5 Things You Should Stop Doing on Steemit

1. Using Bid Bots
You should stop using bid bots. I'm not saying this from a philosophical view that bots are bad for the platform, I'm looking at it purely from an economic perspective. If you jump on to www.steembottracker.com you will see that most bid bots are actually giving losses during most rounds of voting. Paying 1 sbd to get a less than 1 sbd vote just doesn't make sense. One of the main reasons for this is that people don't realise that they are bidding into a pool. They think that sending sbd will guarantee a return but for most bots this is just not the case. Additionally, you run the risk of being scammed if the bot is down, or is the account is a scammer account who had no intention of voting.

2. Having a Downvote War
The ongoing saga of @haejin and his followers vs @berniesanders and his followers is bad for all of us. To new users it gives the perception that Steemit is an unfriendly place and you run the risk of being downvoted into oblivion. Yes, there are issues with self-voting and the abuse of the rewards pool, but I think that needs to be solved at a systems level. The eye for an eye mentality of that battle equals bad press for all of us and it is a battle that neither side can currently win. It also encourages other vigilantism which is a dangerous path to go down (although blatant spamming should be dealt with).

3. Spamming
Don't comment on 100s of posts with "nice post" or worse still "dear sir, please vote for me and I follow and vote for you" (sic). If you want me to follow you, make an insightful comment and produce good content. When someone says something interesting on my posts I will look at their page and if they have good content I will follow and vote. Posting more than 10 times per day will generally constitute spam too, it is unlikely you can produce that many good quality posts. You should also ensure that your content is original, don't copy photos or text from elsewhere and pass it off as your own. This is plagiarism and is immoral (and potentially illegal). If you spam and plagiarise accounts like @tubcat and @steemcleaners will eventually catch you.

4. Voting for crap
I hate seeing a garbage comment with a $10 vote on it. Sometimes it is not that extreme, but the whole point of a voting system is to reward good content. Rewarding garbage will encourage users to produce more lazy spammy content and comments. If you see a particularly bad example you might even comment on it explaining to the user how they could produce better content. If they are a blatant spammer you might also report them to steemcleaners.org

5. Keeping steemit.com a secret
This is a great site. Don't keep it a secret and treat it as your golden goose. The best thing for everyone is for it to expand so that you have larger stronger communities in the areas you are interested in, whether it is travel, gaming, crypto, photography, etc. Tell your friends, organise meetups, encourage others with your interests to join.