Steemit and communities

In the thousands, we read the last post from @steemitblog yesterday. Many of us were relieved to finally hear from them some reflections regarding the past year. Instead, others were disappointed as more details regarding the Smart Media Tokens were expected. However,  I found  a very welcome keyword in yesterday's post: community. 

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I was happy to see that in the coming months the focus should be directed towards building communities, it is something so badly needed on steemit especially because in many cases we are still behaving like a crowd of users. We all have different viewpoints, and especially when money is involved, things can turn emotional. 

We grew a lot in the past year, this was due to the work of the steemit team but it was also due to the hard work of all of us. We have all invested considerable amount of time and energy to create content, help other users and promote the platform. Heterogeneity of ideas is something that could even make us stronger with time, so it is ok if we don't all agree on everything but after each discussion we should all remember that we all share a common interest which is the growth of the platform and its reputation. 

Growth means that our audience increases, the price of Steem goes up and also the problems grow. In fact, things that did not seem so important in the past, now start showing some issues. I read yesterday that @ned mentioned they are working on improving sign ups, while that is something that surely has some technical challenges, as a member of the community there is little I can do about it. Instead, we should all focus on what we can do. I remember when I first joined the platform I had very hard time growing, it felt that no matter how much effort I was adding, I wasn't going very far. The catch-22 situation was that without an audience our words are quacks in the void but to get an audience you need to stubbornly write good content with no rewards. Competition is fierce especially among the minnows, and many good writers just give up. 

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Truth is that so far our crowd of users resemble more the animal farm of George Orwell rather than a true community. The vast majority of users struggle to get fair rewards and to distinguish themselves from spammy profiles. Most of the reward pool goes to a few users that are truly having great time and don't seem to be too bothered about it. 

Here, I can imagine I will obtain different reactions depending on the personal situation of the reader, minnows will likely feel their blood boil in frustration while whales probably have already given up reading my post.  Anyway, I would like to talk about intentions and intentions are not AGAINST something but FOR something. I mentioned things I am against and now it's time to talk about things I am for.

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What changed my experience of the platform was when I started interacting with communities. In retrospect, I realize how lucky I was since there is a great scientific community on steemit called @steemstem and I am a scientist by profession and there was a great community of italians called @steempostitalia that was starting to organize and I am italian. In these communities I found what was missing in the steemit crowd, communication! An important tool at our disposal was the steemitchat for steemSTEM and a telegram group (now discord server) for Steempostitalia. Being able to discover the person behind a nickname was crucial for changing my perception of the platform. 

All of a sudden, it was easier to exchange ideas, learn things about the platform and also organize ourselves. These two communities were the catalyst for my growth and most importantly, there I found generous people that work really hard and help others without asking for anything in return. By helping others they even have less time to write content, so they renounce to some portion of the reward pool while providing a service for the community. Today there are hundreds of users that probably would not be here if it wasn't for them. As a community I hope we could encourage this type of behavior, incentivize it and help them. If 2 communities had such a huge impact on so many users how much more can be done if we create more communities? 

Inherent characteristics of communities are the presence of leaders and effective communication among its members. 

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What is a leader? 

I don't want to offend anyone but if you have a lot of Steem Power that does not make you a leader, leaders channel their ego into their people instead whales channel their voting power into self-voting lol. 

The point I want to make is that when a user abuses the attention and the rewards he is getting, he is no longer leading but he is just taking. To build sustainable communities we need more leaders and they should be given the tools to help other users. 

The transparency of our platform is already enabling us to see who are the leaders and who are the takers. The great thing about leaders is that people around them will mirror their behavior and positive attitudes will propagate exponentially across the platform. We should all seek to find a balance, ask ourselves if we are giving back to the community enough value for what we are receiving. Some users get luckier than others, wouldn't it be cool if those users started behaving a bit like leaders? Are you a leader or a taker?