RANT ALERT: WHERE are the BALLS of STEEMIT?!!!?!!?!

in #steemitbloggers6 years ago (edited)

I have seen and read some pretty horrendous things on Steemit in the last 7 days - all of which have left me somewhat "hollowed". Don't get me wrong, I am all for expression and freedom of speech but most of the Sh!t that is spewing itself down on the Steemit feed, is like a kid that needs a good fat SMACK to bring it back into touch!!! There are certain things you can declare on social media and the rest, should probably be dealt with in a room... on a couch, with one of those people... you know the ones ;) lol!

RANT ALERT: WHERE are the BALLS of STEEMIT?!!!?!!?!

......

I may have only been here for just over a year, but I can recall that when I hopped on to this bus - so many were declaring their thankfulness as to how "different this space is" from other social media platforms. I used to feel the same, but to be honest, now... all I see around me if I dare to click on the "new, hot or trending" tabs... is either spam bullshit which has been upvoted by bots to some gross degree, people moaning about precisely that, others bitching about others, and then of course... some random with a $500 color challenge entry which consists of nothing more than a photo which to be honest, they probably didn't fncking take!!!!

Steemit is becoming WORSE than FACEBOOK!!!!

I don't have much power here, but whatever I "do" have - I try to push in the direction of promoting QUALITY POSTS and uplifting the "little people" - but even that doesn't fncking get noticed and it is starting to piss me off! What the bloody hell is WRONG with humanity?! Can we no longer see the wood from the goddamn trees???????

Why are we LETTING this happen?!?!

This entire freakin' system is only sustainable if we look after the people that SUPPORT IT... AAAAAND GET RID OF THOSE THAT ARE MILKING IT DRY!!!! What is going to take to get everyone to grow a set of fncking BALLS and to take damn stand?!

Hmmmmm........ A lot no doubt.

Will we all sit around and wait for it to all fall to pieces before anyone does anything? well, let me just say - I come from Cape Town, South Africa and I feel quite strongly against that complacent kind of bloody attitude!

It STINKS! - Yes, it DOES!

ANYBODY who knows me on this platform knows FULL WELL that I give my ALL EVERY SINGLE DAY into Steemit and the people trying to make it here, but I am getting a "weeee" bit tired of the fact that the BIG NIGS here are simply too preoccupied with counting the money in their wallets to actually give a shit! I wonder how many of them have ever actually been in business and calculated the WEIGHT that their bread and butter customers carry?!?!

...They probably don't even know what a bread and butter customer is! (how sad!)

I was recently called out by @underground to become part of their Dolphin Council because we are those "people" stuck in the middle that actually still give a fncking shit! And I am there! I will support ANY initiative that focuses itself on uplifting the quality people on this platform!! Not like I have the time to actually do it... between trying to conceptualise and create my own posts and managing my @steemitbloggers discord server, but shit son, I will MAKE the damn time because I am SO tired of seeing some ridiculous meme or stolen sunset photo hit trending, whilst all the TRUE geniuses and creatives of Steemit who are "too good a human being" to PAY THEIR FNCKING WAY up the ladder... are getting LOST!

This is NOT acceptable people!!!!???!!!! WTF!!!!

Ok, rant rant rant.... what purpose does that serve??? NONE if there are no solutions or actions implemented. I am not pretending to have all the answers... I do have some ideas, but alone they are worthless - much like this post if it gets lost like every other one!

The other day @jerrybanfield made a post about having the "downvote" option removed... ok sorry WTF?!?!?!?!??!!!!! Quite frankly, I don't think the bloody downvote option is used often enough here! If it was and we all stood a little braver, we may have a lot less crap like that floating around the steemit feed! But the sad reality is that nobody wants to get involved!

The sadder reality though, is that if nobody does... there will eventually be nothing left to get "involved with" - and perhaps THEN, everyone will catch a bloody wake up! - but it will be too little, too late!

Yes, I manage several curation initiatives which are focused on UPVOTING the GOOD content which I find on Steemit... but What if... in the spirit of preservation, we ALL started to DOWNVOTE the utter CRUD which we are exposed to more than 10 times a day through the general Steemit feeds.... "what if" we all stood together and did that and made a consequential impact...... sigh what if....

Would love to hear YOUR thoughts on all of this....

@ocd @curie @c-squared @minnowsupport

……

Until next time...
Much Love from Cape Town, South Africa xxx

Steemit logo Jaynielea.png

FOUNDER OF THE @STEEMITBLOGGERS

Steemit Bloggers


oh... and have you met my little man? @judethedude

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You are absolutely right.

Quite frankly, I don't think the bloody downvote option is used often enough here! If it was and we all stood a little braver, we may have a lot less crap like that floating around the steemit feed! But the sad reality is that nobody wants to get involved!

The fear of being punished by someone high powered or whales suplorting the user we dont use downvote.

Infact I have never use a single time it.

This is quite serious matter to think about.

I appreciate your initiative and support you.

Thanks for sharing

So true!!!!! People are too bloody SCARED to use that button and it should NOT be like that!!!

Yeah I stepped away and came back like what the hell is this. There was something different a year ago. The energy is just all jacked up right now.

yeah... sad but true!!!!

I feel your frustration @jaynie, both with the stuff that's going on and the inability of good people to really do anything about it. Rightly or wrongly my response - once life stops getting in the way - will simply be to post the best quality content I can and see where it gets me. From that position I admire and really appreciate your burning desire to foster people who do that and get after those who have other agendas. At the moment it seems Steemit is ruled by the law of the jungle but things can't go on like that for ever: something's got to give.

Totally agree with you! Well said!!!! And love the positive vibes!!! xxx

I started a similar rant (& counter-rant) yesterday... triggered by a post that @therneau made on whether or not Steemit would be a good place to "invest" millions of $s (assuming he had the $ to do so :P).

That post is sitting on about 3 pages of back and forth, less-than-to-the-point babbling... I'm still gonna try turn it into a post... but in case I don't... I just want to add my 2 cents on bid-bots:

edit: I just wrote another 2 page comment reply here... no more coherent than my draft post... so my full "2 cents" will have to wait until when/if I get to that post.

In short: Don't hate the player, hate the game :P (and use the same rules that make it suck to make it work - or decide to play elsewhere).

  • Humans will human, and most humans are selfish assholes. Don't expect/design for anything less.
  • Bots aren't a problem, and will be a good thing in future once legit users start using them (when we the other users stop thinking of just ourselves).
  • If you've invested millions into Steemit, you should be allowed to do with it as you see fit... but the community should be too without fear of retribution.
  • p.s. Check out @SteemFlagRewards - you can get rewarded for flagging.
  • and now recently @bid.bot (to read about @flag.bot) - I haven't checked it out properly myself yet, but sounds promising.

Oh yes... BTW: I found this post because of your post on curation groups/guilds and wanted to say thank you over there, but now I'm here :-)
... a few cool sounding ones over there that I didn't know about ;-)

If you've invested millions into Steemit, you should be allowed to do with it as you see fit... but the community should be too without fear of retribution.

Now that is one of the fundamental problems here. When I look at crypto in general it is supposed to correct the injust system that has been created over the years. Greed and money = power hungry tycoons that dominate the world.

Unfortunately the system here is the same. The more money you have the more power you have. It's created the same imbalance here as we find in the real world. That's not what the principles of crypto should stand for.

Anyhow, there's still lots of good out there so I'll just keep focusing on that and poke some fun at the shit... and occasionally rant about it :D

"There's still lots of good out there so I'll just keep focusing on that and poke some fun at the shit... and occasionally rant about it :D"

hahahaha - I couldn't agree more!

P.S. FWIW - if/when I get to finishing my thought(s), it ends on a positive note, with high hopes for Steem ;-)

You're not alone @jaynie,
I absolutely can confirm your feelings about Steemit.
Since December, member since last August, I started blogging here, mostly travel posts with my original pictures.
I realized more and more there is no way to get the right audience.
I started reading posts of the whales, especially the comment section is very interesting, and I realized, most of them see Steemit NOT as a social network, they see it as a Business and money making system.
There are so many things what have to be fixed to make Steemit social.
It starts with the unfair upvote and downvote system, you never can start argue with a bigger fish and not think to be careful that he flag your account to 0.
Some whale and dolphin groups upvote only their content and give a shit about new users.
Now I started already to make my posts shorter and using bots for "promote" them.
I wait for ONO and will take a look there, I think many, many other users will join ONO,too and if Steemit is not really careful, they will lose a lot.
So let's see how its going on..
Best frustated regards, hehehe
Tom

Yes lets hope and continue to strive for the best 🙂👌

The downvote option is a great tool if used properly. But the problem is, the spammers and trollers downvote every post they see including the quality ones just so that they could make their content more visible.

But what these idiots don't realise is that downvoting everyone without any reason decreases their reputation and makes their content less visible, so basically they are being a problem for everyone including themselves.

And the reason why people are afraid to downvote shitty content or spam is because they don't wanna involve themselves in a cyber war and put their content at risk.

200% on point! A sad but very accurate reality.

I Agree too. Thanks for the advice @ayushjalan.

To be honest, I’d rather spend my precious VP motivating people that do post quality content, instead of letting it go to waste by paying attention to those who deserve to be downvoted. Negative attention is attention too...

And sure, just like everyone I don’t want to come across somebody who can’t stand ‘losing’ and will be out for revenge.

I realize that makes me one of the cowards. Yet, even if I powered up to 10000SP, I would still have not enough VP to do any serious damage to a lot of those accounts. I still believe in fairy tales where the good always conquers the evil.
Downvoting takes away my ability to reward and motivate the people that are actually putting in an effort...

I totally agree with you and as you know well, that is precisely the stance I take... however it doesn't make it any less frustrating at times. Somehow and some way a dent needs to be made...

Right on Jaynie. The rules are set up here to encourage and reward behavior that promotes low quality content and lack of engagement. Too few users hold most of the power and decision making ability and many of them seem content with the way things are. Note that HF20 is likely to make it even harder for smaller users to succeed here, because it will eliminate one of the few mechanisms we have to get a larger percent of the rewards on posts. Check out @tcpolymath's recent series of articles on the impact of HF20. As a few others have mentioned here, I suspect that the Steem witnesses have only a little time to actually correct these issues before an alternative platform comes along that does a better of job of actually rewarding quality content and wresting power from the hands of a few.

That said, there are many users here, such as you, but also more powerful users, working to improve Steem, so lets hope some sensible changes happen quickly.

Proud member of #steemitbloggers @steemitbloggers

This is an appropriate day for this post because it is also the day that @taskmaster4450 suggested having a minnow uprising. Post 3 times a day for the month of July and use the tag #minnowuprising. I started today.

This is a brilliant idea, but realistically (speaking for myself), not achievable, especially if you're talking about a post that is substantive and original. I do, however, support the notion of #minnowuprising wholeheartedly!

Fabulous Idea! I saw your post regarding this earlier this morning @toddrjohnson and am going to resteem that on all my accounts. I REALLY hope that it is successful! I cant really participate as I am technically no longer a minnow, but I will support it whenever and wherever I can! and kudos to @taskmaster4450 for the concept.

Honestly this is the sort of thing I was talking about when I made my post about block buttons yesterday - I get that Steemit wants to be transparent and let everyone see everything, but an option to stop people from at the very least interacting with your content (downvoting, commenting, ect) would be a major deterrent to at the very least the people who post spam comments on people's posts. You spam me once, I block you and you can no longer comment on my things.

And yes, people do need to be more liberal with the downvote button. I know I certainly am, as well as with the flagging of comments. We need to use what we have to make sure spammers know they are not welcome here, until the staff or whoever is in charge of this stuff decide to give us better tools to fight them or implement something that they themselves can do about it.

You have the right attitude!!! (And BALLS) ;)

Comes from being elsewhere on the internet. I learned the fast and hard way that the sooner you let people know in no uncertain terms that they are unwelcome in your space and to interact with your content, the better. I've been called 'block happy' by more than one person but I give no cares, if you're going to come in here and be a troll and spam and not contribute anything of value to the community then get out. I've also been called 'ban happy' when I used to be in charge of stuff, because as soon as it was obvious people were just there to spam or whatever I didn't even bother with anything other than that ban hammer nice and swift :)