I've been frequenting Steemit for 3 months now. My initial flush of excitement has waned and disappointment is setting in. This post may be my last.
I've posted a wide variety of content in the last 3 months - long, short, specialized, technical, general, personal.
My most successful (by earnings) was the technical statistical analysis. Some of these analysis posts took me literally weeks of effort to compile. To be frank, the earnings didn't justify the effort but the insight I gained was invaluable.
I've curated content, carefully selecting posts and crafting constructive and hopefully insightful comments. I've rewarded quality posts with my votes and in some cases, flagging with down votes. Day by day this becomes more difficult as the wave of junk just seems to grow. Hot and Trending is full of mostly garbage (if you're not into Food Pics or Bible and Motivation Quotes).
I've delegated my SP to worthy communities like Utopian and seen very modest (and frankly disappointing) dividends. I've learned about Beneficiary Rewards, how high they can be and how poorly they're publicized.
I've invested SBD in Promoting my posts and learned you need to spend A LOT to make this worth while. I've even moved fiat into SBD via blocktrades and coinbase to see how it all works and who’s taking commissions.
I've reposted things I've liked (and one I didn't) and still haven't figured out the utility and value of this functionality.
I've tinkered with public domain code like dsteem and steem-js to query the Steemit API. I've opened up and poked around the guts of the block chain with steemata.com. I read the White and now Blue papers and followed the blog posts of various core developers.
I've engaged in Discord channels both with humans and Bots. It's through Discord and the statistical analysis that I began to understand the role and extent of Bots. This lead me to explore the workings of the reward pool and the inherent advantage enjoyed by early-entrant members (Whales and Witnesses).
I've watched with fascination the battles being played out by high $$ users (e.g. @Berniesanders, @Haejin, @sweetsssj and others) and their use (abuse) of automation (bots). I've read various discussions on reward pool rape and manipulation.
I've come to the conclusion that the majority of content is increasingly optimized for Bots rather than humans. This enables competing publishing and social platforms like Medium.com to maintain a competitive edge in content quality.
Unfortunately the founders at steemit.io are either not listening or don't care, instead preferring to tinker with mobile interfaces (!?!). In my mind, their engineering debt needs paying down sooner rather than later.
Humans with high technical skill (or assistance) are optimizing their content and automating their posting and voting schedules to maximize earnings. While not an illegitimate strategy, their content ends up being somewhat soulless and frankly, not that interesting. Yet their critical mass and momentum garners more and more votes and followers.
The earning gap between Whales and Minnows continues to widen in what I think is an opaque, disingenuous and underhand way.
Minnows are told to invest in building relationships and high quality content creation, while successful users are investing in technical skills, APIs and Bots. There is an automation arms racing taking place in the shadows of the Steemit platform.
Steemit is fast becoming an ecosystem for bots with humans being marginalized and sidelined. Earnings from following the community guidelines don't come even close to those of the technically skilled willing to bend the rules.
While my education has been most enjoyable I don’t feel Steemit can be a viable income stream for me unless I'm willing to engage in underhand practices. And I' not.
Return on my effort doesn’t come close to my day job. I acknowledge I may be an outlier and this may not be the case for users living in other parts of the world. I’m just saying, it’s not viable for me at this time and my interest and effort will earn a better return elsewhere.
Thank you Steemit it’s been fun but I need to go make a living IRL now...