Here's the thing. And I've said it for months and it's still an axiomatic truth:

You get what you reward.

The Steem blockchain rewards playing the minigame of courting whales to give you up votes because you cater to a very limited spectrum of content. Unless your crypto cultist or spend your time writing about Steem itself, you aren't generally going to find yourself earning a lot of money – or any notable money, for the most part. Unless you're willing to really engage aggressively in playing the social game and also are very good at it one, it's impossible to get the attention you need to form an audience.

That's harsh. But that's the world that is created by the mechanics of the system in which we are participating right here.

And then we get to the social issues, where it is socially negative to vote for yourself – even though the system makes that the default action and even though it's one of the few ways that you can actually express trust in your work that it will find an audience. Investing in yourself is evil.

It's also evil to actually take your income and use it as income. It doesn't matter if you are an artist or writer, designer or lecturer, you better HODL or your a bad person and making a terrible decision – even if that's your income and even if that currencies are for, if you use it, you're a bad person.

It's not a surprise that given both the technical and the cultural aspects that we find on this blockchain, that we find in this social network, that's sensible, sane, reasonable people would choose to go do something else with their time.

As well they should.

When the individual matters, when what you want is what people think you should get, when what's yours is yours, and when what you make can be put in front of people that want to enjoy that creation, then you get people who make things and are responsible for things and maintain things.

Until that happens, unless that happens, it you don't get creation, making, and responsibility.

It's really quite simple.