Steem: With Reputation comes Responsibility!

This is just a quick insight I wanted to share with steemians.

A lot of people might know this already, but I just realized a very crucial point about steemit: With greater reputation comes greater responsibility. It’s a simple, but very significant concept.

As reputation increases, steempower (SP) will also increase (as most people have learned that SP is the most important long-term investment on steem). With SP and your upvote you essentially get to decide which content (and which person) gets rewarded with steem and thus a potential payout.

This means that the vote of people with a high reputation (high SP) is tremendously valuable. If you get such a vote your potential payout will be in the dollars range and not in the cents range.

This system is good in the sense that more experienced users and with a higher reputation get to decide which content is valuable to the steemit community. The underlying assumption is that these users can better decide which content is more useful and which content is unimportant for the community at large. This ensures that quality content will get rewarded and is preferable to a system in which every user will always have the same voting power.

However, there is one big caveat here. It means that reputable users should continually search for new content created by new steemians. Otherwise there is a danger that reputable users will upvote only content from other reputable users and thus will create a sphere of mutual benefit: only content from a limited pool of users will be rewarded with steem. This is in essence contrary to what steem should be all about as all users who create good content should be rewarded.

By searching for new content created by new steemians and upvoting it, reputable users have a great deal of power, but also have a great deal of responsibility. They are responsible to keep the community healthy and ensure that new quality content finds a wider audience. It is a role that has to be filled over time as the reputation and SP increases for every one of us.

TobeTada2017