Echoes Of Ghosts

My feed has been rather stale the past few weeks. I'm getting the same few authors over and over again and many of the promising smaller accounts I have followed over the past 12 months have pretty much lost all interest in the platform. I kind of feel bad for some of them. They had some unique insights to offer but were ultimately doomed to drown out in the noise.

My feed today, Steemit tomorrow?

When thinking about this platform, I don't think about myself, because I'm a fortunate success. Sure, I might not rake in wads of cash, but I am lucky enough to have joined the platform early enough and to have contributed enough early on that I know that at least a few people are reading what I have to say. Regardless of the money, someone cares.

But for most users, their talents and personalities are drowned out by the excess noise and the focused attention on narrow areas of the entire network surface. Interfaces doesn't really do a superb job of connecting people with their interests. Maybe it's because money is in the way. I'm not really quite sure.

I personally feel that the job of a successful content network and eventual semantic web is to allow individuals to make meaningful connections with minimal effort. If we focus on content, we can reframe this as connecting content consumers with creators that they find interesting.

But sometimes it feels like nobody is really in it for the consumption. As much as I post, which to be fair isn't a lot, I'm not really a content creator. I've always been a consumer with a strong personal opinion. That's really it. Sure, I tried to be a content creator for a few months, but the daily grind with respect to posting and commenting was never my forte.

For me, I want to support the unsupported and the undersupported who I feel bring both value to myself and value to the network. These people are really hard to find. Maybe it's because I am a little bit of a picky eater or maybe it's because there aren't a lot of people on this network willing to take the time and effort to produce the stuff I would find truly worthy of my attention.

But I know that these people exist. Or at least they existed at some point. But they seem to be disappearing and I'm finding it really hard to really engage without resorting to critiquing individuals and institutions that are conning themselves into believing they are helping the exact individuals I am talking about when at best, they aren't really doing anything.

Most of the accounts that show up on my feeds are by folks who have old accounts. The fresh accounts with that new perspective and fresh insight are abandoning a platform that does nothing for them. I'm not saying they deserve money. They don't. But they deserve a chance to be heard.

There are people are out there saying they want a better trending page. I used to think the same way. I was also wrong in that thinking. Who cares about trending? Real people aren't on trending. Real people were never on trending. Early investors and folks willing to dump some cash are there.

That's not really interesting considering these people aren't celebrities or really that interesting of personalities to begin with. That's not saying they don't deserve it. A few of them probably worked hard to earn the monetary and social capital to justify their position on top of the stack. I'm just not very interested in the stack.

At the end of the day, what do global metrics and sorting algorithms give to the people who barely register on them? It gives them nothing. In the meanwhile, I have to spend extra time digging in order to have a hope of finding interesting enough people to replace the ones that have quit. And you know that they have quit when they begin draining their Steem Power and selling out. Though I can't really blame them. They at least deserve that small amount of "social currency" to worth something tangible.

That being said I think social platforms on this platform can succeed if they pivot their focus on building narrow content stacks and focusing on network traversal and connecting real human beings with each other. I want to find to hidden voices and hidden ideas that make the ecosystem a stronger and better place. But I can't spend so much time digging up caskets and hope these folks still have a pulse.

Most of the people who remain are those that have some stake in the platform. Which makes sense. If these folks quit, everything would dissolve. They have the most at stake. But these are in fact the least important people in terms of network health.

Because at the end of the day, the power of a network is determined by the number of connections that exist on that network. And mathematically, you have more opportunity for connections when more nodes exist in the network. Unfortunately, a lot of the nodes in this network are dead. And the amount of nodes turning on appears to be greater than the amount of nodes turning off. Although a lot of the core community remains, the "potential community" has shrunk significantly.

And some may argue that the people will come back once the price goes back up. Apparently, we need investors to save the sinking ship. Which makes no sense given the network model. Active nodes are better than passive nodes in creating those valuable connections and investors aren't necessarily going to want to be the bright nodes that lead us through the night.

We need consumers. We need people to engage with the underclass of Steem and make them feel wanted. ROI doesn't build connections, interaction and network traversal do. That's what I want. I want to be able to explore the blockchain so effectively that I can't help but upvoting the content and moving on to the next because it really is that compelling.

I want to spend hours venturing down a rabbit hole. I want to hear new and differing opinions. I want to find someone super excited about the most random and pointless of things that has nothing to do with Steem or money or cryptocurrency or anything that people care about. That's what makes the internet beautiful.

This is my requiem to the forgotten ones. This is my requiem to the underground. This one is for the plankton. May your brief words and beautiful songs never be forgotten. For they may have been the softest of echoes in the wind, but they were, at times, the moments that made me feel something and gave me optimism on a platform so full of vapidity and repetitive and often uninspired noise.

For those still singing songs I can't hear, hopefully I find you before you perish and give you the small amount of optimism and support that others gave me to give you the electricity to power your node for just a little bit longer.

Because it's getting a little dark in here.