I started this blog because I wanted to make money. I came to Steemit, saw a bunch of people getting paid stupid amounts of money to post retarded shit, and was like, "I gotta get me some of that."

Then I get here and realize that it was all fake. The upvotes were all purchased. The only people who were getting "organic" exposure were semi-hot girls who posted pictures of themselves and wrote a few uninspired paragraphs about their boring lives. Sad.

So what's a guy to do?

Well, I mean now that you know the system is fucked, you might as well do what you want, right?

Wrong.

You still want people to read your work, don't you? Do you think they're going to want to read your poem, manuscript, or short story if you're just another nobody? No.

You need to BE SOMEBODY for them to care. You need to be famous for some reason. I don't care if you're famous for doing tutorials on YouTube on how to fix your computer - you have to be well known.

People need to recognize your face, they need to recognize your voice. They need to know your style and be like, "You're reading a @yallapapi post aren't you? I can tell just by looking at it."

I mean let's face it, your short story is pretty stupid anyway. Your poetry is trite and your articles are full of spelling and grammar mistakes. You're not even very intelligent. Average looking at best.

So what's the great equalizer? Yeah okay, fame. But what about before that? Because fame takes a long time to create.

Money. Dinero. Cashola. With that, you can do whatever you want.

First you get the money, then you get the power

Steemit is a perfect example. I wrote for YEARS on various platforms and not so much as a tumbleweed blew by to take a shit on my tens of thousands of words that I carefully crafted into hobo-esque scrap-metal word-sculpture masterpieces like this one. But now I can just pop over here to this wonderful "blockchain" platform, pay a couple bucks in fake internet money and boom - instant celebrity.

It's crazy how people equate high cost with high quality. But look, I do it too. If I see a post that's only got $0.09 worth of upvotes I think, "Meh, probably garbage."

But then I scroll the Trending page and see some of the most stunning works of art I've ever seen. I need but read a few words, and I'm sure that they'll all go down in history as some of the most inspired literature ever to grace our mortal-minnow eyes.

Let's take a look:

-Capitalization errors in the title. Unoriginal premise that's been beat to death. Inane and uninspired writing. Generalizations galore. I used to wonder how this could possibly earn so much money, but now I know - paid upvotes.

-Uninspired title. Meager information in the article. Basically an update post: "hey guys here's 200 words about what I learned in 4 months on #DLIVE. Did I mention #DLIVE? Because if I use the tag #DLIVE enough then #DLIVE will upvote my post and give me sweet, sweet money. #DLIVE #DLIVE #DLIVE #DLIVE #DLIVE."

Oh, you didn't know? Posting about other projects that use the STEEM blockchain get lots of love from Steemit staff. My first video on dtube got a vote from the dtube account worth $16.

In fact, if you take a look at the trending page, you'll see that the category of most of the main posts have to do with the STEEM blockchain.

-I guess this one's alright. It's a contest that rewards people for their submissions. The winner is given 20 SBD. So naturally people will actually try and submit something of quality, because there are no paid upvotes on user-run contests. Food for thought, eh @ned?

-Jesus talk about brown-nosing... this guy is a superstar. Wait wait, I'm sorry. Don't hate the player, hate the game. Don't hate the player, hate the game. Don't hate the player, hate the game. 3 times so you'll remember.

-I'm too dumb to actually understand what any of this even means. And if I'm too dumb to understand it, that means that 99% of the people on this platform are also too dumb to understand it. And THAT means that there's no way anyone would have upvoted this because they thought it important, noteworthy, or groundbreaking, let alone a quality piece of writing. Sounds like paid upvotes to me.

-Same problem as the previous article. What the fuck does this shit even mean? Judging from the comments nobody understands either. Just your typical $0.01 upvote-hunting Pakis with their colorless, oxygen-wasting words.

That said, props to ADSactly for how they run their account. Genius.

-I can't talk shit about @SmartSteem as I use them for paid upvotes all the time. Their article is too complicated for me to spend time reading but they're obviously trying to promote whatever they've got going on over there. A paid upvote bot making the Trending page. I don't know, is that ironic or unironic?

-I really don't understand this. It's a product placement for Elizabeth Arden cosmetics. A poorly written article, even by Steemit standards, that's been upvoted out the ass by some powerful bots.

Spelling errors in the title even. Was this written by the 57 year old media manager of Elizabeth Arden who doesn't know how to send a text message, let alone format posts?

Was their head marketing guy like, "Okay guys, we're going to do a product placement on Steemit, but so people don't realize we're just astroturfing, we'll make it seem like a random non-native English speaker wrote it. Then we'll just buy upvotes!"

Homey The Clown don't play that shit

I'm done. If I believed that intelligent people upvoted this because they thought it was entertaining, high quality or valuable beyond a moderate ego boost to the person it's written about, I'd lose even more faith in humanity.

But THESE are the posts regurgitated by Steemit's million dollar algorithm - the ones that it deems most worthy of your attention. I could be wrong, but shouldn't the most highly rewarded pieces on this platform actually be the pieces of the highest quality - not just the most heavily promoted?

Or at least the most shareable, in order to draw people from Facebook, Reddit and other social networks? Wouldn't that make more sense?

I'll be honest with you - I don't bring this up because I actually care about any of you. I really don't. Sorry. I have enough money to upvote my own posts to the top of the Trending page if I want. I know which bots to use, how to use them and can handle losing money if it all goes to shit. I can get eyes on my writing no matter what.

I've also been writing for years and know how to make you think specific things when you read words in a certain order.

But what about you? Are you a girl with big tits? Do you want to write about something other than one of the sidechains of the STEEM platform?

I'm willing to bet most of you aren't, and don't. And like I said earlier, it doesn't even really matter, because in all likelihood your writing is garbage anyway and nobody would want to read it even with all the paid upvotes in the world.

But that's the thing: with this system, your content doesn't need to be good. Your videos don't need to be cleverly-edited like on YouTube.

Yes, I said it. The dreaded Y word.

And guess what, Steemit circle-jerkers: this platform will never, ever, ever, ever EVER in a million years reach the level of popularity of YouTube, Medium, Twitch or any of the services that it's blatantly trying to copy for that exact reason. Let me spell it out as clearly as I can:

On Steemit et al, user posts are given substantial exposure only from upvote bots, Steemit staff, and a handful of high-SP accounts. Upvote bots are for-profit entities with selfish interests. They provide a service in exchange for money. The staff have a vested interest in seeing their platform grow but don't want to seem biased towards non-staff non-whale users, so they upvote Steemit "news" items and other platform-related content. But they don't know/care that nobody outside of developers who build on the STEEM blockchain actually give a shit about those things. Nobody cares about developments in the STEEM ecosystem, or what @ned et al said in some video.

So why does that shit get upvoted? Because we're all human beings, virtually incapable of seeing things from another person's perspective. Shit, if someone posted a video of me saying intelligent things about a technology company that I created, I'd upvote that shit too. All in the name of "the platform."

Viral content on Steemit? LOL

But does that mean it's a "good piece of content" by traditional standards? Is that video of @ned et al going to go viral on Instagram? Will people on Reddit give a fuck about what he says? Will anyone other than the Paki upvote-hunters and Steemit circle-jerkers care about the contents of that video?

No, no and no.

One piece of the puzzle that this platform completely misses is the fact that if the goal is to get people to come on this site and spend time here, there needs to be a reason to do so OTHER THAN MAKING MONEY.

This place is full of "me too" wannabes who sadly think that if they just work at it long enough, if they contribute enough "quality content" to the system, if they're just patient enough, if they just give it enough time, if they just comment enough on other posts, if they just give selflessly without thinking about what they'll get in return, that someday they'll also see dollar signs and triple digits at the bottom of their posts.

Sorry buckos, that's where you're wrong. Look at the trending page. That shit is pure, hot steemy (pun intended) garbage that wouldn't be accepted on ANY professional news site. Full of spelling, grammar and punctuation errors, bland content and poor formatting. It wouldn't go "viral" on any platform that wasn't paying up the ass to give it exposure. It's propped up by fake internet money - then rewarded with more fake internet money.

And you know what's funny? I used to be like that too. Go back and look at some of my first posts. I was trying so hard to behave myself. Everyone on this platform seemed so optimistic, so full of hope. We were all in this together, well on our way to getting rich from the magical blogging platform that pays you crypto for posting and commenting.

I mean, if some dumb ass girl could make $86 from her 150 word intro post with a few pictures of her playing with her dog, then an intelligent person like me should be able to rock this fucking place, right?

No.

Where's @GrumpyCat when you need him? He's right to try and impose some order here, but he's fighting for the wrong cause. Who cares if people upvote 3.6 days after they post? It's not about the money, my brother. Why don't you make yourself useful and flag all the low effort shitposts? What about the worthless "me too" comments?

Oh no, but that would be too much work. Easier to just run a filter for people who use bots that vote after 3.5 days. Like that's going to change the order of the Trending page.

You can't grow this platform without good content. Good by normal standards, not Steemit circle-jerking Kool-Aid-drinking please-follow-me-sir good. Eventually people realize that it takes money to make money. And most people are broke, definitely not about to spend the $300 - $400 required to boost a post to the Trending page, let alone do it on a daily basis.

Yes, Steemit is a mostly laissez-faire ecosystem. Love it. I'm a capitalist to the max. But why why WHY is there no incentivized curation BY STEEMIT STAFF for quality blog posts? Some autistic paint chip-eating bork posts literally anything to dtube/dlive/deeznuts and they get free money and a participation trophy, but the quality writing - the medium with the highest volume of submissions - disappears into obscurity, buried beneath mountains of low-effort shitposts and paid upvotes.

I can't stop raving

I knew there was something wrong with this place when I saw how positive everyone was all the time. I even felt myself doing it too. After all, I didn't want to get flagged or downvoted for being a Negative Nancy.

But now that the Kool Aid Blinders are off, I can see the light. And the more money I spend, the brighter the light gets. I'm going to spend more on this stupid post than I have on all my other stupid posts. I'm about to drop $800 on this bad boy and link to it from my Instagram.

Why? Because I'm a vain ass motherfucker who wants as many people to read my trash writing as possible. Just like you. And by writing something controversial, criticizing the system and calling out a bunch of people by name, AND SPENDING LOTS OF MONEY, you're all going to know who I am.

Instant fame. An overnight success, that only took me 34 years.

You want to make a name for yourself? You want to get people's attention? Of course you do, otherwise you wouldn't be on here. You'd be writing in your diary with a pen and hiding that shit in your desk.

You're here for the same reason I am: attention, recognition, fame, fortune, money. That's what you want. Admit it. You think you're going to get it by creating "quality content?" You think it just "takes time?" Give me a fucking break. That's what they tell you to get you to contribute until you're blue in the face OR until you break down and start buying upvotes.

All good baby. I've got the money and I can type 100+ WPM. You think I made an outline before posting this? This is an hour of freestyling straight up invented on the spot from my brain.

But what about you? Look I'll tell you the truth right now... it all comes down to one thing. How bad do you want it? Is it a must-have or a nice-to-have? Are you 34 years old, burnt out from 7 years of selling hair straighteners and looking to finally get your shit together so you can start banging a different hard-bodied fitness model every night on your reputation alone?

Or are you one of those people who says "money isn't everything?"

You want to get known in this world? You want people to recognize you on the street? You want brands to approach you and offer you $10k to wear their hoodie?

Make a scene. Get loud. But do it with style. Do it so well that they can't just write you off as a degenerate troublemaker who's just bitter that he has to work harder than a girl with big tits to make a little money.

It's not easy. But trust me, it's worth it.

