OLD TIME STEEMERS LIVE IN A DIFFERENT WORLD TO NEWBS

Until this week I didn’t realise I was a Steemit old timer, but now I’m coming up to a year on Steemit and lately several things have drummed it into me that I inhabit a totally different Steemiverse to newbs.

It was seeing a post about bandwidth issues that really brought it all home. I had no idea there were bandwith issues on Steemit. The post was telling people a bunch of tips to reduce their bandwidth usage. Like not repeatedly updating their posts. Pretty much all of the things they said to avoid are things I do constantly. For example, whenever I do a post I usually find another typo to edit the first 28 times I reread it.

I also recently saw a post by a newb saying he wanted to be spotted by a whale and receive the rewards he deserved. Being an intrusive old busybody I suggested that unless he included pictures on his posts and wrote more than one paragraph, that may not happen. He replied that we can’t all be “professional bloggers” and that Steemit needed to be a place where people could just freely express themselves. “Like Twitter” (yes really, I’m not making this up)

And another thing I keep seeing is comments from people saying things like “I just spent hours on a post and it only earned $2. Yes, back in the old days we didn’t have to worry about bandwidth, there was no delay to starting a new account, and spamers were not an issue. But rewards, were a whole different thing.

Nobody had any money in their accounts apart from whales. Our votes were totally worthless. In 2016 I did 14 posts that earned nothing at all, and 49 that earned more than 1 cent but less than $1. Many of those posts took me hours to write, and when I go back and look now, I still think a lot of them were pretty good.

So why did I persist? I can’t really explain it, but ever since I first saw Steemit I’ve been obsessed with it. And not getting paid to blog was nothing new. I have a WordPress blog with over 350 posts on it that has never earned me a cent, and before that I had a Blogger blog that paid similar dividends.

So when I see newbs freaking out that they only earned $2 for a post, I feel like saying “back in the old days, we had to eat lawn clippings and live in shopping trolleys, and we would have sold our souls for a $2 payout”

Yesterday I was searching for a short post I did long ago about Philip K Dick. He is one of my favourite authors and his books have been made into several of my favourite movies. I found the post, and had a laugh when I saw it got 51 votes but earned a big fat ZERO. And those were all full power votes, there were no sliders back in the old days.

So as an example of the sort of posts that were earning me nothing at all nine months ago I’m going to add a copy of that Phillip K Dick post to the bottom of this one. But before I do, I’d better also add the links to my original Steemit post, and to the copy on my WordPress blog. Otherwise Cheetahbot might have kittens!

https://steemit.com/humor/@sift666/the-martian-anal-division

https://www.frot.co.nz/design/funny/the-martian-anal-division-2/

THE MARTIAN ANAL DIVISION

Yesterday I read a short story by Philip K Dick. It was called “The Martian Anal Division”, and it was about a parallel version of our world in which everything is run by and for the benefit of small but cunning Martian invaders

“They live in tiny spaceships which they insert into their subjects anal passages. From deep within human anuses they emit their instructions, which their followers hear as a voice in their anus telling them what to do. These people are known as the Martian Anal Division (MAD).

One of the key symptoms of people who are controlled by Martians up their arses is that they not only want to do what the Martians tell them to, but that they also want to force everyone else to do it as well. They often revert to the phrase “for the greater good”, and want to bring in “laws” in the hope that they can force other people to “conform” to the wishes of the voices in their arses.

In an attempt to get a better handle on controlling the non-MAD population, they introduce social engineering such as water fluoridation (make the population sick and obedient), vaccinations (make them sick and infertile), fear of “terrorism” (submit to more laws and surveillance), fear of various “global apocalypses” (submit to more restrictions and taxes), and wars (the ultimate control system)

They also direct everyone with an anal implant to watch more TV, where they can obsess over misinformation called “news”, listen to angry black men making guttural rhyming noises about hoes, yos, and bros, become jealous over the size of the breast implants of women who sing the things that the voices in their arses are saying, and enjoy watching stocky men in tight shorts battling each other over leather balls.

Luckily, for all their cunning, the Martians have some serious flaws in their evil plan. When they insert their micro spacecraft into their victim’s anal passages, it tends to block their elimination of waste matter. So their victims slowly fill up with shit.

Already pressurized to bursting point, when they are confronted by people who refuse to conform, they start to turn purple and run around in circles making squawking noises like a chicken having an epileptic fit. Sometimes the backed up gasses start to escape from their arse like a loud rumbling fart, while sometimes they just blow up like an American false flag terrorists bomb”