Steemit, the Blockchain, and Integrity

While privacy on the internet is never certain, various social media platforms offer- and people use- filters to control our audience. This has allowed people to feel comfortable expressing certain opinions or, hell, sending nudes, over the internet because they feel confident that they will only reach their intended audience. With Facebook and similiar platforms, the only people who could ostensibly access this sensitive material would be employees who would supposedly have to have a very good reason to do so.

With steemit existing on the blockchain, there is now a publicly accessible record of every post, comment, and upvote ever made. Even your steemit wallet and recent transactions are visible directly on the steemit.com site. Here's mine: https://steemit.com/@tylersr/transfers

One of the first things you will notice about steemit.com is the overwhelmingly positive and insightful nature of the posts and comments that appear here. My theory is this is not just a matter of being able to earn money on our posts and comments. In fact, by publicly storing everything that occurs on steemit.com on the blockchain, for the first time in history a social media platform is generating a community based on integrity, common sense, and goodwill.

Those trying to game the system by, for example, begging for upvotes and follows on posts they clearly haven't read from authors they aren't interested in, are quickly corrected by the community that has realized that such a platform demands a certain level of integrity if we are going to continue benefiting from it.

As much as we practice integrity in our personal, face-to-face interactions, it's all too easy to slip up on the internet. We can type something within the safety of our homes and hit 'Enter' without carefully considering the consequences of our actions. And because we don't have to directly face these consequences, especially when we post from an anonymous account, we don't always learn our lesson in the same way a disconcerted glance would teach us in 'real life'.

By storing everything on the blockchain, steemit does much to bridge the gap between our persona and the real consequences of who we are online. Let's hope that it raises the overall level of integrity among the community and that has an impact on the world at large. From what I've seen browsing here for the past week, I'm seeing that it already has.