Political Posts Controversy

Political Posts = Shit Posts?

In my years of writing articles for various blockchain-based social media blogging platforms I’ve noticed that political posts tends to be disliked or downvoted. It was as if most people considered politically-motivated posts as shit posts.

My first exposure to this trend was when I was still posting articles on Steemit. When I first joined the aforementioned platform almost 4 years ago, I didn’t notice that such a trend existed but the more I explored the platform, the more I learn and the more apparent this dark side of Steemit becomes.

In Steemit, the articles that often get the downvote treatment were ones that criticize the downvoters’ political alignment a.k.a if the poster was right-leaning and criticizes the left; the left leaning downvoters would downvote that post to oblivion or vice-versa.

It didn’t matter how good, popular or valid the articles were, as long as those articles say something bad against their side of the political aisle, these downvoters would downvoted the posts – oftentimes till the post earnings becomes zero.

Moreover, this is not limited to just posts but even comments gets downvoted as well. For example; I once commented on a political post agreeing to the points presented in the articles and was promptly dealt with – I mean downvoted. Heck, even a meme that I once posted couldn’t escape this politically-charged scrutiny, and suffered mistreatment.

Learning from my mistake, I decided to no longer post or comment anything that could be seen as political in Steemit. After all getting downvoted was not only annoying it also affects the poster’s potential earnings and reputation.

Hive.io, an offshoot of Steemit also suffers from the same ills as Steemit. That is to say, highly political articles would usually be scrutinized and/or downvoted by other users, especially if it criticizes another user’s political alignment. It’s not really surprising considering that most Hive.io users simply migrated from Steemit after the platform was bought by Justin Sun.

To not suffer the downvote treatment, I would usually avoid writing articles that are considered political in nature. Most of the time, I would write stories and/or articles related to blockchain gaming (Splinterlands). Although I don’t write controversial and political articles, I would still search for them as they’re entertaining to read, especially the “comment war” in the comment section.

Read.cash also has problems with users disliking articles that were political in nature. Unlike Hive.io and Steemit though, the dislike would not lower the poster’s reputation but it could still potentially affect that post’s earnings. For example, most users would ignore posts with very little likes on them which can also mean missing out on potential upvotes.

It was for this very reason that articles with highly political content are not that popular in the platform. Even the Random Voter would sometimes ignore politically-charged articles. Not that I blame them as political content are highly controversial in the platform as they cause drama (users with different affiliation bashing each other in the comment section). Although reading these comments could be highly entertaining, they could also be annoying to some, especially if some of observers started fanning the flames.

So are political posts no different from shit posts?

Personally, I do not think so. Certainly, political posts are quick to cause controversy but by themselves, they’re just posts that show a person’s view on politics. It’s just that some platforms are more accepting of these articles while others are not.

Hive.io, Steemit, and Read.cash are platforms that although allowed political contents, will have users that are hostile against these posts. And being decentralized, users in the aforementioned platforms have lots of power.

In conclusion, if you want to post with high political content then it would be better to post them in one’s own websites/blogs or centralized websites that don’t give its users too much power.

Disclaimer: Everything written here are based solely on my observations and personal opinions of the issue being discussed.

Lead Image Source: https://pixabay.com/de/illustrations/nachrichten-zeitung-globus-1074604/

Disclaimer: This article was checked for plagiarism using the online tool; plagiarism detector, and was proven to be 100% original.

My other articles: https://read.cash/@beastion