Response to the article for upvote beggars

Hey guys! This post is in response to the following post: https://steemit.com/steemit/@hitmeasap/how-to-handle-the-upvote-beggars-one-of-my-biggest-problems-on-steemit-feature-request-make-articles-invisible by @hitmeasap

Before I begin, I'd like to say that this is just my opinion and I do not mean any offense to anyone. If my tone comes off as rude or condescending, then it's just because of poor phrasing. I am not trying to bash anyone at all as this is a public forum where opinions can be shared and we have the freedom to do so. Not to mention, I believe that healthy debates are a necessity as differences of opinions will exist everywhere.

So anyways I was reading this article (do check out hitmeasap's article as I found it to be a very good read) and it got me thinking and I have to say that I disagree with what he's saying. Now a lot of people might automatically assume that it's because I'm an upvote beggar but everyone is more than welcome to go through ALL of my posts and they will realize that never once have I asked for an upvote or a follower. I believe that as long as I keep doing what I do, as long as I keep working hard, I will one day be in the big leagues. If I never make it big, then at least I still have a blog where I can voice my opinions as blogging is my hobby and the monetary incentive is just a bonus for doing something I like.

Now according to that article, beggars need to be punished by making their posts invisible. While I agree that it would help clean up steemit a bit, we need to look at the big picture here.

There are 2 reasons why I oppose this idea. The first is the most obvious one: Censorship.

By allowing making people's articles invisible, we are opening the doors for loads of people who may have a vendetta against someone for their opinions, to gang up on that person and make him invisible for the entire steemit community. Not to mention the whole censorship thing is basically against the ideals of steemit in the first place. Do we really want to start banning everything that we don't like? If that's the case, then what would stop someone who's homophobic from teaming up with his friends and getting everyone who comes out of the closet to become invisible to the rest of the community? Do we really want to go backwards like that? Censorship is simply the best way to step backwards as a community.

The second reason may be a bit confusing but bear with me and I'll try to explain.

Steemit is a living, breathing community that continues to grow with each passing day. Just take a look at some of @penguinpablo's daily stats and you'll know what I mean. The problem with every community however is that as it grows, it leads to more and more people trying to look for shortcuts and easy money. Lazy people are a part of every community whether it's online or in real life.

Here's the thing: Beggars will exist in every society. Believe it or not, the fact that beggars exist actually shows that there's development. Their existence proves that the community is worth something. It means that steemit is starting to resemble a natural community with the elite class or the one-percenters (whales), the middle class (dolphins and minnows that work hard and manage to scrape a couple bucks together as well as those minnows who may be working very hard and producing quality content but due to lack of exposure, haven't really made it yet) AND a lower and poor class (which mostly consists of lazy minnows copy-pasting articles and asking for upvotes).

Now I want you to think of steemit as a real-life community for a moment. Let's say you pass by this man:

OR this man:

Would you always stop and help? Most of you may say "yes" right now but the truth is that most of us would actually just ignore them and walk on by. That's how it works in every community around the world. We don't stop and help or give advice to every beggar on the street. It's unfortunate but it's true.

Unfortunately we live in a world where most of us have tuned out those who are less fortunate than us. But that's not what I'm trying to argue about in this post. The point I'm simply trying to make is that we ignore these people in general. That's how life works in every single community. We know that a lot of them are capable of getting jobs (or in this case write good quality content) but choose not to as they know that begging works. Only recently a woman went viral when she was caught begging for money but actually owned one of the latest cars (I'll attach a link to that video at the bottom of the post for those of you who don't know about this). Begging works as fortunately we still have kind-hearted people left in this world and therefore there will be no end to it no matter how hard we try.

So all I'm trying to say in my confusing article is that we need to learn to ignore rather than spend time explaining to them that what they're doing is wrong because in general, it will fall on to deaf ears. They do this because it works and they will continue to do this. Simple as that. Banning them from the steemit community will just harm the community itself in the long-run. You can't put all the beggars on our streets in prisons because they technically haven't broken any laws nor are they harming the economy and similarly, the beggars on steemit haven't done anything wrong either and cannot be banned or CENSORED for their posts. There is a mute button and you can use that if you don't like someone's posts but I don't think it's right to mute someone for everyone else as well.

So I guess that's pretty much all I had to say about this. I'll end this post with a quote I really like

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"Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself"

- Potter Stewart

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Video of the lady who went viral for begging but actually being pretty well-off:

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