one of the many endlessly circlejerking cryptocurrency discussions and hype around how Steem and Ether are the best things ever, and to do the latter you're shit out of luck because no one will ever see your post (I saw it on Reddit, funny enough), because either it's completely buried within minutes or they just like you are more busy devising schemes how to make it at all on this platform rather than actually interacting with it. I'm actually surprised how civil it is here still, considering how lax and non-existent the moderation is. Maybe the fact that you need to fork out 5 Steem to get an account or sign up with your phone number and wait forever discourages the 4chan trolls. I don't know. Maybe I don't see the horrendous shitfights because of how bad the tags work, and the fact that everyone talks non stop about cryptocurrencies.

And people complain about how bad Reddit is.