RE: Why I'm worried about the evolution of steemit.
Steemit mirrors real life. But it is for the first time a place where one can experiment if it is possible to overcome the challenges and turn it into opportunities. The cost is time. New users receive immediately around 8 USD. For some users this is a lot of money for others from wealthy countries not. Let's say you come from a country where someone with a Phd gets around 100 USD a month, 1 USD made through Steemit a day is already 30% more income while in other countries you you have a minimum wage of around 10 USD per hour.....
My short-term goal is to get to a voting power of 1 USD. With 1 USD I can make the day of around 4-5 Billion people on this planet if they have access to Steemit already a happy day because this is 1% of their income with such one vote. My dream is to get to 1000 USD per vote one day....
It is a place where you can share your ideas and grow a community of supporters and it is not a place for the one's that want to make quick and easy money....
I think slowly but surely this word will spread and we will see more users again....
I actually think that the price curves and other metrics reflect something quite novel not just in the blogosphere, social network realm, and cryptosphere, but something entirely new. Steem is like the real world. What happens in it depends on what people are doing. @ned and @dantheman may have had some inkling about how intensely emotive their platform might end up being, but it has proven very very very powerful. The crabs in buckets metaphor is absolutely brilliant, and maybe a factor they didn't anticipate from the image comes from the fact that the ones in the bucket snip at each other as well.
We are all working together, to work out how to use it, and part of this is to do with finding the problems, and bringing them to the attention of those who are doing the development work. Even the sleazebags trying to game the system are helping, and the sense of gravity about the stakes in the situation, I think it finally makes a real step from mostly masturbatory, inconsequential blather, to a real, functioning social system within the internet.
Sure, maybe these other networks that are coming up are going to do well too. I wish them, and all the adopters, the best of luck. But us Steemians, we have the advantage of having swum around in the very first of this kind of platform, and we are, as predicted, very loyal to it, at least I can say this for myself, and I see other people saying the same. Core principles of the architecture are being forged in fire here. Even if somehow Steem were to not survive, what everyone has learned from it is going to have very significant consequences for the future.
@steempowerwhale that outlook is a good one indeed. My mindset had been to post value add content that helps people improve their financial lives. Now I can add to that by providing them content and literally adding to their financial lives with my upvotes. Worth 0.01 now, worth $1 sometime in the future :-)