A rant worthy of noting
This website is wonderful, however egotistical clique oriented people with nothing else better to do know how to abuse and manipulate the steemit system to punish people they don't like. If you do or say something that pisses off the wrong person on Steemit, they and their clones will relentlessly ruin your reputation score. Case and point: I was in general chat, still a noob because although I had been here for almost 2 months I had just came back from a 30 day vacation from the internet. I threw up one of my funny posts, relevant to the conversation to make people laugh and INSTANTLY 3 people jumped all over me as if I had just slew a litter of newborn puppies. One of them was a complete asshole about it. I didn't realize regardless of the intent we are not supposed to "advertise" (which was not my intent, it was to add to the discussion), and because I am not one of the cool kids in chat every day there is no leniency.
Not realizing the severity of the situation, I replied with sarcasm and my Politically incorrect post. At this point I got the ominous "You have been warned" statement. Thoroughly disgusted, I left general chat never to return but the damage had been done and it still continues. When will it stop? Do I need to hire Security? I am not going to be bullied into leaving, so if you're reading this and you are one of the ones continuing this childish game you might as well stop because you will get bored before I submit. Go pick on someone more deserving of this bullshit, I'm here to promote my business, smart boxes programmed by yours truly.
The moral of the story is if you're new here, make a lot of friends before you decide to exert a sense of humor or try to fit in. Otherwise you're gonna have a bad time.
Really great article, I had such a situation too, that some people wanted to destroy my reputation and told wrong things about me! Of course upvoted. 👍