I joined Steemit in late 2017, long before the fork between the Steem and Hive blockchains. Since the fork, Hive has been constantly evolving into its own distinct platform. This got me thinking about the past and the blockchain that I originally signed up for. The lows unfortunately were more dramatic and memorable than the highs.
Below I discuss each one of my five low points of Steemit:
5) Internet Celebrities joining Steemit
At some point, YouTube celebrities the Hodgetwins showed up on Steemit. Many Steemit whales believed that popular people coming over from other traditional forms of social media would make Steemit more mainstream. So naturally they gave the Hodgetwins massive upvotes.
The issue I saw with this was that each day the Hodgetwins would first upload a video to YouTube. Then they would just reupload the same video to DTube. So they were producing zero original content for Steemit. I know this because I was subscribed to them on YouTube and followed them closely.
After a while, the Hodgetwins started having technical issues uploading their videos to DTube. Eventually trying to upload their videos to DTube became such a pain in the ass that they quit Steemit. They left despite the fact that they were making hundreds of dollars a day on the platform just by reuploading a video.
The Hodgetwins were not the only internet celebrities to join Steemit and quit fairly quickly thereafter. But Chealsea Lifts is the only other one I can think of off the top of my head.
4) Removal of Page Views
When I first joined Steemit, there was a page view counter on each one of your posts. For some of my posts the pattern I noticed was very disturbing. My posts would have like 40 upvotes and 2 views. And one of those views was me looking at my own post.
At one point the view counter simply disappeared. Obviously this was to hide the fact that the platform suffered from a severe lack of engagement. Not only were people not commenting on posts, but no one was even reading the post even if it did get quite a few upvotes.
3) Trolling
There was a well know troll on Steemit named Bernie. Many people considered him to be a cyberbully who should be prosecuted in real life. He was a whale who owned a ton of bots that would downvote and spam people he had beef with. The spam usually consisted of an infinite number of disgusting toilet images making the comment section of one’s post unusable.
2) Bid Bots
On Steemit you could pay a bid bot to have your posts promoted, in other words upvoted. This resulted in the shitiest shit posts making hundreds of dollars and being featured on the Trending page. This also means that the reputation scores could be gamed because you could simply pay to have your reputation increased.
In addition there were many bid bot scams as well as some unscrupulous bid bot owners. Luckily many of the bid bot owners have been rehabilitated and are now considered pillars of the community here on Hive.
1) Botched Sale: Ned and Justin
Our venerable douchebag CEO Ned sold a humongous amount of Steem to eccentric billionaire Justin Sun. The only problem was that those shares were intended for use by the community. They were never intended to be powered up and used for voting.
There was initially some tension between some Steem whales and Justin. Then we all woke up one morning and the top 20 witnesses were all sock pockets owned by Justin. A delegated proof of stake platform had become completely centralized just like that.
Things got crazier from there with both sides forking some users out of their stake of coins. It culminated with Justin forking out several large whales but then someone sent the funds to an American exchange with the memo Stealing is Wrong. Apparently it was an inside job where Justin gave his keys to someone he should not have. All this led to the fork that created the blockchain I am writing this on, Hive.
Sheesh now I find it kind of hard to believe that I stayed for the ride and witnessed all this. Honestly, it was the human connections I made that kept me here because I made almost no money early on.
If you believe anything I said is inaccurate or you think I left out a low point let me know in the comments.
NinjaMike
I think you hit most of the high/low points and parts of them.
I'm glad I hit most of the points for you.
I joined some months after you did on "the other blockchain" and missed the page views era. On peakd.com it's possible to view your own Hive account's page views and unique visitor stats for recent posts. However, I don't really consider those stats reliable when at the bottom of the page it states:
I just started using peakd so I didn't know about its viewer stats. But, I could only get one recent post to show up under Analytics. It said 4 unique views and that was on a 24 upvote post.
I remember during that Dlive stream Justin kept calling Steem, "Steemy".
That's funny. I don't remember that.
Nailed it!
Thanks I feel awesome now!