STEEMIT Sport or Spectacle? At the 3 week mark of my relationship with it

joined this society three weeks ago in ignorant bliss. I never blogged before and to be honest I don't know how I happened upon this page. I was educated in the time of kelly green words blinking wagon wheelsalong the Oregon Trail. In a time of 4" floppy disks and to access the internet was $100/hr or so it seemed lol. It really is mind blowing to see the world's technological advances since my middle school days in the 80's. I will admit to laboriously tinkering away on my computer for days to figure out how to insert a picture into my Myspace page lol. I had seen articles posted about people making money blogging, by inserting advertisements along side their words of wisdom. So I thought it was pretty sweet that this site paid you directly by ranking the value of your post with accumulative votes. The wool was over my eyes.

I really thought that I would open some people's minds and hearts, to  expand their imaginations and internally register some of the meaning on any level they needed from my work. I will admit I don't believe I have written anything prize worthy but I definitely have been swimming  against the current. Right off the bat I started reading everything I could find about this website. There wasn't much at all outside of the Steemit site itself. I found some silly info and some I could truly use. I compiled some of this info and posted it together so noobs like me could use it. Of course I didn't expect to get paid for others work, and I didn't. I conquered some of the issues people ( me included) were having with the image and post uploading problems. Peramlink failures and the plague of the blue space station pic lol. I wrote a handful of articles based on different experienced i've had to test the waters. A variety of topics in different writing styles. I had high hopes of course, and lots of issues! I worked all day on an "intoroduceyourself" piece with multiple images to go along with my story. I uploaded it and waited for the results only to find a rather poor response. Not too many people looked at it that I could see, and so I looked into it to go over my work. Only half my post uploaded lol! There was nothing but the first couple paragraphs and nothing after the second pic i added.

In the meantime I started looking into the Crypto currency aspect of the site. Is it real money, where does it come from, and how to process it from A-B with a little dose of how to grow long term in between. All I can say is WOW! This is waaaay beyond my comprehension. At this point three weeks in I don't have a damn clue how it all works! I'm only playing with my cyber money within Steemit. I began with my free startup money and so I figure If I do lose it all it hurts is my pride, not my bank account. I probably would lose it in the process somewhere if I tried to exchange it for Bitcoin because I don't know enough. If I was lucky enough to get it to Bitcoin then i'd probably lose it on the way to U.S. dollars. DO YOU CONFIRM THIS TANSACTION?....POOF!</p>

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<p>&nbsp;There were posts rolling around about upvoting, downvoting and how people were trying to take the short route to success with little real output but a decent payout. I'm not judging those people but I did post several replies encouraging a little more effort but I gave that up. I saw posts saying the biggest payouts with little or no effort was to sit on the new posts and upvote any that had boobs, bitcoin or Steemit attached. This was true of course but I didn't give in. In the meantime the site was hacked and some people lost their steem. There were some big dollar payout of posts regarding this issue if you look hard enough. This was a time of some serious writing and some fantastic posts. The site was locked down for a period as the second hacking attempt took place and there were no new accounts created for a bit. I really enjoyed the turn people's work were taking with out the influx of noobs posting cheats and Gifs of dogs pooing and whatnot.

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 I was super excited with the update. The change in timing for payoutwas pretty cool. The turnover was great because It encouraged steemians to put great effort into what they were presenting to the world, no matter the canvas they chose. Then the bottom started to drop out.Attack of the bots came. I understand the creators need to initiate extra effort to nit pick the posts. The level of poor content was high, and the so called plagiarism and policing the site must have taken great effort.

However this took the so called steem out of steemians who were there for the content along with the promise of a payout of course. The people who had invested heavily in the promising  growth of this community started pulling out with their cyber currencyand transferring it elsewhere. As the lesser content rolled in many people around the world lost faith. I was super pissed as the bots trashed my next 5 posts! Along with hundreds of others an hour. My content was freelance off the top of my occurrences from my own life with my own original pictures off my own Facebook. Within the firstcouple minutes of posting this one bot in particular downvoted  everything I posted pushing it to the back of the new posts for all  eternity! From what i've read this crap was happening willy nilly all over. It was very frustrating and I can see why the drop in Steem occurred when people just gave up and left. I for one was super frustrated being repeatedly targeting not getting the audience I deserved for a whole week. I created a post about the bot in particular and had 24 votes with zero dollar payout of course lol because it was inadvertently a negative post about steemit. However there was a lot of response and the bot crap started petering off slightly. I let that post sit and I didn't post anything new.I sat back and curated posts instead. Over the next couple of days every post I looked at no matter the time or the increments was downvoted by the bot that targeted me "Isaac" and another one within the first 5 minutes of posting. The posts varied, the pictures and hashtags all different. There was no definitive weeding technique.I truly believe hurt feelings and anger led to the price drop. I also believe that It will go back up slowly if the stupid crap's weeded out! I did notice over the last few days that some of the thin contented posts with big boobs were'nt automatically being shot to the top of a $12,000 post. So I see;there may be hope yet. Thanx for listening and Blessed Be!