Building on Steemit: Your Fellow Community Members are PEOPLE, not Just “Upvotes!”
I am now in my 9th year as a member of Steemit, so I've seen my share of changes and different approaches to being a content creator in this unusual kind of crypto social venue we have here.
Lately, it seems like there's just more and more auto-generated and AI content around here, which makes me very sad primarily because it doesn't really add any value to Steemit, as a venue. If I want to know what machine learning has to say about something, I'll just stick to a conventional search, thank you!
While I recognize that there is certainly a temptation to treat this place as purely a way to earn a few cents, if you take that approach it is ultimately self-defeating, and you're likely to "kill" the very thing that's promising you an opportunity to benefit.
How so?
A venue dedicated entirely to automated content and bots posting and then these "talking to each other via AI" is surely just to spiral down to nowhere.
Sure, you might continue to earn some Steem tokens… but if the almost complete absence of human life means that people lose interest, the longer term result is likely to become that the already low priced Steem token becomes worth a fraction of a cent instead of its current lowly $0.13, then where's the gain?
There is no gain! There's only a loss!
Earlier today, I once again spent a fair amount of time simply looking through the overall ”recent” posts going through the newly posted feed. It was a little alarming to me how much meaningless automated content — whether it be pure nonsense, or robotic updates on some stock or crypto, or a few words about a Twitter update — was in that feed and how little was actually an expression of general human life.
Before you decide to create something and put it out there, do you ever sit back and ask yourself "what sort of thing would I be looking for if I was poking around the web? What would I find interesting?"
When I first joined up here a large part of the appeal was this notion that we were building the Internet of People here. Because of the decentralized format and lack of language limitations we were creating a truly global community where I was able to read about the lives of people all over the world.
Which leads me to the point that I'm making in the title of this post.
While I realize that we all would like to earn some rewards here, a very good starting point would be to treat your fellow Steemit publishers like they're actually human beings not just an opportunity to get an upvote!
Get to actually know them! Build connections! Interact with other people to build some sense of loyalty and friendship!
I realize that there are those among you who are going to read these words and say ”yeah, but so many people are abusing the system!”
While, I recognize that that is a problem, it is not a problem that's going to be made any better by you following suit and doing the same thing.
One of the very useful metaphors I was offered during my early days here was that you have to treat Steemit like it is a garden where you grow your food.
If you just keep harvesting and harvesting and never replanting, and never watering the garden, and never removing the weeds or fertilizing, you're eventually just going to end up with a barren wasteland! Sure, you may eat right now and even next week, but your harvest will simply get smaller and smaller until there's nothing left and then you will starve to death.
Perhaps that's a bit of an overdramatization, but I think it's still a useful thing to keep in mind. I just hope some of the people who really need to see these words are actually going to read them!
And even if they don't, at least I am putting it out there, in the data stream... so you can't come back and say that I didn't warn you!
Thanks for coming by, and enjoy the remainder of your weekend!
How about you? How do YOU view the opportunity that Steemit offers? DO you think automation and AI belong here, even if "the code allows" it? Do you anjoy the "social" aspect of content creation? What — if anything — are you doing to help? Leave a comment if you feel so inclined — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!
(All text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is ORIGINAL CONTENT, created expressly for this platform — Not posted elsewhere!)
Created at 2025.07.05 22:58 PDT
x962/2196
I'll be extremely interested in watching how many people read, react and comment on this. I'll save you the boredom of me repeating myself, having shared my own thoughts so recently.
Being one of the users allocated the largest steemcurator account for the month of July, we're starving to death. We're foraging, picking what we can but the lands are already sparse.
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Sadly, I expect very few, and most likely the ones who do will merely see this as a sort of confirmation of what they already believe/want to be true.
People have an unfortunately way of "filtering" what they see/read in such a way that it supports their reality.
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😮 - it gets harder as it gets bigger !
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Fact! But it still falls to us — the active community members — to do our best to support that which makes Steemit a better community, and "push down" that which is basically abusing/milking the system.
In addition to just how the base code presents content, it might also be where "country representatives" can help speak directly to their compatriots to set a good example. I know some of this is already in place... and I also know it's a fairly thankless job to manually mute "spam-and-scam" from communities, but I doubt we can expect sustained growth of Steemit if outsiders looking for the first time see only an ocean of rubbish.
It has happened more than once that people inquire me about Steem and they are more interested in knowing if they can copy content from Internet for their posts. I ask them, "... and why do you think anyone would want to read something they can already find on google?" And then they are like, oh okay, bye. 🙄
Those good-byes make me feel relieved. We don't need such people here who don't understand the soul of this system.
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Good riddance, I say!
Sadly, it seems to be the way of the modern world... almost everybody is trying to find some kind of shortcut or manipulation so as to get to whatever end result they want without cost, effort or risk. Very sad.
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As most know, this isn't the only gardening area. It's not easy to tend one garden, let alone 2 or more. You do a good job at it though!
Maybe there really are too many garden sites. What if everyone here moved their gardens to the newer version? Might be better to focus on one garden. Might not. I really don't know.
Best wishes to you, and all of us social gardeners!
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Indeed, everyone has different approaches and motivations!
As a blogger since about 1998, I'm likely not representative of the norm out there; there was a time when I managed and maintained over a dozen niche blogs simultaneously, several of them as "informational adjuncts" hobby and niche interest sites (mostly psychology and self-help).
Some people believe it's best to have all your content in a single location... I also don't have a concrete answer to what's the "right" way to go, but I think it depends on the individual.
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chriddi, moecki and/or the-gorilla
Thank you! Appreciate the support!
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