5 Different Types of Steemit Users And Different Visions About The Future of Steemit

This is my personal observation after few months of socialising on Steemit.
I have interacted with dozens of different Steemit users, many of whom I met personally during Steem Fest.
I think that my socialising experience during Steem Fest was the most informative and dispelled a lot of my illusions (or delusions?) about certain users, while consolidated my opinion about the others.

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Five types of Steemit users

The creators

These are the users who contribute a lot to Steemit community. They work and spend their time on creating quality content. They engage in comments and chat rooms. Many of them create community focused projects, applications, videos, podcasts and articles. They are here for the community and they tend to be against flooding of Steemit with low quality content such as copypasta, plagiarism or "one sentence, one YT video link" posts. They are here to invest their time and creativity rather than money. Some of them are also whales. That was the largest group during Steem Fest who was mixing up and hanging around together. They were open and welcoming towards anyone during Stem Fest. They want Steemit to become blogging community platform where different people are rewared for their creativity. They seem to be also open towards Steemit becoming UBI-based (universal basic income) type of platform.

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The investors

These users create little content and are here for the profits/return on their investment. If they create any project or application it is usually revolving around monetary aspects of Steemit such as market, large profits etc. They usually seem to have nothing against, or even support curating low quality content (such as that produced by the type of users called "the vultures"). They would upvote almost anything, as long as they can profit from curating it. Plagiarism, scammers, dangerous pseudoscience. Maybe even child porn, if some part of community favoured such posts and were willing to support it. Their usual response is "let the market decide what content should be curated" which simply means that any post is good if it sells.
They are in favour of idea of transforming Steemit into some sort of paid platform that is a hybrid between Reddit and Twitter. It was a small group during Steem Fest and rather kept a distance from "the creators" - it seemed that many of them approached other users only when they thought that such networking would benefit their investment or profit related development.
The impression is that many in this user group treat Steem just like another shitcoin to make a buck of.

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The leeches

These are users who have come here for a quick buck. They can be subdivided into 2 groups:

• Those trying to milk the curation with their low quality content, such as plagiarists, copypasters, scammers, "one sentence, one YT video link" posters.

• Those who have joined Steemit with whale connections (have acquaintances with some powerful users). They do not necessarily produce low quality content.
  Many of their posts are of good quality. In most of cases they show little engagement in Steemit community (unless for promoting their content or taking a part in some bot-rigged competition to reap the prize). They seldom converse in chatrooms or comment on other people's posts (unless responding to comments on their own posts). Most importantly they seldom curate other users posts, especially minnows. They are here for the buck, so even if they produce something to promote Steemit, it is completely profit driven.

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The observers

This type of users are the ones who seldom create any content but engage in Steemit community. Through their comments they contribute to discussions and conversations under other's posts. They are often seen conversing in chat rooms. They tend to have lower reputation because of low Steem Power and little content creation. They made up small but significant group during Steem Fest and were socialising with "the creators".

The beginners

New users who have recently joined and are testing and figuring out what Steemit is about. They tend to post poor quality content while learning about the platform etc.

[ These group distinctions are certainly not ultimate pigeonholing in any way. Some users may not fit into any of these categories and some may fit to more than one. ]

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My responses to some of the arguments perpetuated by "the investors"

"Too small user base", "It is not mature enough" or "it is still in beta" arguments

I think that the user base is already quite large and it keeps growing. The community seems to be established and strong. We saw that during Steem Fest. This event was the proof that the platform is socially mature enough. I have never heard about and other blogging or social platform that has even organised such an event.

The investors argument: The benefits of rewarding low quality content

"The investors" tend to share an opinion that there is nothing wrong in curating low quality or dubious content such as plagiarism, copypasta or "1 sentence, 1 YT video link" posts.
They explain that curating such posts is good for this platform because people outside of the Steemit will see that users are earning a lot of money by posting super short, effortless content such as copypasting YT links, "cute cat pictures", etc.
Allegedly that kind of curation will make people want to join Steemit to compete for the share of those rewards so this will quickly increase the size of the community. This apparently would "increase the value of STEEM because a huge number of people will have it, know how to use it, and represent a large economic opportunity and audience".
Another part of this argument also claims that potential new users from outside the platform who are without any particular talent or who aren't celebrity will see no reason to join, or if they do join, they will find that they can't meaningfully participate, and quit.

My point of view?
I have absolutely no talent, whatsoever. I can't play an instrument, draw, sing, write fiction, paint, dance etc. But we don't to be talented to be creative.
When I joined Steemit few months ago, I submitted many awful posts. I had no previous experience with blogging (not counting Facebook posts). Then I have progressively learned how to properly edit the content and how to create better and more interesting posts. It is not some sort of talent but simply acquired experience. Anyone can learn how to do that. Even the most talentless person. It just takes the will to make an effort to learn. Certainly, possibility of SBD reward is a good incentive for it.

In my opinion, low quality posts should not be rewarded. I think that new users, talented or not, should earn their way up the platform through their work, so they can start being rewarded for their content. To reward low quality content is very inconsiderate towards all those users who put a lot of time and work into this community ("the creators"). "The creators"are the users who make this community great and strong, and they should be respectfully rewarded for it.

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We have to decide if we are here to promote the vision of Steemit as truly social, community-focused blogging platform or to turn it into profit driven entity that adjusts itself according to the "market" rules, not people's creative input.
We have to decide if Steemit will become the platform for creative expression and equality or just means for a quick buck.

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Thanks for reading.

Steem on,
-logic