An interesting question you could be asking yourself at the moment. Do you feel comfortable inviting people to participate of Steem? Meaning, do you feel that if you convince a family member or a friend for that matter, they will enjoy the experience. Or do you have reservations? _{Source Credit @sndbox}
I guess the reason why I'm even thinking about this, is because most of us learnt, maybe through negative experiences that the expectations we may have had for this blockchain were not met. Meaning, that we believed it to be one thing only to embrace later on the fact that it did not work exactly that way.

The reasons why are probably connected to promoters who do their best to bait would be viewers into clicking their overpromising "tricks" to make a lot of money, but then again that might not the whole picture at all.

_{To me the wrong expectations start right here, with a subtle yet powerful message.}

The psychological implications of this very message were probably not very calculated, and if they were, they might have been a bit shady and that is putting it lightly. Why would I say such a thing? Why would I accuse the marketing department (there is probably none, but my point stands) of being evil? - You might say.

I won't use the word evil, because that implies I believe in some sort of absolut. But the right word might be deceitful. Yes, that sounds harsh but I'm not willing to say otherwise, as much as it might anger a few people.

Your voice is worth something

Implies a valuation to your opinion, an implicit understanding that if you don't get anything, if the payout window expires and you happened to see a flipping 0.00 the whole time, that must mean your opinion, your thoughts, YOU are worthless.

Is this true? Is this even a message we would like to put out there? Are we telling people, come, let us be the judges of you? Let us punish you with indifference if you can't cut the cheese?

Do you see where I'm going with this? - The message has a lot of hot cognitions, implicit associations that cannot be ignored and in my opinion should not be ignored.

I know that: Steem != Steemit

I know this very well, but I also know that to 90% of the world who knows about Steem, it's not. And this little fact is what bothers me. In truth the platform today has to do with content yes, but not so much. Meaning that the relationships, the social aspects, the ones that can't be measured by metrics have more weight on the payouts of posts than the quality of the content itself.

Is this fair? Do I like it? What does this say about merit? - I'm not entirely sure, but possibly that part of the conversation is not as relevant at the moment, at least for this particular post.

I can't help to wonder if when I write about these things, I'm screaming into the abyss or if someone at Steemit Inc actually considers my words.