I have been on Steemit since August 2016 so I am not one of the really early members but still earlier than most. I have to be honest when I first got on it I wondered wtf was going on it took me a few months to really understand what it was all about. When I understood the idea I began to believe Steemit was a brilliant idea but it had a problem, there were not many people using it and it was full of bots and the flagging system at the time was ridiculous. The payouts were and are still low (for 99% of us) but I own my own site and I figured at least it advertises my site and therefore my blogs and videos.
I have so far earned about one thousand pound in UK money on Steemit which is not bad tbh compared to Adsense and YouTube it is brilliant especially when we consider there are no shit corporate ads on Steemit to fund the payments.
Slowly but surely I started to believe the hype and I still did up until recently. A few months ago I blogged 17 posts on the subject of Britain's Paedophile elite and they did quiet well. They did not earn much (a repost later earned 44 USD.) I believe I seen a drop after that, I also notice pizzagate has disappeared from the tags on the sidebar, at one time Steemit was full to the brim of pizzagate information all of a sudden the information being released seems to have slowed down.
When people assume Steemit is decentralized they are actually wrong, Steemit is not decentralized it is centralized in profit (look at the top earners and compare them with the rest of us) and it is centralized in control. Steemit top 1% probably earn more than the other 99% (I have not checked for a fact but looking the payouts it has to be something like that) and their vote counts for more than the rest of us.
Interaction with posts seems up and down and ridiculously inconsistent, we expect changes but on Steemit we see huge changes that seem to make it harder for newcomers or minnows to be heard but the changes don't seem to effect the top bloggers so much. Another good point a (former) Steemtian is many of the top earners are friends and family of creators of Steemit?
What kind of secret features have been added to the coding system? Invisible accounts? Allowing for flagging and shit I would not be surprised but at the same time I cannot offer proof, its just a theory?
What is even worse is if Steemit ever does get to the same level as Facebook is at, celebrities and rich people and corporations would be able to simple buy Steem power and make themselves much more heard than regular users that have invested long hours of time in to it. I think Steemit could equal trouble and I there seems to be a denial of its blatant manipulation in trending posts and information. There are two reasons for this denial some people are happy with what it pays (you can't money at the pay rates compared to alternatives if you have the rep) and people just want to believe.
Yeah well people in chat rooms say that the only feed they read is their feed, the home page since the rest is too noisy.. I get that it's noisy but how do you expect to do any discovery if everyone is doing that, and how do you expect the new guy to ever get his article read if that's the case?
These days it's been really down , and people seem to be ignoring the good content and going for popularity , it's a bad thing
No doubt always been the same but steemit is manipulated
I call that capitalism and not centralization.
Forgive me for being new but is steempower that useful? And wouldn't corporations buying steem to power up and increase their influence be great news for you if you have steem in your portfolio?
steem currency and it gives you influence over posts
Steemit may not be optimally effective at democratizing rewards for good content but the ability to generate earnings for curation still represents a structural improvement over previous platforms like Reddit. In terms of the wealthy having an advantage by virtue of being wealthy, Steemit offers no greater leverage than platforms like facebook plus it does a better job of encouraging whales to help minnows so I wouldn't necessarily characterize it as dangerous. I do wish there was more of a middle ground between New posts and Trending or Hot but I believe the developers are certainly open to these sorts of suggestions if you keep contributing your ideas in the right channels!
Some interesting points. I really like the platform and hope it succeeds although you are right of course, until Steemit has a market cap sufficiently large enough, it will be possible for rich people to buy influence and vote down topics or posts that are inconvenient to them such as Pizzagate. I suppose we are in the hands of the original whales who have a similar vision for Steemit as @dantheman who would hopefully, if they saw that elements were trying to harm Steemit come together and lessen their influence.
Like I said, I love this platform and the idea and vision behind it and it would be a real shame if it was ruined, deliberately or not. Interesting times ahead !!!!