<CENTER>![](https://steemitimages.com/DQmTZSRePnEWt4biqBohfEerKNcozk5ivwY31D78VnNnBy9/image.png)</CENTER>

I was involved in some commenting about an article made by @denmarkguy and a article replying to it posted by @fknmayhem both of which point out the following:

<b>"Nobody has any PATIENCE; nobody's willing to actually "bust their chops" for their rewards…"</b>

Well I like contests, especially the scavenger hunts or brain teasers, the photography, short story, video or meme contests not so much as I am not good at them and I do like to win sometimes. Now is patience the reason for contests being so popular? I don’t think so, to me contests are so popular most of all because of desperation, people come to Steemit with a desire to make money, they have no idea of how hard it can be. After a few days of posting articles and getting a few pennies they will try anything, after trying everything and failing they quit.

So actually contests are helping to keep people on Steemit, which I think is great, one of the cons presented in the two articles I am talking about is that one of the requirements for participating is you have to upvote the contest article. Now I know some of the people who post contests are scammers and just want to make a quick buck, but these guys can only do this once or twice.

As for the upvote, I think that is one of the reasons we are on Steemit to upvote others posts and receive curation rewards. So the idea is these contests don’t deserve an upvote because they add no value to Steemit. I agree, but do you really think people upvote an article based on its merits? If you have the slide rule for votes activated (that is if you don't have a bot doing this for you) and you have it set to upvote 4 articles per vote I think it is unlikely that you actually read the say, 40 articles you curate.

So Steemit is not based on merit, it is based on the whims of the curator, contests are just as good or bad as a post that is predicting the future sway of crypto prices based on triangles, if you think about it if I make the graph large enough I can fit all the data inside a triangle so I don’t see much value there, yet these posts make money, and worse maybe people follow this advice and lose money, I would rather lose a vote.

But to me contests or any other articles are not the problem, the problem is a newbie can’t make money on Steemit unless:

* He invests a lot of money and curates his daily limit, and also posts a few articles and self upvotes them. Of course this person is an investor and is also hoping Steem will go up in price.

* He already has a big follower base on Facebook, Youtube, Twitter or some other such media and succeeds in having them follow and upvote him on Steemit.

* He has a few dolphin or whale friends who are willing to help him out and upvote his posts.

* He actually is a great photographer, video producer, meme artist or really writes like Hemingway, and even then he has to grab the attention of at least a few whales or large dolphins to be able to get some traction and start getting votes.

Come to think of it I think these requirements are needed by everyone to make money here, I have a lot of followers and hardly ever make over a dollar with my posts.

Now with so many people on Steemit how come it is so hard to get votes? Well one of the things that make it so hard is that many people who have big VP are using apps like Steemvoter where you can just set up your votes for certain authors at a certain percentage of vote per article, this automates their curation but it also leaves out most newbies and most of us older guys, because only a certain amount of people can be on these bots list,and the lists are already full, of course if you are one of them good for you.

Another thing is bid bots, many people prefer to delegate their votes to these bots, as they have a return assured, of course this is good for the people who have a large voting power, they don’t have to do any voting, but the problem is these bots don’t give the users any good profits, for example if you bid 50 SBD (which of course are beyond the means of a newbie) and you are lucky you will get back a $100.00 upvote,but take away a 20% curation, you are left with $80.00, 40 in SBD and 40 in Steem Power. Now suppose SBD is at $4.00 each, you spend $200.00 to get back $200.00 no profit, of course you could also get a larger amount for the vote or less it depends. So the only thing you can be sure of is that your article will be seen by more people. But as I said that option is beyond a newbie’s reach.

So again even though contests might not look so good and people might get tired of seeing them in their feeds, I think they are a way of keeping people on Steemit, because people at least have the hope of getting something for their efforts.