jroseland
Is Steemit a scam?
It’s hard to call it blatant scam but it’s really a classic pyramid scheme, where the founders and very early adopters are making A LOT of money and the opportunity prospects for everyone else are inflated by perverse financial incentives. Steemit has this very effective yet slightly deceptive way of attracting new users. Articles and videos conspicuously display how much Steem the article has attained in equivalent dollars. Go to the trending section or any of the popular sections and you’ll see dozens of articles that have supposedly made like hundreds of dollars. Not knowing better you think… Hey I could write a better article than this! I could be making like $400 just for writing an article! But actually the people making the big bucks are gaming the system and reinvesting a lot of their cryptocurrency back into system to artificially boost their posts — they are NOT actually making the amount of money that appears so conspicuously there underneath their articles. There’s some commenting bots that point this out BUT someone new to Steem has no way of knowing this. There’s little hope of my best content going viral because the people gaming the system inflate the value so highly of their posts that making it to trending the pages trending pages is impossible. If your strategy is to attract attention organically by creating good content Steemit is not for you. I’ve interacted in a conversational, none-spammy way with a number of other users on Steemit and yes you can find a lot of genuine human interaction there. Because Steemit looks like such a gold mine to those who don’t know better it’s growing rapidly; refresh the #introducingmyself hourly and you’ll see just how many new users are joining. The people will be quite excited to interact with you BUT keep in mind that by design Steemit is going to have a major problem with supply and demand of content creators vs content viewers. Everyone is just joining the site to get rich by hopefully one day getting paid $400 for an article that takes 45 minutes to write. The value in Youtube or Medium is that about 90% of users are just casual viewers, they are there to be informed, amused or educated, they are not there to compete with you. On Steemit this proportion of voyeurs to opportunists is flipped.