Thanks for commenting. I can be a bit to direct at times, but when I first loaded this page, all I saw were numbers and names with no interactions. I was tagged, and it looked like a wall of spam with people greedy to win a contest. I'm very happy to find many actual conversations going on around this and real relationships being built. That's fantastic.
Alexa likes interaction, yes, spam, no. If this was just a wall of numbers and names (as it was when I first saw the thread), in the long run, if replicated, could become a systemic risk. Many people are already convinced Steemit is a money-grabbing scam. It takes people asking tough questions to find what's real and what's helping that negative perception grow. Some people just flag away without asking questions first. I prefer to ask first and be pleasantly surprised if my first impression is wrong. Though, to be fair, I still think contests like this, if replicated, can be very unhealthy for the long-term health of the system. I remember when the flood of "vote up my post and I'll share rewards with you" stuff happened more than a year ago. It was almost an epidemic. It took many whales flagging all of them down before people realized that wasn't worth doing and writing quality content was a better approach.
As for a push to get more people to come onboard, you may notice Steemit, inc isn't really doing any marketing. Their Twitter and Facebook are essentially idle. They are working on hard fork 20 to improve onboarding and (hopefully) help with the bandwidth issues. It may not be as extreme of an issue as I outlined it (I haven't checked the last couple of days as I've been on vacation), but it is something to consider when dealing with spam (again, that was my first impression of the interactions here, one I'm glad to see was incorrect).I w
Thank you for your response. And your point about spam is well taken.
I do have a strong feeling that this kind of contest is not going to grow on Steemit for two reasons. Craig spends an enormous amount of time monitoring the sequence of replies and replying to all who are coming to his post.
And, as we already discussed, he spends way more than he takes in. I think very few people are willing to do that.
And thank you for fighting spam on this platform - I think we are all on the same page in this effort.