SteemStem, Steemit and Entitlement: Grow up

Today, I read that @steemstem are going to take a break to restructure...

GOOD! It is about time.

 
As the more scientific community at planet Steem, this is what has to happen and should happen more in my opinion. Projects, apps and teams need to take a step back and review their goals, processes to achieve them and success rates. They also need to take a long, hard objective look at their behaviours and think if what they do is in the best interest of the community, or just their community.

Not enough projects are doing this and seem to take the approach of, as long as people don't complain too much about our behaviour, all is well. Kudos to @steemstem management for stepping up and I hope that you will make some good decisions for the future that support the larger community.

Now, I have nothing to do with Steemstem and from what I have heard from reliable ears, SteemStem likes it that way. But, I am interested in behaviours and their reason for the hiatus, Entitlement, as it runs rampant through this system and the system encourages it to some degree.

Lets have a quick look at Entitlement for a moment:

Entitlement

• the fact of having a right to something.

• the amount to which a person has a right.

• the belief that one is inherently deserving of privileges or special treatment.

Which one do you think Steemit users have?

In this world, you are entitled to nothing. Sounds harsh I know but, all of the rights are not laws of nature, they are laws of society and can change at any time. However, in regards to the laws of Steemit, you do have entitlements. When it comes to voting entitlements do you know what you are entitled to?

Your vote.

 
That is it, that is the only vote you have any rights over, it is yours to do with what you please but, even this has caveats (at least for me) as my vote is made possible by the community that has granted it. Without Steemit, development, followers, commenters, investors, friends, family and everyone else who has granted me their support, my vote is worth 0. In fact, less, it doesn't exist at all.

You may even argue "Hey, I bought in!", but what have you bought into? It is a community with a public pool with a value granted it by a community who has decided it has value. You have bought into the right to be part of that community, act like it for F* sake.

This means that even though you 'own' your stake and can do with it what you wish, if you think that what is yours is yours because you have earned it alone, you are sorely mistaken. There are a myriad connections, relationships, people, ideas, services, markets, sites and who knows what else that have aligned to give your stake-based vote a value. Grow up and open your eyes, you have a responsibility to the community that has granted you this opportunity.

Now, back to feelings of entitlement. Kill them. They are harming you, they are harming the platform, they are destroying your content. How so?

When you get used to circumstances and expect certain reward and treatment, you become soft, complacent, uncaring, automatic, lose your edge, get fat, lazy and out of touch with reality. You lose sensitivity to the world around you and become blind to the many problems it faces, and blind to those who support you. In my opinion, you become undeserving of being part of the community and do not deserve reward for your behaviours.

You take it all for granted.

 
The harsh reality is that for the majority of people here earning high rewards, in the 'real-world' their content would get exactly what it is likely worth, zero. The exact same value as their entitlement level. We need to all get over ourselves a bit here and take a look at what we are actually doing at times.

I am under no illusion that my content in the real world would struggle, or at the very least, I would have to jump through a large amount of hoops to monetise it either on various platforms or, to get it published. Some people here have published real-world books, how much do you think they earned on them and what did they have to do to get it? All those Youtube stars are here for a reason too and it isn't just censorship concerns.

But again, I am under no illusion that in regards to the level of most content here, mine is at the higher end of the scale. Does this entitle me to high rewards? No, it doesn't. What it does do is open up the opportunity to people who may be willing to upvote some quality work from time to time from someone who is pushing himself as hard as possible and trying to still build the community. But still, I am not entitled to a damn thing here. Neither are you.

That is the reason for this place if you haven't realised, it is meant to take away the entitlements of the privileged and level the playing field a bit, it is meant to give opportunity to a wider community. Unfortunately though, early distribution of stake and people's thinking that it truly is theirs means that the same entitlements of the real world are replicated here.

You'd think that they would have learned because for many here, the real world hasn't treated them too kindly, yet here they are, acting it out word for word again pretending that they are somehow different to the authoritarian oppressors and the privileged upper-class it has maintained for centuries.

We have a large opportunity to make this place something brilliant but people's sense of entitlement needs to be abolished and replaced with a sense of duty of care to work and put back into the community that has granted them an opportunity. People need to start taking responsibility, not value.

Community builders should take precedence over extractors but, that is up to the community to decide and no matter what someone does here, they are still entitled to nothing.

In these early times, perhaps it should be less about quality of content and more about quality of character that is deserving of support.

Taraz
[ a Steemit original ]