Thoughts about Steem and a day of ups and downs
photo credit: Skansen, Stockholm via photopin (license)
I am writing here to ponder, nothing else. A discussion arose today with a friend of mine while showing him steem and its ins and outs:
Curation as well as content generation which are on steem currency reward able actions. Curation and content generation in real life in my mind anyway is called the generation of social capital. Ie if I have a valuable conversation with another person and the both of us gain insight from sed conversation that conversation is social capital and even more so even if neither of us gain any insight from the conversation it is still social capital. In that case it is simply a matter of us having generated re pore with each other.
As such I see steem sitting in a interesting place in which there are three possibilities for every individual who joins and connects on steem:
Those who are purely interested in generating steem as a seen valuable commodity to be collected.
Those who value steem as a commodity but also value social exchanges.
Those who purely see steem as what it is which is simply a way of communicating and thus focus on using the tool for what it is and help grow the community into a well diversified and indepth group of free thinkers who rally around the ethos of an open communication platform.
The problem is, right now a lot of people are writing to earn their coin, and a lot of time it doesn't help to promote communication. As in, I don't get an urge to voice my thoughts on quite a bit of content that is posted.
I think really the best thing to do is to forget about the fact that there is money involved.
Um, I think it isn't only about money. Any system, that qualitates output is going to give similar results. Perhaps less drastic, than when money is involved.
The way of life is never straight. We need up and downs to appreciate. They give us the balance we need
I very much agree.
It's very hard to determine how a user is motivated, and we can't control it. Personally, I prefer posting and reading about original content. I'm in this for the interaction, the incentives are just icing. With regard to ups and downs, I've had my fair share of downs recently, so I know how you feel.
If you'd like to read my thoughts on that, feel free to check out my post: https://steemit.com/thoughts/@jedau/i-the-forgotten
Excellent to hear your thought my friend, I dont so much propose attempting to watch others motivations except for maybe in extreme cases but more so to watch closely my own interactions and what motivates them, as I can only really do me anyway. :)
That's a very good viewpoint, and one that's really understated. The only variable we can change is ourselves. I'm glad you pointed that out so eloquently.