Community Without Losing Humanity
As I watch the progression of #Steemit, it has become all too obvious that community is being established at the expense of humanity. Every post now gets littered with automated bots, awards, and an array of other miscellaneous #bullshit.
I now understand the system well enough to grasp the broader altruistic intention, but I fear that even in these early stages, our compulsion to "get paid" and "power up" is already digging a deep hole into the authentic social intention.
If you agree that @SteemIt is slipping into dangerous territory and want to fight to keep the humanity in the community, please let your voice be heard. I'd love to find others who see the slippery slope that we're currently treading on and want to unite to uphold a community that truly has the potential to change the world.
Thanks for reading!
Agreeing with you. Everybody is hustling to get the biggest payout while on the other hand the reward pool is shrinking in size since the implementation of hardfork 19 due to the huge amount of new users with which the generation of new Steem cannot keep up with.
The best one can do to build real connections is by truly interacting with "your tribe" by commenting or using the chatoptions steemit.chat, discord, or even slack. Let's see what's happening in the future. We as a community are definitely responsible for shaping it to some extend. Let's bring humanity forward!
Thanks as always for the comments @rootingrobert
I can already tell that you're someone I will make an effort to keep in my circle, and I hope you'll do the same. Learning and growing every day!
Thank you, friend (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧
I am always enjoying reading your thoughtful posts. Keep them coming :)
I always get awards from the steemit bot... Lol
Haha...exactly!
I'm not sure if its the bots, or that the website needs to be brought up to date a little bit to deal with all the new users and content. There is simply too much content to read through. I think HF19 was a good idea because it means the awards are a little more even, except one thing is that the people who are 'Whales" are often there because they have worked very hard to put out very good content that is valuable to the community. Those are the people you want to follow, that is the content you want to reward. I think there should be two categories for content on steemit: Informational Blogs/News/Updates and Opinion/Think pieces by established writers (a large following of people who engage with the posts), and then a more social aspect where people can post memes, and updates, and stories, and thoughts/opinions for a smaller group of followers who may be less engaged. I'm not exactly sure about that, just kinda an idea.
@terrapinaj Fair enough, and I agree that HF19 was the right move, but it's also all subjective. I don't want a community that rewards hard work ALONE because setting up a bot that builds me into every post that includes #bot is also hard work. My greater fear is that our societies are not fit to maintain communities on this scale. Corruption and greed rule the day, even when the best intentions are at the foundation.
There has always been this on the surface. Then there are many of us who have been here for quite awhile that totally ignore the trending page. I usually forget it is even there for periods of time. We just write what we want, and don't worry about rewards. If they happen great. If they don't that's fine too, we were able to get the idea we had out of our mind and in writing somewhere.
There are a lot of people that approach it like I do too. There is simply no VIEW or way to simply watch people like that as there is with TRENDING.
I found trending to be incredibly depressing and sometimes aggravating to look at pretty early in my steemit journey. We didn't have a feed that showed us writings by those we follow back then. So I stuck primarily in NEW, and sometimes HOT at that time. Now I mostly follow my feed due to the amount of people I follow, and I'll peek in New, and sometimes hot, and sometimes I'll specifically follow #introduceyourself or #introducemyself tags to try to give new members a boost. With HF19 changing voting quite a bit I'm still trying to determine how to balance my voting power, this has temporarily disrupted how I do things and made it a little chaotic.
Mainly I wanted to let you know that the SURFACE and seem like that and there are some people doing exactly as you say. That is but the surface though. There are also networks of people supporting each other on that surface and thus it is mostly dominated by the same people frequently. I do not believe it will always be this way. They are working on communities, which when implemented will likely change things a great deal.
They haven't even gotten to the point (they being steemit inc.) where they want to advertise yet. They have things they want to finish still. So technically the proverbial floodgates will open then. We will be flooded by masses of people that only know how things are done on reddit, facebook, twitter, etc. We likely will have people trying to import trolling, and other bad habits.
It will be those of us that are here now that can try to help shape, and keep that from ripping apart the community before those people learn that there is another way, and it is quite a cool way. This is where each persons steem power they accumulate between now and then is very important.
There are many layers to steemit. If we call the trending one the surface then I can honestly say I never look at the surface.
There is quite a few people here who are here, only for the money.. Which is the for the wrong reasons.. It can easily be seen when you view their content. I find for the most part they don't profit from it. Unless, they already have a lot of Steem Power and are upvotting theirselves. There are a few good "whales" I know that search for this kind of content, spamming of comments or irrelevant content, and they downvote it. What I don't like, and what bothers me, is the comment botters. I can tell if a comment is genuine, or fake. I try to reply to every comment I receive on my post's, and I succeed in this probably at a rate of 99 percent. But, if I see a comment that says "I upvote, upvote me back" That is not genuine, and is probably a bot haha. I don't tend to stray too far away from the handful of people's pages I check daily, so I don't see everything, but I hope the platform stays in this mostly positive direction it is going. I come to find, people who are just here for the money, don't tend to profit, unless they are bringing in their own money.
Yup...that's the right perspective. Authentic interactions are easy to spot, and in time, I think those that look to bring their true selves to conversations with others will be the ones who win. You're on my short-list of those I know that do this day in and day out, so keep at it!