Steemit: Why Money Doesn’t Matter

Have you been enjoying your time on Steemit?  Reading and interacting with all of the amazing people on here? Have you noticed something, yet?

Everyone is Nice

Knowing how to get noticed and get rewarded for their efforts, people have generally been very courteous.  We understand the economics behind why this is the case, but is there another reason?

Happiness Begets Happiness

When you read an exciting story about an adventure or someone’s life story, how do you feel when you are done reading?  Pretty good right?  So good that you even decided to hit the upvote button and maybe even reach out to compliment the creator for all their hard work making you smile.

Did you think about the fact that you might get a portion of their rewards when you up voted?  Or did you simply signal to the community that you enjoyed something in particular?

I tend to believe that most people fall into the second category.  There are certainly bots upvoting and commenting on any new article, and there are also strategic voters who are trying to maximize their curation rewards with every vote.  But I strongly believe that these aren’t most people on the site, and as the site grows, this pool of people will continue to shrink.

I believe most people are on here to create and share all of the things that they are passionate about in life.  The money got them into the door, to actually follow through and sign up on Steemit, but the quality people and content is what is getting them to stay.

How to Further Foster This Behavior

We need a following page.  We need notifications and private messages.  These are essential tools that make a social media platform thrive.  The Steemit team are likely working on these as I type, as there is no way they don’t see the same things.

These tools will enable us to stay in the loop on the people we value on the platform.  Bookmarking everyone’s page isn’t practical and with so many people getting on-boarded, it’s simply unrealistic to try to catch every good post going through “new” posts.

All of this will eventually help us further network and entrench ourselves alongside other quality people. People not contributing anything to the site will quickly find themselves with little to no followers and hardly any exposure.  Any reasons to act any other way than productive will quickly evaporate.

Steemit encourages great discussion and exploration right now today, but get ready for what’s to come, because we haven’t seen anything on Steemit yet.  And when we see that day come, it won't be because of the money that's at stake, it'll be because a lot of normal people are enjoying the things that they like and signaling that to the community.

Original image source: https://pixabay.com/en/money-euro-profit-currency-1015292/