Should I start advertising myself through comments?

in steemit •  7 years ago  (edited)

I mean, just look at this guy, joined in july and already has 790 followers!


I could not help myself (again) and simply had to reply to his comment on @azfix's post (which makes a lot of sense by the way, read it).


Now anyone with half a brain and some understanding of the platform would laugh this guy off and procede onto other things, right? Well, I guess we already know not every human being on this planet has half a working brain, which explains the followers he does have.

He made me think though! Maybe I should be advertising myself through comments aswell! So here we go, as a reply to a couple of his comments:


I wonder if people will understand the irony or maybe I'll get flagged... Keep you posted!


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I have come across so many of those comments and it irritates me. I get so tempted to write something really harsh back or like you, write that they will not get anything for following me unless they can produce good content in their posts, but what stops me every time? The possibility of someone flagging me. I also don't get where and how I am getting some of my followers because I haven't posted anything except comments and when I check on some of my followers, some of them have written lots of random comments in their comments section. This is totally starting to make me lose any faith I have in the future of this platform. There are just way too many of those people out there....

There are a lot of those people here lately, I agree. It's why it's important to build up your own circle of people to follow, so you can ignore the rest. Though I guess, as you can see, they still bug me from time to time. I don't want to just ignore them every time, because that way, they won't learn and they get away with it.

I react harshly sometimes, other times I react like this. It all depends on my mood.

I understand your fear of flags. I pick my battles carefully, which means I don't go after members with more SP than me. I simply can't risk a flagging war with a big account. Most of these spammers and sad types don't have a lot of SP though, so I hardly feel their flags. If they do get annoying or rude (like yesterday), my reach is big enough to get a little help from a few friends.

What I've also discovered is I've been receiving .001 from people I don't know and don't follow, so I'll go have a look at their profile only to find they send out that amount to dozens of people.
It's an unusual way to get someone's attention.

I just received one of those aswell! It was a 'thank you' for upvoting one of his pictures. When I went to check, I noticed I didn't upvote any of his pictures, so I quickly closed the tab. I'm not okay with mind games ;-)

Lol...that's a great idea!! You made me laugh @playfulfoodie :D

Yay, happy to hear it :D

LOL well played. I almost started going after some on the photography tag. Posting macros that even I have seen before across the net as their own. Of course being upvoted. The funny thing is the copied text was so fluent and flowery English, but when asked questions in the comments, couldn't barely string together a sentence.
But then I ask myself is it worth the time and getting my blood pressure going lol...so annoying coz if one stops there is always another one and another one......

but when asked questions in the comments, couldn't barely string together a sentence.

Ugh, I know, that's a dead giveaway. I find it hard to think of what to do with pictures. I can't always find their source, so I can't proof they're stolen. Text I can just take through google and it'll give me the source. It works with pictures sometimes, but I don't think it works all the time.

Anyway, yeah, there'll always be others. I still like to catch a few though, because it might send a message to some of these others to change their ways. I dunno... usually I'm a realist, but sometimes I have to be an idealist :-)

HAHA! Love this :)

Great to hear you liked it :D

I loved this as well. I have been seeing similar things wondering the same thing. Keep up the great work.

Thank you so much! :-)

  ·  7 years ago (edited)

Pity I already follow you. Perhaps I could unfollow and then follow you back? Oh wait, I don't get the princely sum of 0.001 SBD if I do?? Affronted, planning to retire to the corner of the room and sulk for a minute and a half.... or more depending on how much I enjoy THAT!

Imagine the same scene happening on a road. Which one reeks of a challenged intelligence? And which one of a genuine & meaningful interest?

Follow/upvote me and I'll follow/upvote you and then we can forget about each other and follow others? After all success in life is only based on the NUMBER of followers, right? :D

Or, let's talk a while and if we enjoy each other's thoughts let's also follow each other so we don't lose sight of each other in this ocean of people?

LOL @playfulfoodie! I finished reading the entire post, commented and I'm still laughing.

Haha did you enjoy the corner of the room?

I'm glad you liked the post :D

Not very much, I'm afraid. I prefer the center. :D
I definitely did. And I'm keeping an eye out for more posts from you.

I do not understand why people continue supporting this projects. More and more accounts will do the same and one they they will become the majority.

If this trend continues, Steemit will not be a writing platform anymore, but a marketing platform.

I share your worries @ropaga! It's why I'm trying to act on some of these comments, instead of just ignoring them. I know I can't make too much of a difference; there are simply too many of these things going on. I still hope that my replies will make some people think twice before buying into this.

I really don't get it why everybody is so obsessed with follows and resteems.
Just engage in posts and comment about the post without begging for anything...

I get these 0.001sbd about a resteem service where you can buy your resteem for 2sbd . How can anybody think that that is worth anything? It'll just be resteemed in a flood to people who don't care and see your post anyway since all they care about are who votes for them and getting more followers.

I completely agree with you! There is so much of this stuff going on, I'm trying to counter some of it, but ofcourse that doesn't do much at all. It's more for my own joy now :-)

Post engagement is so much better indeed. I actually upvote quite a few comments on my posts, because I like rewarding people who take the time to read my stuff and interact with me. I can't follow all of them, but I'd feel bad not showing any appreciation. I normally make sure to give atleast $0.02, but my VP was drained a lot yesterday by my flagging actions, so I have to take it slow for a few days now.

It'll just be resteemed in a flood to people who don't care

Exactly! It's the quality of followers/readers that matters most, not the quantity.

I can only vote 100% (lol) but I also upvote comments from people that actually took the time to read what I posted and take the time to comment and ignoring the : please vote for me / follow me beggars.

I found someone that copied an entire post from someone else that posted it 2 hours earlier. That person didn't even remove the picture names (DSC00202.JPG etc). So shameless. Instant steemcleaners material.

I'm also at a discord channel teamnl where sometimes people come in to drop their link. 9 out of 10 times it's plagiarized stuff that I can post to steemcleaners directly...

I found someone that copied an entire post from someone else that posted it 2 hours earlier.

Hah, I've had that exact same thing happening to me a couple of months ago.

It's really bad, though I'm pretty sure not everyone knows what they're doing is wrong. It's why I always tell them why I flagged their post, so they'll atleast know what not to do in the future.

Nahh.. I don't buy something like that.
If someone makes a post on Steemit and someone else copy & paste the entire post you are deliberately doing that.

In this case it was : https://steemit.com/life/@cherryblossom-sa/why-the-beach that was upped to 68. The other person : https://steemit.com/life/@zulfahmi2141/life-when-you-do-something-good-it-will-come-back-to-you-that-is-good-karma-2017810t13322547z

Yeah, copy/pasting other Steemit posts is simply bad. Some people copy from completely different sites though and maybe they're just used to the whole sharing-thing Facebook has. Except that Steemit doesn't have a Share button on every single site out there ;-)

Ha ha ha you made me laugh withthe second comment. No promises! 😂
Just the other day i got involved in a discussion about these one cent transfers. Apart from their almost aggressive way of responding to you (really offending) i thought it to be so silly. So i like the way you handled this. If there is an upvote cent left for today....it yours 😀

I'm glad I managed to make you laugh :D
Yeah, these small transfers are so weird and aggressive. Honestly, I'm sad to see so many people falling for this stuff. Luckily though, these same people probably fall for all sorts of stuff, so they won't be good followers with their 1000+ people to follow.

I guess not, indeed

Haha nice, keeping it real! :D

Those people that mindlessly follow will sooner or later regret it and notice that its of no use. Just like the users that lately have been mass following to get a big amount of followers and through that start selling "re-steem" services which will give them pretty much no visibility, rewards or recognition and is only to benefit the one running the service who has tried to take a short-cut for some easy money.

Oh right, those resteeming services, another joke. Gotta hand it to them though, nice way of playing into other people's desperation to get some extra cash! I'd almost do it myself, it if wouldn't make me feel so dirty...

Yeah, like I mentioned in another post about it the other day, I'd feel sorry for my followers.

Exactly. I hardly ever resteem and when I do, it's to fill in gaps I leave on my usual topics. People follow me for a reason, so I'm not going to feed them random crap. It would basically mean losing good followers, so it would cost me upvotes in the long run. Not a smart move any way you look at it.

Exactly. I was a bit on the verge of resteeming @ocd posts since I know they are very random but to give the account and those authors visibility I'm using my followers for that and knowing that its activity is for the greater good of the platform.

Usually I've been very careful with resteems before that and I think many others should be as well.

Haha, nice one @playfulfoodie :)

Thank you very much! I'm expecting 2000+ followers in no time :D

I imagine you'll be living a whole different life then :D

I'm sure it would just be more dead followers ;-)

Another good idea is to ask people to stop following you and offer them 0.001 SBD if they do. I have no idea how this would be good in a long run, but it'd be an interesting experiment.

Have you checked if you have got any new followers after leaving those comments?

Haha, great idea, though I think I'm going to pass on that experiment for now :D

Ah, I only posted a few and there's not much difference yet. To be fair, I did post them all as a reply to this guy, so they probably don't get a lot of visibility.

Can't see a special peak in your followers, so maybe it didn't get that much of visibility or people who saw that weren't very interested. It's a shame.

I have to admit, in the past, you were one of the first people to comment something meaningful on my first posts in history (like 6 months ago) and you are a good example of a perfect Steemit user. You are creating content, you are reading other peoples posts and you keep on interacting with thought. It's not only "nice post" and "come and follow me". The best users never need to do that.

Well, it wasn't really to get any new followers anyway. I just wanted to counter this guy by showing how silly his message was.

Thank you very much for saying that @apsu, it means a lot :-)

I've noticed I don't have the energy to go through all of the posts anymore, so I'm sad I miss out a lot and feel a little bit bad about that sometimes. My first priority are my own posts and interacting with everyone who comments on them. I do try though and if I don't have time to comment, I try to atleast upvote.

It's hard sometimes to think of a good comment! Especially on photography posts, because the main thing I often want to say is "Great picture!" :D

I know, but I would have loved if you would have gained a big bunch of followers by doing that and the silly guy would have left with none ;)

You shouldn't take stress of Steemit and reading everything or even posting! The most important thing in commenting is still this:
Don't write "Great photo" in a post with no photo. It usually helps you get far :) (And I've seen this happen!)

Upvoted and RESTEEMED!

I found it easier to follow so to shut him up! :)

Aah that would feel like a win for him though, I cannot do that :-)

This great idea, and better and maybe I will try this, hehe

Great post! I'll vote for it if you follow me long time.

Just kidding.

I already follow you long time! ;-)