Day 4: STEEMCEPTION
I think it was the middle of March when I happened to attend to a conference by coincidence or divine will at the university where I used to work. I say it was a coincidence because I didn't work there anymore but one day I entered on Facebook at the right time to see among a sea of publications an ad shared by a colleague about this activity.
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It was an informative talk by an organization that promotes technological entrepreneurship called Hackers and Founders (originally founded in Silicon Valley and with presence in several countries of the world) to make themselves known to the student community and promote an event they are organizing. Attendees were invited to the next meeting of this group, the theme of the night would be something called Steemit, some kind of tool to earn some dollars online.
For readers outside the Venezuelan borders "some dollars" may not seem like much, but due to the constant devaluation of our currency and inflation here (google it) some dollars can be very useful to deal with daily expenses and survive. Days before the meeting I started to research this platform and also opened my account (I would have to wait 10 days to receive the access key). Of course, in my brief investigation I discovered that the profits were not exactly in dollars, but in a cryptocurrency called Steem, also in Steem Dollars and Steem Power.
At the meeting the platform was finally presented to me formally. I received valuable information about how it operates: upvotes, rewards, 7 days of waiting, curators, communities in Discord, how to cash out the earnings in local currency through exchange houses (one of the most popular topics among the audience). Steemit was sold to me as a social network where it is possible to generate income, some kind of Facebook where you can earn money.
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Upon entering the platform, the first thing that appeared in front of my eyes was the trending section, where I saw publications with profits beyond my imagination. I thought those posts should be very good. Also I started to imagine how great it would be to earn amounts like that. You can realize how naïve I was then. In short, the first days I had a wrong idea of what Steemit was.
Of course, after a few days I learned that most of those posts at the beginning of the trending section aren’t a big deal, in fact some of them are quite mediocre, I learned that those exorbitant gains aren’t organic but achieved with strategies that aren’t necessarily related to the quality of the content, I learned that all the votes don’t worth the same because they depend on the Steem Power we have and that the votes of the whales are apparently the only ones that can give us decent profits, the whales that don’t know we exist at all ...
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Those who have arrived to the platform at this stage of the game face this clash with reality and think: this is not a Facebook where you are paid, this is not as easy as I have thought. I will call this discovery “The First Awakening”. We woke up from the idyllic world we were told through misleading advertising, not by the Steemit team but by word of mouth.
source
After this awakening there are two options: abandon or continue. Those who continue are determined to write the best and most attractive content possible (well, not all of them hahaha), do everything in their possibility to attract the attention of the elusive whales, earn some money and then extract it to pay their bills and cover their needs. Everything seems under control, they are finally making some money with this.
They don’t suspect that they are still asleep. Just like the movie Inception they are in a dream within another dream. A Second Awakening is needed.
source
To be continued…
It was an informative talk by an organization that promotes technological entrepreneurship called Hackers and Founders (originally founded in Silicon Valley and with presence in several countries of the world) to make themselves known to the student community and promote an event they are organizing. Attendees were invited to the next meeting of this group, the theme of the night would be something called Steemit, some kind of tool to earn some dollars online.
For readers outside the Venezuelan borders "some dollars" may not seem like much, but due to the constant devaluation of our currency and inflation here (google it) some dollars can be very useful to deal with daily expenses and survive. Days before the meeting I started to research this platform and also opened my account (I would have to wait 10 days to receive the access key). Of course, in my brief investigation I discovered that the profits were not exactly in dollars, but in a cryptocurrency called Steem, also in Steem Dollars and Steem Power.
At the meeting the platform was finally presented to me formally. I received valuable information about how it operates: upvotes, rewards, 7 days of waiting, curators, communities in Discord, how to cash out the earnings in local currency through exchange houses (one of the most popular topics among the audience). Steemit was sold to me as a social network where it is possible to generate income, some kind of Facebook where you can earn money.
Upon entering the platform, the first thing that appeared in front of my eyes was the trending section, where I saw publications with profits beyond my imagination. I thought those posts should be very good. Also I started to imagine how great it would be to earn amounts like that. You can realize how naïve I was then. In short, the first days I had a wrong idea of what Steemit was.
Of course, after a few days I learned that most of those posts at the beginning of the trending section aren’t a big deal, in fact some of them are quite mediocre, I learned that those exorbitant gains aren’t organic but achieved with strategies that aren’t necessarily related to the quality of the content, I learned that all the votes don’t worth the same because they depend on the Steem Power we have and that the votes of the whales are apparently the only ones that can give us decent profits, the whales that don’t know we exist at all ...
Those who have arrived to the platform at this stage of the game face this clash with reality and think: this is not a Facebook where you are paid, this is not as easy as I have thought. I will call this discovery “The First Awakening”. We woke up from the idyllic world we were told through misleading advertising, not by the Steemit team but by word of mouth.
After this awakening there are two options: abandon or continue. Those who continue are determined to write the best and most attractive content possible (well, not all of them hahaha), do everything in their possibility to attract the attention of the elusive whales, earn some money and then extract it to pay their bills and cover their needs. Everything seems under control, they are finally making some money with this.
They don’t suspect that they are still asleep. Just like the movie Inception they are in a dream within another dream. A Second Awakening is needed.
To be continued…
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Ciertamente esto ha sido para muchos un descubrir de cosas nuevas cada día. Es un aprendizaje continuo
Y nunca debemos dejar de aprender. Saludos.