How to Lose Newcomers and Alienate Your Followers (With One YouTube Post).
Be Careful Out There Kids!
The Internet Can Be A Dangerous Place.
And then there's Steemit Inc. & it's "Big Dogs".
You can choose to take the next thing I am going to tell you any way you wish. You can call it spam. You can say it's an attack piece. You can even agree or disagree with it until you're blue in the face. You can read it, watch the video posted within it, and decide, "Hey, that sounds great! I want to try that," or you might say to yourself (what I consider to be the ethical thing to do), "Wow! That's just wrong!". No matter what you choose to do, or not to do, after watching the video, I believe you might owe it to yourself to read what follows after it (especially if you are new here and are thinking about investing your money into the steem system).
Please watch & LISTEN to what is being said in this video. And know what he is saying is not theoretical, it can be done (and probably is being done, if not by bots then by people who only use steemit in the way he describes the bots could do it).
Video Source: Courtesy of @craig-grant's YouTube channel "Craig Grant".
Did you comprehend what is being explained here? And before anyone decides to defend the producer of said video, I will say now that I understand he is using the term "hypothetical" to soft sell the concept that this is not something that he is actively participating in. To leave the observer to believe this is just an idea in his head and nothing more. And yet he is encouraging potentially thousands and thousands of people to attempt to code and run such a bot. If you think this is good for the blockchain, think again.
Think of it this way. Your new to the steem platform and don't really understand the game. After the first week or two you're struggling to understand why you aren't getting much exposure, how your posts only pulled in a small SMALL portion of what you see others pulling in. In addition, you start noticing single upvotes worth anywhere from $1 up to $40+. So your thinking to yourself, "How can I reap such rewards and have that kind of voting power?" and decide to look into it. Chances are all the other steemit blogs on the subject tell you, "BUY STEEM! Invest more than your time and content. In order to increase your voting power, and your potential for exposer in the process, you have to put your money into it".
Excited in the idea of such power and profit, you immediately purchase hundreds (or, even worse, thousands) of dollars in BTC to exchange/trade for STEEM. And you do see an immediate increase in voting power and a slow increase in exposure as well (more followers, potentially more upvotes from others).
Sounds great, right?
Not exactly. Enter @craig-grant, and other malicious Whales or even bots now.
You know all that money you just put into this thing? Well, guess what. The majority of it goes right into the rewards pool and is being sucked up by these kinds of accounts by a thing called self-upvoting.
You see, these accounts have been around for a lot longer than most of the rest of us. This whole project began with 0 users around 4-11-2016, and by 7-09-2016 it had approximately 10,00 Registered Users (and at that point less than half of them were active - and today it is gaining new users by the hundreds and thousands each day, approaching a total user base of almost 250,000). @craig-grant joined somewhere around June 2016 or sooner. These are the folks that pumped a bunch of their own money into the start-up platform and blockchain. Sounds like we should be thanking them, right? Some of them, YES. Yet some of them, NOT AT ALL.
In fact, we should all be researching them - and praising them or calling them out when appropriate (it's not a transparent system for nothing people, would you hand a pile of your hard earned cash to a complete stranger on the street based solely on their promise it will make you more influential and wealthy? You know, because BLOCKCHAIN. I doubt it).
What I believe these accounts/users are doing is baiting all us newcomers into investing real fiat currency. And then using techniques described in this video they are draining the rewards pool with malicious intent with their so-called right to self-upvote.
Image found on PinterestSo all that money you put into this thing.... it will force you to make a choice at this point. And your choices are:
OR
Respectfully reserve your upvotes for others posts and comments while only upvoting very little of your own. If you're lucky you just might stay ahead, but your content better be out of this world. Even so, with some Whales habitually self-upvoting they are still not leaving much in the rewards pool for the rest of us no matter how good our content is.
If your content is good, you shouldn't have to resort to lies, manipulation, and what nearly amounts to criminal fraud in order to be profitable and successful here. That is, so long as it's not too late and these malicious types are now just to big and too well connected to prevent them from taking all the worms and leaving the rest of us with just the castings (worm poop).
Fortunately it seems there are still enough righteous, honest and true Whales left out their to keep the scales somewhat balanced (here's looking at you @gentlebot 😇 and @randowhale 🐋).
If "earning your fortune" includes convincing people to invest real money knowing you are going to get most of it through your "hacks" and "techniques" and "style of being Da Man".... sounds like criminal fraud to me (if it quacks like a duck....).
If you agree or disagree, please be a part of the conversation and voice your opinions in the comments. And please be sure to
& even give it an 
if you can "spare some change".
liked and followed :)
Thanks m8... don't see the upvote, perhaps from all the damage he's done to my account with his flagging. But I don't mind.... I found more "profit" in knowing someone actually say this (more worried about sharing this news with as many eyes as possible than I am in making any coins right now).
Following back, for what it's worth (he's got me about at two minutes to midnight, facing the destruction of this account only to make another 1 or 3 - and yes, I can make and configure a bot if I needed to, I'd just rather do all this the ethical way and use whatever time I saved by being a good person and NOT cheating with a bot to spend with my amazing Wife; whom I am nothing without).
if you don't like @craig-grant then switch to @trevvonjb lol then you have nothing to complain about!
And @craig-grant doesnt flag man, show me some times he flagged people...ive never ever sen craig falg anyone! , and u realize if he flagged everything hed loose his voting power? You CANNOT make money flagging! wtf why would u think that?!? haha its really weird man! I feel like u may not fully understand how steemit works, and i doubt craig ever flagged someone to "get money back in the reward pool" because he ":and his kind" dont just automatically get money from teh read pool....he only get s money from teh reward pool when HE EARNS it man....its kinda weird that u made such a long post without understanding how steemit works lol steempower allows craigs followers top upvote his posts and grant him a few cents or bucks at a time, and he acumulates his money from upvotes, that he earns, dont get it twisted, hes earning his money
And let me tel u about his "programs" theyve made EVERYONE money! from Genesis to Bitconnect, theyve ALL made EVERYONE whose clicked His Links a lot of money period no "criminal behaviour" about it, dont get mad because he foudn a way to make money by helping others make money
and NO hes not "keeping most opf it" he gets a SMALL cut and simply gets LOT of people to get him thats mall cut
the referal bonus on fuckin genesis and bitconnect is ONLY a few fuckin percentage points man! thats not "most" of the money and WTF u want craig to just give away all the money he earns bcause YOU dont t huink he actually earnd it? Youre like from the days of being AGAINST passive income, where men had to WOK IN A FACTORY all day, but now peopel REALIZE its OK to have passive income. Busoness can be automated, u dont have to sweat and work urself to death just to earn a dollar jhust bvause YOu may have had to do that for YOUR life, dont get jelous of othrs no reason have envy, theers PKLENTY of people to signup to bitconnect or to genesis OR to stemit! steemitd oesnt have an oficial affiliate program BUT steemit DOES have a system that allows you to sign people up who will then follow you and end up upvoting you! and when you teach ur followers how to make money, YOU end up making money as their upvotes become more and more expensiv!
Man its really unfair how youre trying to ruin @crag-grant 's reputation, and i only defend him now not to suck up or brown nose, i just have to defend a man i know is not guilty of these accustaion and I DOUBT you actually watch and follow him AS MUCH as I do, i watch his shit almost everyday, and i see his posts daily, DAILy and i WATCH him and nayon whose talked shit about him has just been envious of him MOST of the tiume
youre despertae to find an excuse as tyo why he does NOT deserve the money he makes
im suprised noone has tried reporting him to the IRS in a desperate atempt to get him audidtd JUST tof uck with him, haha that wontw ork however as crypto currency si NOT a legal tender and if they forced peoiple to pay taxes on crypto cutrrency THEY WOULD RECOGNIZE IT AS LEGAL TENDER which they cant do yet!
And theres plenty of other ways he can avoid paying taxes legally and if people keep harrasing him he will simply move to the carribean and liveon some iland forever and have his friends bring him supplis by boat if he has to! hahaha he could probobly buy his own boat and ail around the carribean at this point, uploading videos from youtube and steemit over satellite internet, hahaha
Comments can go so deep, never thought about it....
What is bot?