Number 10. Plagiarize someone else's work
There's no faster way to get a visit from the Cheetah bot than to google an article, copy it, paste it, and pass it off as your own. I'm not a huge fan of flagging, but even I get tempted to flag morons for this.
Number 9. Circle Jerk your posts
Ok, so you're a well known author on Steemit. You get a lot of money from posts you make in part because bots follow you because you're a well known author. When your posts go from high quality thoughtfulness to low quality spam featuring poorly thought out idiodic shit in your head or simply posting cat memes and readily accessible graphs on the steemit economy from poloniex then it's finally time you've attracted the ire of your peers.
Number 8. Flag someone else's post
A lot of folks that come to Steemit just want to blog about shit they like, but others come because they have values that align with the goals of the platform ie free of censorship. For that reason people really don't like flagging. If you want to piss off the community find something that's well written and flag it because you disagree with it.
Number 7. Post obnoxiously
@cryptocash lookin' at you bud. But you're not the only example. @r4fken is another steemit classic. Yes, get pissed one day, maybe get drunk, post too much shit or say something bad, catch a flag, and then go on TILT!!! Flag everything in sight.
Flame everyone with rep. This path will crush your baby rep into the negatives. You've been eliminated from the steemit history books of any chance of relevance. But don't stop there. You can create alts, and spam people in other ways. Never give up. Never surrender. You can change steemit one meaningless flag at a time if you're willing to do it to thousands of people.
Number 6. Be racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic
People don't like racists. Sometimes people like the jokes etc. But ultimately people in this community don't really like those that are outspoken assholes. The health of the platform is necessary to everyone on here and that largely means teh health of the community. What they don't want is a bunch of dickheads writing lots of bad things that make this place look bad and folks stop using it as a result which would devalue the steem in their wallet. They might forgive you for locking your car down in a "bad part of town" but if you make overt comments clearly in support of racist shit then "C-Ya."
Number 5. Blog politics
So, I don't think people really want your opinions on here. Unless you're already famous. Then people will support them either for celebrity worship or because your posts will attract attention and upvotes and bots can ride that train at least for some reward. That said, a bunch of the curators and whales don't really want political views on this place or least won't support them.
I'm not entirely sure where the attitude comes from. It's likely some combination of "those conversations tend not ot be healthy and alienate people and thus reduce readership and authorship so it's bad for the platform." It's also likely got some Christian programming of "it's not polite to talk about those things." And maybe they are apathetic and don't see politics as any reason for why the world is not going too well these days. Tough to say, but there are many whales and curation teams that aren't supportive of political posts.
Number 4. Blog conspiracy theory
Again a lot of the people on the platform think of this a commercial enterprise. While freedom of expression and all that jazz is a good talking point in reality it gets messy. You start telling people that 9/11 was a false flag event and people that believe otherwise are sheep and folks get insulted and want to leave. That's bad for the platform. So, people with money in this place, even if they might agree with some of the sentiment, have financial interests stacked against it.
I can see that with some pizzagate posts. There are well written and well documented posts about pizzagate on here. A handful of truthers upvote them, but it's not like you see the whales or curation bots/teams supporting them. A post about the life of an african lemur hurts no one and possibly brings a few nature lovers. A post about how the USG may be run by satanic pedos starts freaking out platform investors. That's a sure way to scare off whales and make sure your posts don't hit the trend line.
Number 3. Criticize inflation on the platform
Well, oddly enough, this one worked. For you youngsters that haven't been around here for a while this platform had a stage in it's growth where it had inflation set to 100%. Central banks tell you all the time that inflation is a good thing, but inflation is a really good thing for select people. Namely, those who already have a lot of the currency or those who get first crack at the currency before the devaluation really takes hold. In this case if you look at the accounts over at steemwhales.com they had a bunch of currency probably because they were early adopters, employees, or invested but then they ended up with a shit ton of currency because inflation kicked into high gear and people that already had twice as much in a very short time period.
While the value of your account never changed the price of steem plummeted in that time period. If you're a whale waiting the long game to sell out it didn't matter because you could see the amount of steem increase. If you were a lowly minnow or pauper as I like to call them (Millenial works too) then you didn't get the benefit of the increase and your posts were now worth shit. So, blogging stalled big time. They cancelled the inflation, slowly the price started rising a little as folks meandered back to the platform, but it cemented the whales as having even more rediculous stake in the platform.
At the time it was pretty hotly contested. People's feelings got hurt. People got called out. People wrote rants on why they were leaving. It's a bit of a dark ages for steemit. But as far as I can tell, whales don't like being called out for having huge stakes because inflation hella-launched them there.
Number 2. Criticize distribution on the platform
So, along with "don't talk about inflation" there is another unspoken rule that's also touchy. You're not going to make any friends talking about steem distribution on the platform. Here's a snapshot from steemwhales.com that shows today's distribution.
Looks like 90% of the steem is in the hands of 1% of the people.
It's not quite like that because steemit has it's own account, which is in turned owned by the original investors, so it's more like that one big one is in the hands of X number of others on the list. It's also not quite like that because there are a shit ton of bots on here. So, there aren't that many actual people so it's hard to calculate a 1% kinda thing when you don't know the denominator accurately.
And I get it, steemit doesn't charge a system wide tax so they need a phat account that they can use to pay for stuff and have as a faucet at times and that jazz, but I guess there are other ways to do it. They could upvote their own posts, or post such that money flows back to them when they need it. I think folks would understand that it's a kind of tax, but one that doesn't directly pull money from their accounts.
But when you want to attract newbs to the platform you don't really want them to know until they are 1000 steem in that "Hey, by the way steemit is more efficient than fuedalism or the federal reserve at preserving wealth at the top 1%, but that's not really our values."
So, if you want to be popular around here don't mention that.
Number 1. Criticize Steemit Founders
Ok, the day I lost the most support seems to be the time I compared @ned and @dan to humpty dumpty when the price was crashing and people were fleeing the platform.
https://steemit.com/steem/@aggroed/humpty-dumpty
Also, they did things that could easily be perceived as insider trading to anyone that pays attention to hardforks and where they moved money simultaneously. Those actions were brought up too.
I mean well. I try to hold people accountable. I use jest as a way to make things palitable and funny. But I'm not making any friends by doing it. I made more money on an off topic Sona from League Post then I did on most of the other posts I've made in the last couple weeks. 4 people saw it, but it was rewarded, because it's a safe post and it's not going to irk anyone. It wasn't offensive. It didn't call attention to the dirty secret of this otherwise really amazing place that's developing a more corporate and risk averse curation and authoring culture.
Conclusion
Don't be like me. If you want to make money on this thing, and you probably need money, don't do these things listed above. Your wallet will thank you. Your following will thank you. And maybe, just maybe, on a really rare day, when the whale is tucked into their blankets sipping a hot beverage reading the new section you might just catch an upvote.
Did I miss any other unspoken rules? Starting to think "Don't be bearish on the price of steem should have made it too."
Nice blog!
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Unfortunately I agree with this post... on the other hand if you want upvotes just say how wonderful steemit is.
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