As I have repeatedly stated, STEEM blockchain has gathered up the single greatest massive online community on this planet. STEEM blockchain is creating value on top of value. What do I mean by that? If you look at Bitcoin it uses a PoW mining process. Bunch of people gather up to solve a puzzle and the person who solve the puzzle gets to add the next block to the blockchain and receive a bunch of Bitcoins each times a block is added. Basically there is a resorce wasting rat-race to get some rewards. But PoW has its advantages too. If BTC started out as anything but PoW, it would have been a disaster. Let's put that aside for now and move to PoS. As you know this process replaces the ASIC mining with simply owning a bunch of coins. One needs to have a bunch of money to own a bunch of ASICs so why not just force them to buy more coins to mine more coins. The result is PoW minus resource waste reduction plus added incentive to not attack the network to bring down the token price.
I know there are other models like Proof of Importance from NEM and Proof of Capacity from storage coins etc. Let's put them aside for now. My point is that whether its doing some puzzle solving work or just staking, the value isn't intrinsic. It's done for an extrinsic gain (to get more tokens). DPoS isn't that different either. It's just made to be more clever and scalable. I'll let you read an excellent dummy proof post from a friend of mine on the subject: @jaichai/ijch-eos-dpos-wolfgang-pauli-the-royal-throne-twenty-kings-and-queens-per-minute-and-if-you-don-t-move-your-meat
But out of other DPoS projects, STEEM and GOLOS (Russian fork of STEEM) and even YOYOW have a significunt difference. Whether its PoW or PoS, the reward distribution is based on who owns what percentage of coins. When it comes to STEEM that's only 10% of the case. Only 10% rewards go to block producers who make the block. 15% is paid as STEEM Power. The rest 75% is distributed based on the net upvotes received by the accounts on STEEM blockchain. To gain upvotes one needs to post content. The idea was to make people post valuable content and people would upvote just like any other social media.
Decentralized Autonomous Company
Steemit or any other project that use the STEEM blockchain do not post ads. I was skeptical at first because of this. Instead of running away I started digging in. Dash was the first DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) which pays for its own existence via a self-funded treasury that could use upto 10% of the newly generated coin supply to do whatever it wants. Bitshares came up with a similar idea too. STEEM uses the most decentralized version of this DAC. Instead of a stakeholder vote, every little upvote you are naturally performing anyways is counted. You don't have to decide on approving projects. There is no approved/rejected vote. Every vote counts and those votes are from a natural social media activity.
This is how STEEM runs without ads. At the moment STEEM has inflation rate of 9.5% decreasing by 0.5% each year. Instead of the 10% of Dash or many other self-funded projects, STEEM is allocating 75% of the newly minted coins for community distribution. The coins are minted using DPoS but 75% of it distributed piggy backing the activity of a social media project(/s)
If you look at STEEM as a social media project on blockchain; Then it's a Ponzi. Plain and simple. If you look at Dash and say what if we use all the funds in the treasury to pay for social media contributions and if the allocated percentage was 75% instead of 10% then you have what STEEM is.
Because the blocckchain is funding the rewards, people can write in a greater frequency. Instead of working at McDonald or KFC, a person could be blogging on steemit and after some time, this person could have better earnings on the blockchain compared to the minimum wage job. Some people are actually earning thousands of dollars a week even people who are only commenting gets some rewards along the way. There are tons of projects based on STEEM blockchain beyond just steemit. There is Zappl which aims to kill Twitter (You can read some of my thoughts here: @vimukthi/my-introductory-experiences-of-zappl-the-good-the-bad-and-the-case-for-mini-blogging-with-smart-media-tokens-shortsteem) and finally DTube is becoming a legit alternative to YouTube (as long as you don't mind 480p video quality which is sufficient for most cases)
Earning few SP doing your self-serving Duty
All this money brings in cheap short term thinking jackasses into STEEM hoping to get a piece of the pie. There has been some stupid flag wars going on and there are some reward pool protection warriors and some hypocrites in the mix too. I like to keep things simple and I'm a supporter of the Sacrosanct Non-Aggression Principle.
There are content that are certainly violating the the quality of the platform. Deciding who deserves what is the mentality of commies and tyrants. But understanding what's without quality or ruining the quality of the platform is more like common sense.
-Spam isn't good
-Plagiarism isn't good.
-Spreading lies isn't good
-Spreading hate without any facts isn't good
-Begging for upvotes and follows isn't good.
We can all understand this and we all encounter these things regularly on steemit. My question is what are you doing about this? Most of the accounts who does these kind of things barely have any SP. Their flags are not going to hurt you if they retaliate. Nobody except another spammer group would side with and support these spammers. I've been fighting these kind of spam for a long time. Here is one of my old articles: @vimukthi/serial-spaming-your-way-into-a-reputation-of-56-how-did-this-happen
After some time I found out about steemcleaners who has very high reputation and lots of SP. You can use this page to report all kinds of STEEM abuse: https://steemcleaners.org/abuse-report/
They pay you rewards for reporting accurate information on abusers on the platform. I get about 1 to 6 STEEM Power a week by reporting these abusers. It's not much. But at least you are getting paid for your work done for the community.
How do I hunt the Spammers
We all have limited time. We can only spend so much of it in negative things in life. We need to get rid of bad things but do that efficiently. The best way is to have a high value post. The few Zappl posts I wrote barely get any spam or upvotes. My long massive posts that hit the trending page on the other hand gets showered in spam. Many times the first few comments on my posts have been spam.
Most of these spammers have below 40 reputation but some has over 50 population (seriously people, you need to crush these trash the hardest. A majority of them also seem to be from the South Asian region which is the home to quarter of the world population and earning $1000 a month in this region is called being well-off. High population, high networking ability and little bit of rewards being considerable or just being plain greedy from anywhere around the globe can lead people to spamming and other abuse.
So when in doubt,always check the comment section of the accounts. Any tiny red flag is worth checking out. Over the course of few months these spammers have become more sophisticated using buzzwords and praise to fish for upvotes.If the comments doesn't specify anything on your post and you don't know the author, you should seriously check his/her profile. Even this trick doesn't work all the time
Some spammers pick a niche and copy paste a single comment across many posts. So even a legit looking comment that seem generic can very well be just sophisticated spamming created through studying of the behavior of the upvoters. So even the common sense is being used as a method of spamming.
Few more Tips
Spammers and abusers are cozy and networked with other spammers. If you make a good post and get a bunch of spam, you can use those spammer accounts to find other spammers who are commenting on their posts. Report them all to steemcleaners.
Most spam on some popular posts are unreported. It takes less than a minute to report a spammer and you'll be doing a service to the community. STEEM would become a slightly better place. You may even earn few cents worth SP.
@miti downvote: A real person who has real values that I'd vote for witness if I could. Just call for a downvote when you meet a spammer. It's only going to take few seconds and you won't even have to use your own voting power.