It seems that people are getting discouraged on the Steemit platform because they are not making a bunch of money and it is hard to compete with people who are paying for upvote bots and upvoting their own content.
The funny part about it is it seems that the same people are also getting upset because if they spend money on the upvote bots that they end up losing money.
These two complaints are often seen together but to me do not make any sense.
I think the problem here is not with Steemit or the way the platform is set up, but I think the problem here is unrealistic expectations.
I would like to point out the fact that nothing like this has ever existed. We have the first opportunity ever, to get paid by contributing content in a completely decentralized community.
Because the earliest adopters were able to to create so much wealth off of so little work (the same way that early Bitcoin miners were able to mine many bitcoin with small computers) I think that people coming in later have slightly unrealistic expectations.
With that being said there is still nothing else out there to this day, that makes the opportunity to get paid for content creation so easy, But that doesn't mean you are going to get rich quick. Here are some things to keep in mind
Creating successful content on the internet is an art and a skill that can take a lot of time to develop.
Before Steemit existed, people would have to spend a very long time guest blogging for people and creating a name for themselves, before they could hope to start getting paid for content. Even to this day, in order to get considered having a paid channel on YouTube you have to have over 1,000 subscribers and over 4,000 hours of watched video time within the last 12 months, and I can tell you those numbers are not easy to get to.
Now with D-tube and D-Live, you can get paid on the very first video... but this doesn't mean you are going to get rich putting out bad content and videos. Creating content that people are interested in is harder than most people think.
There are pretty much only three things that you can contribute into a project, Time, Money, or Ideas.
You can only expect to get out of something a return based on what you have contributed.
The only way you are going to see rapid returns is if you have all three of these things to contribute at the same time, but unfortunately that is not the case for most of us.
Money:
If you have a lot of money to contribute you can utilize this money in many different ways to buy influence. Hands down this is the easiest way to get ahead on Steemit, but I think the same thing could be said about almost any project and that it is only fair. The person who is willing to take a lot of his own money, that was earned through the success of other projects and work, outside of Steemit, should have an advantage. If the output of the work on Steemit is money, the person who takes the most money into the system to perpetuate the output should be able to produce the highest output.
Let's make it a math problem: M=money T=time I=ideas. If (M+T)I=M, It only makes sense to me that the person contributing the maximum amount of M (as an input of the equation) should have the easiest time producing M (as the output).
Time:
Even if someone has all of the money in the world, it is still going to take some measure of time to earn rewards. Even for those who simply buy steem power and upvote themselves 10 times a day, it will still take time to make a simple post and nine comments to upvote those posts.
On the other hand, someone without a lot of money to contribute into the system, can spend time cultivating relationships and creating content to build a following. Without being able to buy influence in the system, you must build it over a long time. Even small payouts will add up over a long enough time.
Ideas.
Ideas are where the magic happens. Ideas are the multiplier. However much time and money you contribute into the steemit community will be multiplied by the quality of your content, or in other words the ideas that you bring to the table.
This is the part that I think many people are missing. Yes it is true that people can buy influence, Yes it is true that someone can bootstrap a following with a lot of time… but the really successful people on steemit are the ones who are combining time and money to create influence then multiplying that influence with good content.
I think this means that you have not found the proper multiplier for your audience. In other words, you need to work on your content. Not to say that your content is bad, but you are competing agains people with a lot of money, and the only way to win is to increase your multiplier.
I believe that you can always beat the spammers with the proper multiplier... Meaning that the good content will alway win, but the content has to be really really good because you are competing agains people with a lot of time and money.
Capturing an audience on the internet is always difficult. Try creating a website anywhere and getting people to go to it without really good and captivating content is almost impossible. You can pay for ads on Facebook, you can pay for clicks with programs like Google adwords, you can spend massive amounts of time going around and telling people about your website. Without good ideas, or good content you can not expect your website to flourish.
Yes it is true that the guy who spends $1 Million dollars on a Google adwords campaign is going to have way more people coming to his site than the guy who spends $100, But without good content it will not have been money worth spending. I don’t think that paying for influence on Steemit is much different. Anyone can spend enough money with upvote bots to get their posts on the trending page, but I think that most people can spot bad content right away, and only the really good content will continue to gain upvotes above and beyond what the upvote bots have given.
I can tell you from personal experience that the upvote bots are not always profitable, many times they will actually lose you money, if you don’t get them at just the right time. The more people who use them, the more the votes are split up, decreasing the amount that each person gets. It is always worth it though if you have good content because it lets your content get in from of more people. But your content actually has to be good, and appropriate for the community.
Those of us who are on Steemit already are even still early adopters of this platform, and the way I see it this comes with good and bad.
The good.
Because there are not that many people on steemit (comparatively), it is possible to get your content in front of people with little competition. As more people come into the Steemit community, you will have steeper competition. Blogging and creating internet content is an art, and there are a lot of talented people who have yet to make the transition.
The bad.
Because of the small amount of people, sometimes bad content will get undeservingly rewarded. Without a lot of good, well known, content creators in the space it is still relatively easy for people to get bad content to the top of the list.
I believe that as more people come onto the steemit platform, it will become harder and harder for the bad content to make its way to the top, and as more people are utilizing upvote bots, the payouts will not be worth using on bad content.
I believe that Smart Media Tokens, and other advancements are going to bring a lot of people into the Steemit community, and that as it grows it will naturally become more resistant to these type of unwarranted rewards.
Upvote and re-steem this content if you agree, or let me know what you think in the comments.
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