My experiences haven't been much different. The amount of trust the public has in these centralized services is astounding. But we shouldn't forget that when you're one Steem under your own name, ALL your data is open to the whole world.

Anyway, what brought me here was the money. A friend of mine told me about Steem almost a couple of years ago. I did some posting in 2017, but I really got active in early 2018 and haven't missed a beat since then. I love it here! I get to do what I want and get paid cryptocurrrency for it. I'm not overly concerned about the external price of STEEM, though, because, eventually, it will be figured out how to market this thing to the masses because the blockchain has genuine uses cases. It's most likely gaming and gambling that are going to be the first killer apps. Those are the use cases where decentralization and an open and public ecosystem is actually a decisive advantage.

When you're using the traditional centralized content delivery platforms, you're basically getting raw deal compared to using Steem-powered apps. I've been active on the Internet since 1992 and I can remember the pre-web era quite well. I was active on Usenet news almost the entire 1990's, and, enter Web 2.0, I started blogging. I've written probably thousands, if not tens of thousands blogposts, newsgroup posts, blog comments, Facebook comments and whatnot put together, and I shudder to think about the money I could've made had Steem existed for me to post all that content on. When I talk about Steem to the kind of crowd I usually hang out with who are active on traditional platforms and see the blank looks on their faces, I'm dumbfounded by their lack of grokking it. Seriously, my view of humanity has been altered by my experiences in trying to get people onboard. I mean, I haven't been able to onboard a single individual. I hang out with intelligent and mostly well-informed people, some of whom I have opinions and views that are non-mainstream. For example, one friend of mine I talked to last March, is a bit of an anarchist and always on about copyrights and electronic freedom. Being told about Steem left pretty much a blank stare on his face. I could only wonder what the fuck was going on. Am I in the only thinking person inside the Matrix or something? What the actual fuck? I mean, this guy has been an extremely active content producer online (mainly text) for well over 20 years just like myself. It should be a complete fucking no-brainer for someone like him, a computer scientist, get a Steem account and do his debating and discussing there while earning money.Nothing else changes. Only cryptocurrency, worth real money, starts rolling in. (This guy can code and I think there is no reason to think he could not actually become somebody on Steem in short order.)