An outsiders first impression of Steemit
Upon the arrival on the front page, I was welcomed with, well, I don't know. The titles are all in Korean, and here is a little fact, I am not Korean. Nonetheless, I kept scrolling. Being the selfish money-seeking person that I am, my eyes were attached to the "dolla" sign, and it was magical.
Actually, it wasn't. The very first good impression that I have made that the posts can generate the money on this site, quickly squashed by trying to justify why those posts have that much money. I'll be honest, with that language and with the content of those posts, I couldn't help by thinking about malware working over the clock to generate that dough. That some warehouses storing hundreds of black-marketed GPUs are interacting with these posts that are made here. Are these thoughts justified? Well, let's see.
https://steemit.com/kr-game/@zinasura/76
I was scrolling down the feed and saw one user with a post about "Legend of Zelda". Hey, I like that game! Is this post leaking the new game footage? Does it contain proof Link's real name is actually Zelda, and the theorists have been right all along? Not gonna lie, that deserves some juice poured on the author. Well, does it contain that? Nope. The post contains the transcripts of the game. Yep. The whole channel is dedicated to transcribing the Legend of Zelda game in the Korean language.
Wait wait wait, are you telling me that all I have to do is transcribe the games into the Korean language? Is that it? Have I cracked some meta-algorithm or I have figured out how mafia works. I don't know dude, let me check out more posts.
I swear to God, I have seen some nonsensical one-paragraph posts that were generating money like crazy. Cmon dude, there is something very unjust there, it's evident.
At this time of writing this, I am wondering, what is Steemit site in the first place?
Okay, I understand that it is firstly a blogging site, that is decentralized yadi yadi yada... But really, what is this? If it's a blogging site then why the posts (at least in the trending section) are so low quality? Where are the categories dude? I feel kinda nauseated. I want to like it but I just can't. The whole goal of the site is to drag the users into the blockchain and trying to make it popular by incentivizing the people to contribute in some way.
Let me tell you something about the engagement. People that clearly don't have an interest in the post topic, or that don't understand Korean at all, are still commenting on the post. This is making engaging fake and stripping the human part of the engagement. But hey, that's how the algorithm works I guess.