Like many of you, I found Steemit by a happy accident. What a strange place where people use 'Steem' to 'power up'. When they're really happy they 'Steem on'. It was confusing at first and then quickly I saw a diverse, dynamic and interesting community of people. It was, and is, a great idea. I continue to have a fun time on Steemit.

Now lots of us here (including the founders it seems) are idealistic. 

'Steemit is the future!' 

'Steemit breaks new ground!'

'Steemit is true anarchism!'

This was my kind of talk. This was exactly what the internet needs. This could change everything. And so at first I was, as they say, 'all like...'

WAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY

But then, after a bit, I was all like...

Why?

Because at present the step forward isn't happening. Instead of a self regulating community pushing onto bigger and better things, Steemit, is slowly being swamped by scams, a false sense of community and mediocre click bait. I believe the reason for this is as follows. 

There exists a fundamental misunderstanding among the Steemit community about what enacting Anarchism entails.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me first highlight some cases:

Yesterday a Steemit celeb wrote a post about his concerns over not draining the reward pool. He's computer savvy enough to run the top witness node but not quite savvy enough to remember to click the decline payout button. However few people said anything because of the pressure to be positive and what I call 'Steemy nice'. @charlieshrem might be a good person.  He might have been convicted unfairly. He might be a great witness. I don't know about any of these things. Certainly I wish him well. But if you take his explanation that a posting hiatus over the holiday season was to resolve some deep inner conflict about his role on Steemit which was yesterday clarified by a prophetic dream rather than 'I had a bit of a rest and did something else over the holidays' then your Occam's razor needs sharpening.

This is a minor example of the sort of thing which is rampant on Steemit.

To take a far more serious case, recently I was forced to confront someone who was running a betting game but not paying out rewards properly. It was clear he was giving all his accounts added legitimacy by running a spectrum of sock puppets which would actively 'talk' to each other. When confronted he ignored everyone's concerns and, when I was forced to start flagging he attempted to play the role of the victim. After that I saw him use any technique he could think of to trick the community into believing a false narrative and avoid taking responsibility for what he had done. At no point was he prepared to accept that he had acted dishonestly. 

None of this mattered that much. What did matter to me was how easily fooled people were. I was utterly shocked at how many people would take one comment he had made, provably false, base their entire opinion on that and claim that I was the dishonest party. To me it was a form of cowardice and again, people being 'Steemy nice' to someone they were familiar with. Despite many complaints from minnows, they were defending a poster they knew to maintain their status quo.

This leads me to perhaps the worst aspect of Steemit. The burgeoning and relentless mediocrity of posts.

You all know what I'm talking about. Posts that have clearly been written with miminal effort, just so the poster can have a chance a catching a whale who will upvote without reading or use his c.750 followers to earn $8.

Recently I saw a well knows poster caught by Steemcleaners for rewriting an entire academic essay in his own words. He apologised and said it had been because he had read the essay too recently. Comparing the two showed that he had rewritten each paragraph in classic plagiarist style. Dreadful.

In another case,  I saw a well known poster publish what looked like his classroom notes on a poem all British children learn in school. Using what I call 'padded originality' he'd added just enough to make it a tolerable read. Whilst the first case is clear, were the actions of this poster wrong? First, consider the following:

Both of these posters profess to be 'for' the Stemit community. Yet if Steemit's value as a community is dictated by the quality of the posts it contains, their actions prove that they are first and foremost looking for profit at the expense of good posting. Therefore writing a mediocre post for profit whilst claiming to be dedicated to the good of Steemit is hypocritical and wrong.

Perhaps I'm being overly harsh. But both of these case (the latter more so) highlight the problem well. Steemit aspires to be a new self regulating type of community. Yet there is in actuality very little self regulation. The whales make some effort but a lot of the community overvalues their critical faculties. As an example @berniesanders  downvoted a 'Pizzagate' post for being 'shit' and overvalued. But where was he for Charlie's very very short $300 'non profit' post in which Charlie didn't even bother to include a fresh photo.

Perhaps large sections of the community are still under the spell of celebrity.

This brings us back to Anarchism and hopefully a little more positivity.

For this community to thrive we actively need to do something very complicated. We need to actively move towards teaching people to think for themselves. I'm aware this sounds both arrogant and paradoxical. Please bear with me.

All of the problems on Steemit stem from things which have developed in the real world. Yet Steemit is marketed as something different from everywhere else on the internet. It clearly follows then that we need some sort of filter between the morally bankrupt real world we all know needs reform and the community we're trying to build here. Remember that everyone who comes here is, to some extent, infected with the values of the real world.

I suggest this filter should be a far more comprehensive form of curation and regulation. Paradoxically, to be more free we first need to be more controlled. This is the difference between anarchy (by this I mean loosely organised chaos-what we have at present) and Anarchism (a society without rulers).

To go into this fully would take days. If there's sufficient interest I'll go further into Berlin's positive and negative freedom in another post but why don't we start by discussing possible Steemit community guidelines.

Here are a few suggestions:

• Every organisation which solicits upvotes and professes to act for the god of the community would post accounts or face punitive flags. We want to know who is profiting and by how much.
• A punitive scale for over frequent posting should be introduced. This would regenerate over a week. Posting more than once a day would incur greater penalties. Additional accounts held by the same poster (Making an account for your kids so you can post even more? Really???) could have rewards modified or limited by flagging. If you're posting more than once a day you're almost certainly posting bland, mediocre, formulaic content.
• Far more active monitoring of how whales vote and act is needed. They have immense influence and they (mostly) ensured their position with massive rates of compound interest on SP for the first 9 months of Steem. By their actions they've effectively self declared themselves as a collection of ruling nobles. Therefore I want to know exactly what they represent. This is my platform too. If they're indifferent to what smaller accounts think then I'm out of here.
• The SteemitAbuse channel needs some strict guidelines on how to behave. At present it seems like they're making it up as they go along. People are getting bullied and others are being excused based on popularity and whim. I asked for guidelines on sock puppet accounts and was mocked for it. If you're not aware of how this will progress without strict controls being implemented, please see 'The Stanford Prison Experiment.'
• Influential members of Steemit need to exhort the community NOT to vote for celebrities without good content. (or as a 'welcome back' after 2 weeks away). 

For now, I'll leave the last words to Thomas Sowell. Let's all try not to be Johnny.

None of the images in this post were created by me. I borrowed them all from the internet! :D