I have been reading quite a few articles right here in steemit drilling down statistics that paint one story - the growth of crypto & the growth of steem value in particular. I hate to be the party popper, but thought I might as well put my thoughts down in writing before the movement goes down the drain.
Escaping Imaginary Traps
When I first entered steemit it felt crazy that people advocated curating another person’s post! ‘Cause that literally meant increasing another person’s revenue - which is EXACTLY opposite of what the FIAT world has been preaching to us for the thousands of years!
In here, the idea is you can grow only by the growth of another steemian. Every single action you do in steemit is the pocket-money going into your piggy bank.
This is for anybody on steemit who is thinking of playing over-cautious games: Don’t feel deceived by traps when there are really none.
The USP of Steemit
We are led to believe that steemit exists for everyone to make an earning. While that is a good value-ad, steemit has a feature set which makes it eligible for a title that no other cryptocurrency can compete for - Gateway to Blockchain!
Seriously - think about it for a minute.
Steemit should be the entry point for anyone bothering to invest their time and money into cryptocurrencies.
Not Bitcoin or Ethereum, it is steem which makes it easiest for a layman to understand the way blockchains work and make sense. It is the easiest crypto to mine & stake! And at the moment it is still most affordable of the lot!
A Thing About Voting Power
That’s a nice picture that summarises how you earn with your voting power. But it has also driven many folks into thinking never to vote below certain VP (like say 80%).
While arguably an useful tip for a minnow, it would be a very bad practice for whales. Purely because of the amount of hashing power they end up withholding. I think the advise should also include the point that, with increasing reputation the lower limit of VP should also increase linearly!
The Flawed Gene
To earn on steemit, all you had to do was design an algorithm that would punch random keys, setup some bots to give and take up-votes and insert random comments. The platform still will work the way it should and boast of making money for those on it. In an ideal world, if every steem user was a bot, they would each produce equal amounts of content (until the taxation steps in), up-vote each other until their stake-weights level out.
When the human element got involved there was a certain structure that began to develop in this randomness. With each new member added there was a strand mutating in steem’s DNA. Selectivity started being bred which in a way is anathema to steemit’s soul. Yet this strand goes more overpowering with each new member.
Knowing your Role
I am sure that you have a standard & taste for quality of content; we all do. But more than anything else we are here to choose one job - create or curate! Post good content (with your followers in mind) & if you decided to follow someone, just go over to their blog from time to time and give them a boost.
I am sure many of you felt a moment of happiness or gratitude when some random bloke just came over and clicked the up-vote button. It was a truly a wow moment when you saw that there was a value attached to our thoughts put into words - I am not being metaphoric; this is real money! And to go check your wallet and see the boom in your $$…
STOP right there! This is exactly the moment you need to put your greedy little thoughts down the drain. Ditch all those learnings that the world has taught you about staking your cash pile. For the time you are here keep to your job & the rewards will pile up on their own.
So Where is this Post Going?
When we stepped inside it was not the usual welcome party, was it? I mean the day we decided to checkout steemit!
There was no wallet app to download; no crazy command line prompts; no mining rig; there wasn’t even a bitcointalk forum to speak of. This platform was all of the above rolled into one! Simplistic, yet fully functional.
All we needed to do was mine by creating or curating. The Voting Power and vesting power were only meant to level the playing ground to some extent and then spice up the rules of the game; possibly also to make the life of bots a lot more difficult.
Yet with all this proposition already ingrained in our subconscious mind, we fail to deliver where and when it matters the most. Even if steem is holding the frame, the creator has made the picture, for some reason we fail to hit the nail on the head!
We refuse to see the power of comments; we are blind to the fact that commenting is the easiest way to disperse our hashing power (so to speak). I have been insisting the below point on many posts recently:
By commenting we not only raise our own chance of earning an up-vote on any post (even a self-up-vote) we also open the possibility of earning a return comment or better yet, new follower(s).
Might I also add, that you loose absolutely nothing by a comment; not even your VP. On the contrary you stand to earn comment rewards! So if a post catches your eye even for a second put a comment and move on, in case you cannot up-vote; keep that door open!
On any traditional blogging site the post may be the creator’s property, but here on steemit we as curators have the golden opportunity to earn a share in that property just for dropping by and saying a hi - how cool is that?!
Final Thoughts
If the trend of too much selectivity combined with preservation of VP or lack of commenting continues then this platform is going to the ground. There is no two ways about it. Steemit is not a traditional blogging platform. Don’t treat it so & play the game as it is meant to be!
Fun fact: If everyone stops voting and creating for even one day, steemit’s market value will come crashing down!
With more new people joining there is very slim chances for this ever happening. However, newbies joining after a boom could have a tough time if the above vicious circle continues to build.
If the payout received is not reflective of the effort put in, it won’t encourage them to say positive things about steemit and externally influence more people to join in. As recent stats indicate, this is clearly the boom time & steemit can use an evenly spread out payment, more than ever!
The day you see more whales than minnows is possibly when it is safe to say that steemit’s mathematical probability of losing value is nil. If you looked up the tree above you, you should be smart enough to note that there are whales whose path you have not crossed yet.
So don’t end up just creating gangs and groups that vote each other up. That will not be lasting and neither will it do justice to the efforts you put in. Who knows? Your blog might be appealing to more bigger fish out there. Feed them and watch the miracle happen!
Every up-vote you refused because you were conserving on that VP or simply because the blog is not popular (yet) is like missing on investing in a stock and later lamenting it. To make steem story successful, act on your whims and be decisive.
Image credits:
Pestrevenge
Imgsafe
Steemit Whitepaper
The Tech Journal
Internet
Steemit
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