Freedom

No, this is not a post about the mysterious whale account on our platform, although come to think about it he has had some rather interesting activity on his account lately. I'm sure many of you out there have noticed and maybe decided to copy his actions. ;)

I recently started watching "It's always sunny in Philadelphia" and this one episode was about the freedom to do whatever you wanted and how laws and states have restricted people's freedom way too much lately. In this episode they decided to remove all these restrictions and let anyone coming to their bar do whatever they wanted to, in many ways this episode reminded me of our blockchain.

It didn't take a long time and people were smoking inside the bar, all sorts of people were showing up doing and selling all kinds of drugs and there was even illegal gambling going on at the other side of the bar which was conflicting with the interests of the bar owners as their main motive was to shoot a sort of "girl's gone wild" videos. They quickly realized that the mix of people were ruining their main idea so they decided to "hide it under the rug" by relocating the hardcore gamblers to the basement and everything seemed so much better again - for a short while.

This is where it started reminding me of Steem and how the freedom of expression and everyone being able to chime in anywhere can bring in all sorts of people. It's beautiful in many ways but in some ways it can also get a bit much and it is something you have to keep in mind almost daily. With so many different people from different places in the world and with different experiences of it there can be many different kinds of motives they can have for saying or doing the things they do. This is why Steem is so experimental cause in most centralized social platforms nowadays you have your inner circle of friends and followers and they may be much alike you so you seldom have any problems understanding them or getting your point across. With Steem everything is so much different and while the positives clearly outweigh the negatives we are still in the early phases of compared to Bitcoin much of the activity here may not be for the best sake of the platform/currency.

I often like to think back of the usecase of Bitcoin in the early stages and how everyone used that as a way to portray the currency of being something that only criminals and terrorists use. With any new technology though that's the kind of usecases you find being exploited first. I think Steem was created at an appropriate time in the innovation of blockchain technologies timeline, a little earlier and we may only have people here trying to use the platform for even more illegal things and trying to leech as much value out of it as possible, a little later and we would have a lot more competition which all may have started around the same time. The important thing to remember is that the incentives of the blockchain by itself thrive on positive actions and thinking. I'm not saying we shouldn't reward constructive criticism as that can often help the evolution of the platform but if there are people out there just trolling or being difficult for no apparent reason they may quickly find themselves being left alone from the rest as they either move on or have better things to do.

In the end although all this freedom is nice to have there will always be some need of governance and I'm looking forward to how communities (hivemind) and other front-ends and UI's will tackle this so not everything turns into that episode of "It's always sunny" where they later go down to the basement and find out that the illegal gambling has turned into russian roulette.

[Image Source Pexels.com]

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