Things to Avoid Doing on Steemit. Directions for 🐟 Minnows 🐟

My dear Minnows. I know you are eager to shine and become popular fast. We all aspire to be that next Steemian Whale. Ambition is good, it drives us to excel, but success doesn't happen overnight and requires dedication, persistence, consistence and time to achieve a solid network for yourself, with loyal followers.

Here are a few common mistakes I've seen people do on Steemit, so try to avoid them.

F4F
The Follow Me, Follow You mantra is not an effective way of building your network. This is not a high school popularity contest. Does it make sense to blindly follow someone then discover all they talk about is mathematical theories, while you love spending your time in the kitchen? You both end up getting useless feeds that you won't read or upvote, which spam your day and waste your time. Also, please don't hammer your way into a comment thread with a "follow for follow" . It's irritating and irrelevant for the discussion. If people like your comments, don't worry, they will upvote and follow you, no need to beg for it.

INDUSTRIAL FISHING
Joining Steemit and throwing that big following net at 1000 users since day 1 in the hope that they will all follow you back isn't a good strategy. You think 1000 is a lot? How about 10000? Or 45000? Yes, I've seen it, I won't name those guys, because I don't want to send them a negative vibe, but believe me they're here. No, you will never get 10k or 45k followers when you join, and even if you do, are you prepared to read and upvote that incoming flood of posts?

POOP TALK 💩💩💩
Rudeness and profanity aren't cool. There's too much vulgarity on the internet, Steemit is the last place we want that. So try to be polite. It's ok to disagree with someone, but cursing won't make you right. Some people might get offended so try to disagree respectfully. If you persist on insulting others, you will get flagged and lose friends faster than making new ones.

We need emotional content, not anger.
_{-- Bruce Lee, "Enter the Dragon"}

NAKED POSTS
Linking a youtube video or a nice picture in an empty post is not blogging. Remember, Steemit is a blogging platform, which means you write your opinion about something, you author a story, you share an experience, you exhibit your art. When I see someone always linking a picture or video without any explanation or thought, I consider it spam and never come back. I don't know what you think about that, but maybe it's just me. A blog's purpose is to encourage thoughts and reactions, so use it for that.

THE XEROX SYNDROME
If I want to read the news from CNN, I'll go to their website and read it, I don't need someone copy/pasting it to me on Steemit. Besides, it's plagiarism and the community frowns upon it. Try to create and write original content. If you must copy/paste a paragraph or more, cite the source and/or quote the text by starting it with >. If you don't, you risk getting flagged and lose reputation in the long run. Check this excellent post about fighting plagiarism written by @fortified. Also this useful post about copyrighted pictures by @rhondak. And if you happen to see @cheetah the bot upvoting you, don't feel special, because that's a friendly warning that you copy/pasted some material. If you cited your source, that's fine, if not, you don't want the @steemcleaners visiting...

Here's what a quoted grayed text looks like. At the end of the quote, add an empty new line to exit the quoting markdown. Thank you for your time.

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Proud member and delegator of the @minnowsupport project.
Join us on https://discord.gg/GpHEEhV

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