The Internet Culture Becoming Mainstream Gives Me Hope For The Future Of Steemit And Cryptocurrency In General

A strange thing has happened in the last five or so years within the United States, which I’m sure many people have realized. The memes and online culture that was once bred in the depths of dark holes like 4chan, has now moved into the mainstream. Walk through the mall today and you will see stores like Hot Topic or just random T-shirt vendors selling various apparel featuring memes and other online references. It isn’t just your off brand store that is trying to capture the market anymore either, companies are trying to capitalize on the market the same way, with cringe worthy meme commercials or internet references, I think we have entered the era where internet culture is now the mainstream culture.

Sites like reddit now boasts around a million unique users per day and much of the content created there ends up getting fed out to other outlets like Facebook and buzzfeed. So even people who have never heard of reddit,4chan or any other site are still going to be exposed to the culture created there. This has only ramped up with the focus many sites have put on the sharing aspect of social media as well. I almost completely avoid Facebook now, one of the reasons is because people are just sharing various buzzfeed articles on stuff I have already seen through other outlets. Having the internet in everyone’s home was probably mainstream 10 years ago or so, but interaction with social media has really become a more mainstream use case in the last 5 years in my opinion. This growth in online social media and internet culture gives me hope that users will keep coming to the Steemit platform.

Steemit doesn’t have anywhere near the daily users that reddit has, but neither does 4chan, which is a longer well established site on the internet. We don’t have to be the biggest for our cultural impact to be seen. If we make articles here there is a chance that the content will go into other forms of mainstream social media and eventually come back to us. If we can whether the initial hardships of low pay and finding our niche we can still become very successful. I have no doubt that as time passes by and more countries become developed the use cases for the Steemit system will become much more apparent. In my opinion people will continue to keep the internet culture growing and perhaps many internet celebrities on sites like YouTube will be the new wave of famous people.

If we look at the amount of people who watch someone like Pewdiepie and compare that to how many people watch some shows, you can see that they are not that far off from each other. In fact in the last couple of years the growth of subscribers that the YouTube elite like Pewdiepie, Markiplier, ect have been getting shows a trend of continuous exponential growth. Whether that will happen is unknown, but there is definitely a large possibility that these people will become the new generation of famous celebrities. Even now if you ask a young kid who Pewdiepie is, many of them watch or at least know who he is.

As time goes on and more people are born and raised on the internet, generations of kids are going to be exposed to internet culture on a massive level. This gives me hope that a platform where people can participate in and earn money will grow and appeal to them. The cherry on top is that it will introduce them to cryptocurrency just by using the Steemit service. Imagine a world where cryptocurrency is as well known as the internet? It could all become a possibility and in my opinion, it is the direction that our society is moving towards. The internet culture going mainstream gives hope not only to Steemit, but to cryptocurrency in general and all the other cool decentralized projects that are being developed. Moving towards networks of decentralized systems is almost always better for everyone, so the possibility of our next generation taking their freedom back that way is something positive to think about. There is no denying that the internet culture is most likely only going to become more mainstream as time goes by and I look forward to seeing what else happens.

-Calaber24p