I was genuinely surprised to find the consensus in comments on my last post, “Of sock puppets and witch hunts”, to be that I stay and keep writing on Steemit. I would love to do that, but I want to do it in a way that supports the community. What I've decided to do is continue, but with the goal of sharing at least one piece I am excited about daily, and spending more time looking for minnows who are producing excellent content to follow and upvote. I won’t be doing it alone.
As I was hatching my plan, @lifeisawesome was creating one of his own. It has already been established that he and I know one another as friends. We share a passion for writing on positivity. His plan is to encourage and feature writing on positivity here on Steemit through weekly challenges. My plan is to encourage and feature excellence. It is natural that we should merge our goals as it will enable us to offer deeper support to the community by potentially doubling exposure.
This plan will be called Project Positivity!
I have to admit to not fully understanding Steemit. It is with @littlescribe's help in comments on my previous post that I have set a new course for participation here. With that said, I hope you will create and link your best work that aligns with the development and positivity goals @lifeisawesome and I will be sharing. He will set the challenge, and I will follow it up with tips for engaging the challenge/producing quality content.
In essence, we are creating a publication! Your excellent work will benefit not only from resteeming; it will receive the sought-after “whale vote.” For more on that, please read @lifeisawesome’s introduction post here. Project Positivity is his brain-child and is being backed by our fearless leader, @kushed.
I’m talking about evening the playing field.
Let me take a step back for a moment:
What @littlescribe pointed out to me was there are many here who have been writing for years and feel it unfair that I was able to come in and write on someone else's Steem essentially, with that whale (@kushed) presumed to be reaping rewards for my work even as I do. Even if this were true, I don't know that I agree with it being wrong. That description is literally how a publication works. I have built more than one publication from the ground up. It takes years to grow a reputation enough to be able to hire writers to produce valuable enough content to maintain or increase your reputation/income. As this is an income-based platform, that seems like a very natural evolution.
However, I see how it is also a frustrating evolution for excellent and dedicated artists to be working with hope and dedication on this platform and not receive the same recognition.
Stink eye, side-eye, cat eye . . . I get it.
I want to use the curation rewards accumulated on this account to give back. In order to do this, I will put my publication-building skills to work alongside @lifeisawesome. That begins with finding and reading you. As we get Project Positivity started, I hope you will generously share links to past work you have published here which suits our themes and write to the challenges posed. While the goal is to encourage generation of high quality positivity-based pieces, we also want to recognize work you have completed.
Please use “project-positivity” as a tag on your Project Positivity posts so we can easily find them!
Beyond that, don't feel shy in promoting yourself in my comments. I only ask that you share one link of your own per prompt, but as many as you like belonging to others. Of course, only you know how many accounts you have, so please be honest. I've seen how it is hurtful to doubly promote yourself on the same topic, so please choose only one of yours per week.
This is not the only way I wish to be a better community member on Steemit.
I realize there are other projects here promoting minnows. I want to learn about and support those as well. If you have a project you want to spread the word about, please please help me understand it by linking or commenting below.
I am happy to promote excellent work, and not just by minnows, but I am most interested in seeing work from minnow accounts. I resteemed one piece earlier today that speaks on rain and positivity, two favorite topics of mine. I hope you will stop in to read it!
I hope this feels like a positive move to you. I would love to stay here as long as it feels safe. So far, it seems the demand to stay outweighs the demand to put myself in danger by revealing my offline identity.
With that said, I promise to continue composing original content for Steemit. I will also try to be on steemit.chat more often for real-time interactions.
I value your reflections on this action plan. Please share thoughts and post links!
xoxo,