I'm here for my free flag @son-of-satire!
Seriously, though... I just got through 10 days of doing the "Steemit Community Engagement Challenge;" name's pretty self explanatory... point being I just got through looking at probably 1000 posts and 20000 comments and this shyte is running rampant. And I found myself starting to sprinkle flags to some of the worst offenders. I understand what Bernie was trying to do... just a shame he let himself get sucked into a flagging vendetta.
At the risk of writing an essay here, "Houston, we have a problem." I think most people don't quite grasp (a) who these people ARE and (b) that we are just at the very tip of a very large and very ugly iceberg.
If we truly give a damn about Steemit and its long term success, we need to focus on making it extremely clear that this is not a PROFITABLE place to run bot spam in order to make a few pennies. These people could care less whether their substandard garbage is allowed but if there's no money to be made, they will go away.
Let's consider, for a moment, who they (or many of them) are. They are not content creators. They are really not social media users, in a general sense. If there's a key phrase to sum them up, it would be "get paid to click." You will find concentrations of them on Amazon's "Mechanical Turk" where they seem to think that transcribing supermarket receipts for 12 cents an hour constitutes a "Great Way To Make Money Working Online!" (caps added for satirical effect); you will also find them in any number of "Best Places To Make Money Online!" forums... which number in the thousands, and some of the forums have hundreds of thousands of members.
Just adding a little perspective.
This "being Steemit" means NOTHING. Zero. Zip. Nada. We could could saying "Make Five Cents Counting Tacos Online" and they would be here by the thousands. To them, Steemit is nothing but a fancy cash dispenser and the more ambitious ones will go to almost any lengths to find ways to "game" said cash dispenser to maximize payouts, by hook and by crook.
The purpose of any "countermeasures" we apply should primarily be to have them go back to their forums saying "That Steemit thing is a scam, you can't make money there!" or just "You can't make money there!"
I know some people are going to say "But Steemit.... blockchain... no censorship.... for everyone... freedom... yadda yadda."
Yeah... no. Until you've watched a couple of dozen "content sites with rewards" go down in flames specifically because of this kind of action... you don't entirely understand what we're dealing with, here. Yes, I realize that since this is not a "cash based" site, it won't go bankrupt, but do be prepared to live with 1/2 cent Steem... maybe a year, maybe two years from now, if this is allowed to run unchecked. If the Steemit social platform is the "flagship app" for the Steem blockchain... we run the risk of being part of "just another shitcoin" if we develop a reputation as just another spam repository.
Sound harsh?
I meant it to. Because we need to wake up and nurture our community... think of Steemit as a garden... and there's a cloud of thistle seeds heading this way. We can either get busy "weeding," or we can have a thistle farm. But to think we can somehow teach the thistles how to be roses... sorry, I'm not THAT much of an idealist!
/end rant
I don't think that is too harsh at all. Perhaps I am just too optimistic in my belief that everyone has the potential to be more. But, I won't pretend that I haven't recently considered that perhaps some people are simply lesser humans.
I don't want to think like that, however. It seems arrogant, and far too cynical. So, at least for a while longer, until my faith in humanity takes a final blow, I will remain hopeful that even these spammers have something to bring to the table if they look inside themselves to find it.
Thanks for the comment!
Honestly, I don't like being cynical... and I have lots of faith and hopes in Steemit I just have less in humanity, in the broader sense.
My wife is (among other things) a very accomplished and experienced life coach and counselor and one of the things she's always passing along to her clients is that optimism and faith are awesome characteristics, as long as we don't use them as "blinders" to shield us from a reality that might harm us.
So if we were to give the spammers a chance... let's look at their motivation and experience. First thing that comes to my mind is that their approach is rooted in short term thinking. They care about "how do I get 5 cents NOW?" That's not surprising, because most "make money online" schemes run for a few months, pay out a little... and then go bankrupt. So we have to convey a "long term" approach to them as a better solution...
Part two (and I'm grossly generalizing here), many of our newcomers come from nations/cultural backgrounds where "cheating the system" is an inherent part of the culture. Not because they are "bad people" but because they were raised with and live with corrupt governments. Those in charge make unreasonable rules and demands, so you "cheat" to get ahead; to survive. Here in the west that might make us "pretty criminals;" elsewhere it's simply "a way of life" (I lived in Africa as a kid)
But now we have Steemit... which is a GLOBAL community... which cultural rule set do we build our foundation around? And HOW do we do that? @ned and @dan had a great vision for Steemit, but they were undeniably not born and grew up in Viet-Nam or Bangladesh.
So that leaves us with "education" at a very fundamental level. This sort of gives me an idea for a post... but whether enough eyeballs would see it is a whole other ball of wax.
Thanks for the conversation @son-of-satire.