What if I had Steemit as a teenager?

I have been thinking for the last few days about how different life would have been overall if I had steemit when I was between the ages of 14-20. I was still living at home with my father. Back in those days I spent countless hours on the internet talking to people on gaming forums and chatrooms where I would just take about all kinds of random topic with random people.

But as a kid I always wanted to be able to play arcade games or buy a new nintendo game or get some kind of cool new toy. Had I been pulled into something like steemit I am about 99% sure I would have been hooked almost instantly. It would have been discussion with friends. My parents would be too uncool to really have any input. I would have probably had multiple accounts, I would have probably began to rate people I knew purely on their steem power.

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I am pretty sure that I would have earned a lot of steem between the ages of 14-20.

Considering the amount of time that is spent on the internet back then I am fairly certain that I would have gone into my first career job interview at the age of 21 with several grand worth of steem power at my disposal. All of which would have probably been earned from just posting artwork and ranting about video games.

But on that note, I wonder if I would have ever had the urge to work a regular 9-5 job at all. Seriously, I honestly think that both me and my peers would never have even considered working minimum wage unless it was a fairly dire situation.

As a teenager I had a couple jobs over the years for minimum wage. Mostly for the sake of having some pocket change to spend. But I can honestly say that, I might not have ever even deemed minimum wage worth my time at all when I was already making money talking about video games.

In a society where the youth are all earning money from blogging would it become a problem for places that depend on cheap labor to find people willing to even work for them?

I imagine that whiny posts asking for upvotes would have been pretty commonplace!

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Popularity would potentially have been formed around steem power in high school.

Steem power is a much better indicator of wealth than the number of facebook or twitter followers. Mainly because there is a much more direct correlation between the two. If you were a popular kid in high school you would likely have had been upvoted by a hundred people in your age group for every post.

I think that this is really important to think about. If a generation of kids were to ever find themselves addicted to a meritocratic system such as steemit then it would have had a really huge effect on political opinions.

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As a teenager I would have walked into owing taxes like it was a land mine.

It would be absolutely insane to convince a child that they owe taxes for the earnings they were under the impression belonged to them all along. A 15 year old kid who thought he accumulated a thousand dollars being told to cough up 400 bucks would be a blistering red pill shot of anti statism to the likes that have never been seen before.

This is especially true if I already spent it on a brand new Neo Geo with a few games. as a child I would be ready to go full out black block with a fiery passion. It would have been the end of the god damn universe for me at that age. I would have rushed up to my room and slammed my door extra hard at the IRS. "Like seriously maaaaan."

I am convinced that at my most rebellious age I would have gone too far and it would have taken me years to calm down about the topic. There would be a market for "FUCK THE IRS" T'shirts in Hot Topic. Any musician that didn't speak out against this shit would be scolded in boiling water and publicly chastised.

Fred Durst and Trent Rezner and that guy from Pearl Jam would have been forced to speak out about the FED. Kurt Cobain, Biggy Smalls and Tupac all would have had Steemit accounts worth half a million dollars. Shit would probably have been pretty fucking different today.

Forcing and reprimanding selfish teenagers to pay taxes would have caused a combustible whiny political movement that would have very likely forced a change in politics overall to be more fiscally conservative, all while railing against republicans for being religious nut jobs. (In the 90s there was a waning satanic moral panic)

I mean, just look at the backlash around Napster and how THAT played out. Now imagine if it was over taxes. The life blood of the government and all social programs. The sheer amount of bad poetry that would have been spawned over this is palpable to say the least.

There would have been no damn way anyone who wanted to increase taxes would have been cool to the youth of the time.

Bernie Sanders would have been flayed alive in that climate. There would have been no such thing as a democrat, it would have been Republican vs republican.

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Blogging is a wholesome activity while status updates are more about your feelings.

Anyway to end this on a lighter note, I think this is an important distinction between the two activities. Status updates and blogging have a lot of distinctions that may actually shed light on how people interact with one another these days.

Doing a status update on twitter or Facebook is more about you sharing how you feel about a topic in a much less formal way. Its meant to be low effort communication that usually causes people to form together like a hive mind. This usually causes a lot of drama.

One of the reasons that status updates are so profitable from a predatory perspective is that it provides a lot more information about each person in very bite sized chunks. The surveillance state stands to gain a lot from a platform that builds itself around the status update mindset.

Blogging, on the other hand, is the exact opposite. Its high effort and it can usually be about a much wider range of topics that may not even include the poster. Blogging requires more thought. Blogging requires you to think about a topic from start to end then figure out what you want to say. While a blog usually does include how you feel it is usually also about why you feel that way.

A society that is built around status updates is likely to be more easily offended and far more likely to raise scorn from friends who wish to defend the offended. It becomes a storm of opposing view points filled with echo chambers to gain optimal user retention. It seems like status update culture may have seeped into our daily lives actually.

A society formed around blogging will have people who are more or less just happy you actually read the damn thing much less care if someone posed an alternate viewpoint. You are likely going to still see an echo chamber but at the same time people are forced to think about topics to a much greater degree.

I think that a society built around blogging would likely promote a far greater degree of independent thought. But I still do actually feel that steemit should have space for doing status update style content. Either be in the form of tweets or just low effort posts.

Maybe I should promote a statusupdate tag or something along those lines?

There is little doubt in my mind that Steemit would have been monumental if it had existed in the 90s.