What Minnows can learn from the case: @berniesanders vs. @haejin // Minnows 101

Life can be hard sometimes. Whether you are big or small.

Gary Vaynerchuk recently released an audio album, known as The Airplane Project. On Track 2: My Current Mindset, he explains that everybody has their sh!t. Everybody struggles and everybody has their issues. The key to winning is focusing on yourself, getting better at what you do and having enough empathy to realize that someone else has issues too. Thereby, you stop wasting time to judge others and focus on yourself.

The irony of this, there are two sides of the coin. On one side, on a personal development level, this is great. You spend time on you, getting better, beating anyone who is plain talk and no work, and you grow exponentially. On the other side however, you create an individualistic society, that focuses on itself and offers limited support to others. There still is collectivism, but it is limited to a win-win and excludes everyone else. This works reasonably well in a structured society, less so in a chaotic or less organized world.

In the current state, Steemit belongs to the latter. Now, hear me out. Steemit is less than 2 years old. The concept of writing content and making money for upvotes is equally new. This means the system is far from perfect and still needs some work. As a result, the comment section of a recent @berniesanders post has become a discusion forum on why the system is not working the way the blockchain is intended to. Bernie is calling out @haejin, a self made CryptoAnalyst for abusing the Steemit system, taking up a proportionally large part of the available rewards.

Again, there are two sides to the story here.

From a community perspective, watching both accounts as a newbie could make you feel like living in a unfair world, as both @haejin and @berniesanders get an enormous amount of upvotes (and steem/dollars) per post. According to Bernie, Haejin's power is not in balance with the quality of his content. The quality is being discussed in such an extend that @netuoso made a satirical post about it, which ironically... went viral (https://steemit.com/steem/@netuoso/technical-analysis-proves-that-steem-will-either-go-up-or-down-click-here-to-see-more-charts-provided-free). This quality issue is something that some writers on Steemit will feel as well when they look at their blog compared to others who receive more upvotes for far less valuable content. Yes, I do agree that you need to know how the blockchain works, how valuable it is to understand how voting power works and that you should work on connecting and building a following. On the other side, let's be honest. The quality of the content does not always matter on Steemit. Yes, good content will help you get 10 upvotes instead of 0, or 150 upvotes instead of 100. But, the real power of Steemit currently is not the creation of content, it is understanding the blockchain. The money is where the money is. And for those who just want to put out good content, following the money is like selling your soul. In my first couple of comments I will add things that might be useful, but I feel quite awkward for doing.

From a personal perspective, Gary Vaynerchuk's advise makes a lot of sense. Everyone has their struggles. You don't know other people's demons. You do know one thing. You have to work to get somewhere. @haejin did not get his following for free. He built a large following on other platforms and brought them to Steemit. He puts in the work. Whether his content is properly valued? According to his following it is. The quality of a post will always be a subjective matter. And upvotes are currently the most objective way for Steemit to measure. The message, again, is to put in the work. @berniesanders openly bashes those who don't put in the work but complain. So, I guess, the real message is, we should all just continue to put in the work.

Tan bun,
@jeanlucsr

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P.s.

1. The original title for this piece was 'This is what happens when you connect Social Media with Money'. I changed it as I was writing, since I realized this was more of an advice piece to minnows like myself that are still struggling to understand how Steemit actually works. For those struggling, check out this guide for newcommers by @miti:
   https://steemit.com/steemit/@miti/a-complete-guide-for-newcomers-and-minnows-to-avoid-a-possible-spam-and-to-write-good-comments
2. Steemit is aware that it still needs to develop. To learn more about their roadmap for 2018 and voice your ideas, be sure to check out: https://steemit.com/roadmap2018/@steemitblog/steemit-roadmap-2018-community-input-requested