"WE ALL CAN PLAY THIS GAME."

If you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.

Stephen King

To be free and express my thoughts without fear is one of my most important goals as a writer. And I have tried to avoid things that might impede this said liberty. But I have come to realize that freedom is a luxury that many cannot afford. I am in the process of buying mine on this platform. The higher my stakes the freer I become. I am not so dependent on certain groups or people. There is still a limit to this freedom. I still have to play the game.

We are all playing some game on the steem blockchain and our strategies are different. And it seems everyone is trying to work an angle. Anyone who is ambitious on this platform has had to play a game or two. From the top ranking witnesses down to the minnows, who unfortunately are at the bottom of the table. They have to make do of the little they get out of the reward pool, but even that comes at a price.

Those who aren't active contenders or participants in this power struggle are already setting themselves up for failure. What makes this game interestingly difficult is that we are all producers seeking consumers--there are few that actually exist on this platform. More than 80% of the people using this blockchain aren't natural consumers of information. So we switch roles quite often to maintain the balance. Nonso the poet has to read other poets he does not fancy in other for his own poem to be read as well. So it's more a less a barter system in place here i.e like for like; a view for a view; a comment for a comment, and we know how unsustainable this is in a long run, but that doesn't stop us from playing. Now Nonso the poet finds other poets and creates a community of poets who care less about each other's work but that doesn't really matter because we are aware, either covertly or overtly, that we are all content producers, not consumers. So we like each other's posts, earn a few coins and we're good. At the end of the day, it is still all a game.

The interesting thing about games is that someone eventually loses. It's either the gamer or the system. However, it goes further than losing sometimes. In some cases one of the two gets destroyed--the gamer ends with addiction issues that ruin his entire life or the system gets overloaded. These are an extreme case but they are far from rare.

When it comes to the steem ecosystem I am a gamer (most of us are). I have gone through various levels and I have lost a couple of times but that has not deterred me. Now more than ever I want to play fairly so this system doesn't overload.

I want to enjoy this game as long as possible. This is only possible if we fix some of its issues. For starters, I will like to see the number of views on my post; I will like to receive comments from viewers outside the steem ecosystem and I want a platform that rewards authors based on their content and not alliances. This is my dream for this blockchain. Personally, I think the basic problem here is that we've blurred the line between content creators and content consumers. Until we define these categories of person and device ways to cater for both, this whole lousy game (which I am part of sadly) will continue until the system is broken for good.

©nonsowrites

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Image source: https://pixabay.com/photo-2727443/

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