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On Steem, we are content creators, and the posts that are usually valued the most are posts that "contribute" to the community. How do you contribute to a community?

Usually, by helping, working toward a common goal. And what is the common goal? Ahem, making Steem great? Making this a blockchain full of useful articles? And what's a useful article, then? Maybe guides, pictures documenting things, debates.

It's a bit too altruistic to try to always behave in a "useful" manner. We are bound to be met with people who say that this is a social network, that everyone has the right (and should be encouraged) to post whatever they want on their blog. I've gotten such comments and see their merit.

But then why is it that we can speak of good posts vs. shit posts? Many services that offer support to users remove the availability for DLive, Steepshot and other such services that encourage low effort.

Are we then promoting effort? Steem's system is usually called Proof of Brain, but it is in the end marketed as a social network. Does every tweet on Twitter or status on Facebook have to be something useful or made with effort? No, but maybe Steem is a different kind of social network.

Let's define our parameters

And what definition of usefulness or effort do we use anyway? Sometimes I'm having a bad day and I find it useful to watch a funny gif that brightens the following few hours for me. Sometimes I spend 20 minutes writing a 1000-word post, or I spend a few days rummaging through my brain to pick a proper title for a post that I've already written; which carried more effort, those 7 words on the title or the 1000-word post that I wrote while waiting for the water to boil?

What is usefulness anyway? "Able to be used for a practical purpose or in several ways", says Mr Google. Able to be used. Can stories be used? To entertain, perhaps. But then every entertaining post would be useful too. Gifs, memes, zapples, witty jokes. All of these are shunned by the vast majority of the people who judge Steem by its quality and not its participation rate. Some say that only useful posts should get high rewards.

And that's alright, everybody has their opinion. As someone who writes long-ish articles and goes for a specific aesthetic view and has high-quality standards, I am upset when I see low-effort content getting higher rewards than me. It's simple: perhaps it's a feeling born from envy, a common human trait that in many cases drives people to strive for success.

And what is effort then? "A vigorous or determined attempt", says Mr Google again. Perhaps effort relies on "good faith" or "good spirit". It's something that people honestly believe is the proper use of time and space.

Everyone is free

All in all, in the end, everyone will post whatever they want regardless of all the judgements that we make. I can't say that things "should" be one way or another because I'm not an expert in what drives blog-based social networks forward into popularity and success.

What if posting gifs like crazy drove us to popularity? Maybe people would complain when gifs and silly pictures start to take over the front page with $1200 or more in rewards.

But why would we complain about that? What is it that we care about? Why are we so troubled by lack of effort and usefulness and talk so much about "quality"?

Why is low-effort litter?

Are silly pictures "trash"? Is it like littering? The only explanation I find is that we're looking out to keep our streets clean, and we do the same with Steem. But why would we consider silly pictures to be litter? What is wrong with silly pictures, memes, zapples and gifs?

I recently watched a conversation where someone said "we don't post memes in our main accounts; nobody likes to soil their accounts with that kind of stuff". Low effort and usefulness is seen as "bad" on the blockchain, but I still cannot find a conclusive definition that would tell me what exactly it is that people want.

What do you consider "good" content? Should Steem only have this "good" content? Should we drive the rest of the content away?

Leave a vote and a comment below with your opinion