What Did You Dislike About Steemit?

This weeks topic for @legendchew's Exclusive Blogging Course Giveaway Contest and one that I am once again participating is:

What Did You Dislike About Steemit?

Image Source

Oh boy where do I start cause I definitely have many things that I totally dislike about this platform. Off the top of my head: the insane level of entitlement among many users (old and new alike), how gameable the current system is, how the current number of active accounts are comprised mostly of alts/bots and even how these so-called "quality-enforcers of Steem" are somewhat preying only on "weak" accounts.

There are many more things that I hate about Steem but these three tops of my list:

"7-Day Timeframe"


Image Source

As most of you already know, Steem Platforms only allows a maximum of exactly 7 days for a post or comment to collect votes. All votes casted after the 7-day period will no longer give any monetary rewards or increase in reputation(?).

While I somewhat understand why they have to do this, (if content is paid indefinitely then the reward pool will get thinner and thinner as people will try to game the system by creating another account to vote and transfer their SP to that account, repeatedly). I personally think that it is unfair to people who write informative posts or do tutorials as their contents might not be relevant at the moment of writing but probably will be relevant in the future.

Take my personal article as an example, months ago I wrote about "How to Get an Upvote from the Busy bots (@busy.org & @busy.pay)" and "How to determine "vote weight" given by the busy bots". During that time I was only a small minnow with little visibility and reach (only around 400+ followers), while I did boost that post with bidbots, it seems like it drowned among others hours after.

After some weeks had passed, I've started getting some tag and mentions from people sourcing those two posts. I believe it was quite informative and helped some newbies who still don't know how the Busy bots worked. But seeing as the post have already paid out, their votes if any would be meaningless. Same can be said on my post about Qurator's Qustodian Bot: How does Qurator's exclusive only bot, @Qustodian work? to which unfortunately was only seen a month after. Too late :(

The point I am trying to make here is that after 7-days your article or content will become meaningless money-wise. No matter how well-written or how exceptional the post is, after 7 days it becomes a remnant of the past. All these brings me to the second thing I hate the most about Steem.

"People who preach about Quality like it's the only thing that matters"


Image Source

In conjunction with the 7-day timeframe, I am probably in the minority who thinks that one must not thrive "that much" into creating Exceptional Quality content but should focus only on Decent Quality content, especially if you are new to the platform and don't know anyone nor have invested any money on Steem.

Like I've said above, no matter how much you come prepared before delivering your post, after 7 days it all become meaningless. I've recently had a conversation with @adelair about this as she once said to me that she is quite unsure about creating an original artwork solely for Steem. A talented newbie's artist dilemma in here is getting noticed, and no matter how good you deliver your post is, the payout is not at all guaranteed.

Take @dunsky's experience as an example:

Image Source

An amazing artist could spend days and days to create one exceptional artwork solely for the Steem platform but days after would probably end up getting disappointed after getting such low payout. In @dunsky's experience, he only got $2 for an illustration that might have cost 200-500 times more than the usual rate. These wouldn't be an issue of course if the payout was indefinite right? But as I've said above it will create another issue if that one is to be implemented. (As for @dunsky, he is now the illustrator of eSteem from what I read. Good for you! :) )

"The Rise of the Bots"


Image Source

Out of the ~60k active accounts daily on the Steem Platform, how many do you think are just alt/bots auto-upvoting/commenting/resteeming other people's post?

When I first joined here on Steem by January of this year, the bot problem wasn't that much of an issue. Sure I do see some spam bots once in a while fishing for my mere upvote but it was at most at a tolerable level. And no I am not talking about bidbots here but those bots/alt accounts commenting on other people's post and being upvoted by some accounts with a higher SP to probably hide and justify how they use their stake.

I first noticed this 2months ago (not sure if it is still going on) when I first invited my irl friends over to try the Steem platform. As some of them took the time to read the FAQ on Steemit.com, their first ever post was a self-introduction, a #introduceyourself kind of post.

Now guess what happened? Around 5 bots(?) commented on the said post "welcoming" my friend. Sure this is all nice, who wouldn't love a welcome right? But what pissed me off was that after some hours had passed , their comment was upvoted by their main(?) account or someone with a higher SP without even upvoting the one being welcomed to. If you are new to the platform, what would you feel if the comment of someone on your post pays more than the post being commented on?