The person behind your Steem

Something a lot of people tend to forget about social media and a potential strength of Steem is that instead of just screaming out into the void and pushing whatever happens to be on the mind, there is the chance to look behind the curtain.

Killing the human

When Facebook started, it was about friends and social network, which meant that people already knew each other before engaging. They went to school, met at a party or something but, there was some kind of relationship already in place. This evolved however as the circles got larger, new media platforms started and, the 'connection to strangers' began.

What this led to was a loss of personal connection and a ramping up of personal branding as the link to the online identity and the real person was broken. No one knew each other anymore enough to see the gap between the two points. People's highlights took precedence because, why would you talk to strangers about low points and boring details. This meant though that the person behind the content was lost.

Reviving life

As I see it, Steem is a way to close this gap again, to put the person back into the content and a chance to reconnect relationships between more than just the facade. This isn't about losing anonymity necessarily though, it is expressing more than just the surface, to show some of the thought process behind a piece of art or, a glimpse into why one believes the life philosophies they do. Rather than whitewashing the reality behind, fill it in with some color.

When it comes to 'traditional social media', it has been engineered as a platform to sell products and concepts, not connect people. For the other platforms, they are not looking for personal, they are looking for mass appeal, they are building groups of users who can peddle the goods of their real clients, advertisers. What I mean by this is that their social network is about social proof to drive sales, not actually a relationship between people.

Not the others

Steem can be different. Steem can reconnect humans to humans and still offer the opportunities that the other platforms offer without losing the person in the process. This is the value in decentralization as instead of engineering connection for marketing purposes, the people can organically develop markets. It is a much more free market system because people's preferences can start being developed by the people themselves. To do this however takes people to be people.

Sounds familiar doesn't it? People are people is generally used in the negative when bad behaviors are ubiquitous and there is plenty of it on Steem. However, it can also be used for all of the beauty that is inherent in humanity and the fact that we are hardwired for social connection and cooperation. Society is our strength, not our weakness but we have allowed the engineering of humanness out.

Rather than show who and how we are as people, we hide our true selves in order to appeal to the unknown masses on social platforms that are anything but social. Rather than form bonds with people who are interested in us as who we are, we connect to people who are interested in us as the product we portray. And then, we wonder why disconnection, disenfranchisement and depression are on the rise.

A new model

We have an opportunity right now to not only change this process and reconnect people to the content they produce but, take economic advantage of doing so by building the communities that care about those within. Rather than have 'scream into the void' communities and wait for the echoes, we can develop them based on personal connection.

This requires that the who and why is behind the content and this is something that so many people are forgetting in their blog posts. Everyone wants engagement with their content but they aren't thinking about what people are actually engaging with. For the most part, people offer a consumption experience, not a connection experience as if there is no feel of a person behind the post, there is no engagement necessary except to eat and move on.

You, not your identity

Again, this isn't about revealing everything and pouring emotions onto the blockchain as that is actually disengaging for the most part, it is about revealing intention. You see, most people are here for the money, not building relationships and this is why they hold back the person behind component, the honesty. They engineer a persona they feel will meet their monetary aims and of it doesn't work, create an alt with another.

People drop their posts devoid of humanity and expect people to choose to follow them and offer consistent support without recognizing that people support content once but, people consistently. This is also why the chat channels are so important as it is in there that personality behind the posts is often developed. The expectation that great content is enough is one built on illusion.

Long relationships

As said many times previously, the strength of Steem as a platform, a currency and an economic model is the community itself and the strength it can develop is dependent on humans, not algorithms. Algorithms can go someway to limit abuse but can't close the gap much to developing relationships other than pulling into the eye line.

Unlike Facebook where the relationship came first, for the most part on Steem we start off as strangers with no connection. We are all on first dates trying to find people who we want to spend larger amounts of time with. If you imagine who you might want to spend your life with, it isn't their clothing, it is the person wearing it. The one who makes you laugh and will sit with you while you cry. This takes depth and it takes revealing some revelation of character.

Empowering people, disconnecting authority

Rather than try to engineer Steem to be a decentralized version of other platforms, it could be a decentralized economic and social network that empowers real people to form real connection and community based on real preferences rather than those of the marketing teams and centralized authorities.

This is my view of potential on Steem as it differentiates Steem from the rest of the social market and segments it out from the rest of the economic market also as it is a model driven solely by the community. To do this, it takes most people on the platform to rethink their approach here and start to question why thy are here and where they want to go. As said, most people are here for the money but in my opinion, they are going about it the wrong way.

Rather than working together to build a community that is made up of many differentiated communities built upon people who have similar interests and paths, people work as individuals who brand themselves for the masses. Decentralization isn't to create a mass to market to, it is to bring out the value and uniqueness of the individual and provide that person the opportunity to live as who they are, not what will sell.

This place is what we make it and if we treat it as if it is like everything else, we lose what sets it apart. We lose Us.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]