RE: How do you feel about Steem drying up as everyone powers up?
I applaud you for continuing this conversation.
My biggest disappointment with Steemit so far is that it seems to reflect what I thought I was leaving behind, i.e. just a few having masses of power/wealth.
I wrote yesterday that I wonder whether Steemit is destined to fail because it is the first of its kind and things rarely work well in the first iteration.
So your building a community around like-minded individuals is a great move because, if necessary we can all move on and create something better learning from what has been created here.
In the meantime I'm resisting the temptation to "throw in the towel and get depressed about it" and keeping on keeping on. Despite the face that my power is so little my comments frequently fail to post due to low bandwidth! Grrrrrrr!
It all comes back to ideology and beliefs. When I make a decent argument out of this, I'm usually met with "life doesn't work that way", but this is always based on an individuals personal experience and understand of life. "Human nature blah blah blah" as if we can really understand human nature from our limited perspective and limited history. People like to use history to understand the present and predict the future, but we often fail to see that our assumptions are also created by that history, some of which may not serve us.
We are moving in the right direction here, because at the moment, our ideas about money and "wealth" are being challenged which can't be a bad thing. We've also gathered a huge bunch of RELATIVELY open minded people in one place and (perhaps thanks to monetary incentives but whatever), they're all being relatively civil (with a few exceptions). I think we have a chance to create something great. Whether it manifests here or elsewhere is not really important, but if we can reach a greater consensus within our communities on steemit, it may have a chance to fix some of it's issues.
I personally think we will always run into these problems as long as we are attached to our capitalistic tendancies but I'm willing to listen to anyone who is willing to listen.
Don't throw in the towel!
"I personally think we will always run into these problems as long as we are attached to our capitalistic tendancies". I agree.
It is hard to shake ourselves free from our personal and collective histories.
Steemit is like a live mini experiment into human nature when power and money are involved and a real "in my face" experience for where my personal preferences and insecurities lie. It's not always pretty but for the most part it is fascinating and fun.