Well... some may think it's the time to make some new years resolutions. I instead thought about what happened und will try to sort through my thoughts while writing them down.
We have been promised the moon... instead we got an alien invasion.

I especially thought about one basic rule of marketing:

The more you pay for something, the more of it you will get...

Please dear witnesses, dear shareholders, dear Steemteam and dear Steemians: THINK ABOUT THAT, TOO!

What did we pay for in the last year?

1) We paid for drama.

People not understanding the reasons and possibilities of flags where whining about "loosing" something they felt entitled to... writing endless posts about beeing treated unfairly. Gosh... how pathetic. I think there have been more "crying about xyz" articles on trending than actual information, news, contributions or anything of (yes... subjective) value. Voting or reacting in any way to this sort of content will bring you more of it... My personal new years resolution number one is ignoring / muting any sort of wannabe drama.

2) We paid for bullshit

Hoping to get a vote back from a larger stakeholder leads us to upvoting ANY bullshit from them. THEY WON'T DO IT! Why?... they can sell their votes at much better rates, but later more of that. Dear Steemians: This kind of content is what the flag (partly) was invented for. Short term gains vs. long term gains is the keythought in all this. You can get some votes by crawling into someones backside short term, but you also can also raise the overall value of the currency by paying for something of value. Sometimes you'll have to dig a little deeper to find real value (I mean valuable thoughts, art, creativity, contributions that make it worthwhile beeing here). VERY RARELY I find that on "trending". If you vote (= pay) for bullshit, you'll get more of it. My new years resolution will be only to look once a week for an overview there and vote there only if I find something REALLY amazing there. Else I'll put my votes into people that really deserve it. Transistos thoughts about it may be a guideline (This is imho one of the rare good posts in trending atm)

3) We paid for votes

Some may see this as an "interesting phenomenon". I think this is one of the worst things that happened to Steem (besides linear reward curves). Imho this is a strictly logical reaction to guild wars (early last year), circle jerking (all of the time) and a tendency to promote bullshit (see point 2). If it's not possible to reach a kind of outcome with good content, but you can selfreward bullshit posts with payed votes... what you are gonna do? NO EFFORT + Rewards vs. No Rewards + a lot of effort... your choice. But wait. May this degenerate the whole platform into something we don't want? WTF YOLO who cares, I got my uninspired drama BS voted by a whale and I got out more than I invested. Perfect job ;-)
My personal new years resolution number three is not to buy votes for myself (as I already did last year), because if you pay for votes, you'll get more of people selling their votes.

I know... not everything was bad

There have been some things that were good, even great things happened, but pointing them out would not fit into a rant. And as described previously, it seems that rants get rewarded pretty well, so you get more of it.

Very silently I'll have to admit, that 2017 was an amazing and extremly successful year for me, and only very few things could have been better...

THX for reading!

Have a nice, successful and just awesome year 2018

Yours

@pollux.one