Weighing in on the values of the different Steemit demographics.

honeybee (77)in #society • 7 years ago

Jobs and the people that work them are not born equal.

A few months ago, I attended the first Taiwanese meetup where I had the pleasure of meeting some friends of old, and mostly new ones. There was plenty of discussion about the state of affairs in Steemit, and one topic that made me think a lot about was the subject of which demographics stand the most chance of taking Steemit to mainstream adoption or usage. Obviously, there is not one single answer but one which I believe strongly in is the uptake of Steemit by developing countries with large proportions of the population who are underbanked or even un-banked. In other countries such as Venezuela, their native currency has devalued to the extent that swaths of the population now work for in-game currencies which can then be sold for "real money" or even crypto currencies such as Bitcoin.

Steemit has been some what life-changing for many people who probably lifted themselves securely off the poverty line with their earnings from contributing. However, we have to realise that for every individual that earns enough to survive in a developed country, that same amount could feed a greater number of people in developing countries.

For quite some time in the UK, there was a growing demographic of people who felt that the Polish, Hungarians etc. came and took all the jobs that should be going to citizens of UK, jobs such as being a plumber, or electrician quickly became marginalised to foreign workers looking for a better salary than their home country. What gave them this opportunity to work in the UK was the fact that the native population considered these kinds of jobs to be above them, they wanted white collar work, respectable office jobs. Should it be surprising then that these throwaway jobs were happily taken on by people from abroad? Not at all, and that is what happened. People with lower expectations of compensation came and filled the gap.

What people didn't realise was that this bigoted snobbery resulted in shortages of skilled people who worked these blue collar jobs. Plumbers and Electricians started making good money and that made many of the people native to UK feel uncomfortable. It angered them that foreigners could come and earn lots of money and then send most of it back to their home countries. They felt that these foreigners were coming to UK and taking away the very jobs that they relinquished in favour of white collar office jobs.

In economic prosperity, it matters less. Because everybody is making enough money and there is less feeling that one person's prosperity is at the expensive of another. In times of economic depression, it's the other way round. People who are out of work who once enjoyed cushy office jobs feel that their difficulty in finding employment is down to a saturated market full of foreign workers taking all the jobs.

What have we learned?

Well, we learned that people from developing countries can offer atleast the same, or even more value, and secondly, people from developed countries shot themselves in the foot by assuming that they had to work less hard to make more money by virtue of their nationality. Further, the native UK citizens were used to a level of compensation which drew the line of viable work above blue collar careers such as Plumbers and Electricians.

On Steemit, we have a similar situation between contributors from western developed countries and contributors from developing countries. The salaries in developed countries are at a level such that people will consider their time and effort on posts with respect to their earnings. If it works out to be below their hourly rate, then they consider it a "waste of time". It is a dangerous precendant because a person with comparative skill sets and comparative contributions from a developing country will quite happily work for considerably less.

On a platform at the early stage of development, the total number of active users is an important metric. The attention economy can only really thrive if the potential difference of attention is very large. The potential for large amounts of people to see a certain post is what will eventually be the way Steemit perpetually brings in fresh money.People who wish to spend money to get a piece of that attention from a larger number of users.

Final take home points.

Authors who contribute regardless of their reward are golden. If the only value proposition of the site is to "get rich quick" then there's something fundamentally wrong with the user experience of the site. (Currently, this can't be ruled out as a possibility depending on who you speak to)

People from developing countries are more likely to work hard for much less. This is really such a no brainer and the exact reason why all the top corporations outsource their work to countries like China and India.

Value is relative. What is a penchant amount of money to one person, is life changing for another. The question is: