Hi @doctorstrange, I saw you commented on a few of my posts so I went over to check out your profile (see commenting works!). I gave you a follow but noticed you haven't made an actual post in 2 months but have been commenting and upvoting a lot.
So what's up? I'm curious. Are you the alter ego of another higher profile username on the site? Is this your commenting account? Did you just give up on posting? Seems weird seeing that your last post made $36SBD. It's okay you can tell me I can keep a secret ;)
Steemon!
Maybe...
The short of it is that this account had been stirring the pot since I arrived, trying to let it be known that the earlier that we faced the truths of what is wrong with the system the sooner we could come out of the beta stage in a strong position.
Instead we kept giving out huge payouts to playmates, pretty women and crypto-anarchy "celebrities" while real users would get crumbs. All in the hopes that these leeches would bring new users to the site. The attrition has been high and getting people to come to a site that is as inviting as a sheet of white paper has been a struggle for me and my friends. My friends are financially successful so they can't be bothered spending a few hours for 15 cents.
Just appealing to anti-establishment fans is a recipe for disaster. Even crypto fans are down on the site, so you must look elsewhere for users.
I had at least 10 articles lined up to write and simply got fed up with the head in the sand approach to dealing with fundamental problems with the site. I'm too idealistic and believe that the core idea of this site can be successful, so I devoted my time to cleaning up plagiarists and charlatans selling snake oil and nonsense.
Unfortunately for myself I squandered literally hundreds of hours over the last two months commenting for very little payout (which has become even less since various changes to the site have been implemented) so I've been doing other things.
I'm not bitter that I didn't create more content when the getting was good, but what I am bitter about is that the site has made improvements and started to reward those that were critical instead of just calling them whiners and "jealous" (though they mean envious and that conflation bugs me, ugg). If we would have tried to root out the issues from day one and listened to the real beta testers that were trying to bring the problems to light, then we could have fixed the problems earlier. Now it seems it's too little too late.
It is very frustrating seeing posts that don't deserve huge payouts get upvoted while so many other deserving posts get pennies. I quite simply don't have the time to waste any more. I tried to help as best I could, but it's utterly pointless.
Sorry for the long comment. It's what I'm good at.
Cheers and keep up the good work.
p.s. That one post I made was about a catfish user, but when I went to post my article it sent my rough draft instead of the final version so I had to delete it and I just gave up. Like it was a sign from the Steemit gods!
While that user may come back and post again, it's another case of someone coming to the site, taking a paycheck then never coming back again.