"Building Decentralized Communities Is Not Rocket Science" || About Integrity, Loyalty, Trust And Where To Find It
If you have integrity, nothing else matters. If you don't have integrity, nothing else matters. - Alan Simpson
People behave with integrity when they feel good.
Decisions pro or against the participation in a certain social grouping are mainly driven by irrational factors such as connectivity, sense of belonging and trust.
Thus, the basis for any stable social fabric in the world is human value exchange. That applies both to real and virtual scenarios.
Decentralized social networking applications are digital tools that enable us to transfer our already existing human value concept to a virtual environment, enabling us to connect with like-minded people and entities in common fields of interest all over the world.
It's the future version of local communities which have been established between human beings ever since.
Here's to the simplicity of community assets and which dApps are able to provide them!
Picture kindly provided by pixabay.com
People go there where they feel best
Again it was @connecteconomy who inspired me to not only write this blog post but also provided it with the perfect headline.
People will go where they feel best,Anja perfectly recaps in Should we be worried about ONO as a competitor to Steemit?.
Most of the decisions we make in the context of social incorporation are emotionally driven. We stay where we feel safe, and we relate ourselves with the ones that provide us with a comfortable sense of belonging and trust. That applies for both our private and professional life.
We keep with the concepts that make us believe we're at the right place, surrounded by the right people, doing the right things.
Human expectations are actually quite simple.
That's why community building requires leadership!
Often people mix up decentralization and lawlessness. The believe self-governance means total abandonment of governance.
But one cannot be free without values.
That's why decentralized environments are based on the concept of consensus, established by responsible, open-minded and community-driven personalities who behave with integrity and trust each other.
Integrity is evident since it ensures that the members don't base their decisions on personal interests but on the common vision of the community.
As in real life so on the blockchain: not everybody can and also doesn't need to become a leader. Leadership requires a set of skills only a few are able to provide.
Real community builders are lions that take care of their pride.
It was @stellabelle who mentioned the term 'caring' in the context of community building lately and it's probably the expression that fits best with the real asset of (social) leadership.
Builders, leaders, lions or however you want to call them have one fundamental thing in common: they don't put their own interests on top of the agenda. They want to achieve something much bigger than that.
Lions find pleasure in educating people! Their pride's learning curve is their own success, and they're rewarded with loyalty.
Now where can we find such values?
In general the best sign of true community spirit is social interaction.
If you take steemit.com as an example you'll quickly realize that the glorious times of the application belong to the past. Now steemians have found many other ways and places in order to live their passion, to socially engage and to build.
I'm repeating myself but I can't tell you often enough that my no. 1 application built on the Steem blockchain is @dlive for the very reasons I've just mentioned. If you're looking for human value exchange, integrity and mutual inspiration, then there may be few other dApps whith these characteristics.
But we wouldn't be early crypto adopters if we didn't keep an eye on the next generation of decentralized social networking. The no. 1 social media dApp of the future will surely be ONO @onosocial launched on EOS @eosio.
Everybody I've been chatting with about ONO so far has devoured and celebrated its whitepaper.
If you're looking for something deeper then this is surely your place to be.
Remember: life is simple, it's just not easy.
Much love -
Marly -
Thanks for your valuable time!
This blog was launched at the end of July 2016
aiming to provide stories for open-minded
people who enjoy living on the edge of their lives,
stepping out of comfort zones, going on adventure,
doing extreme sports and embracing the new.
Welcome to the too-much-energy-blog!
PS: Don't content yourself with mediocrity.
Original content. Quotes found on quotepixel.com and quotefancy.com.
you make some very good points but you left out one thing that in mandatory for a decentralized community to exist.
they need accountability, because in any community system leadership figures will emerge and they need to be held accountable for their activities which could jeopardize the collective
Great point! Thanks for the adding :-)
Without accountability it wouldn't actually work.
I absolutely love this! It resonates to me so much that you have become my 2nd most favourite person in Steemit!
@ashleykalila takes 1st place because when I connected with her I felt that she really cared for people and building relationships and supporting people to become better versions of themselves, of being humans in virtual space.
I have so many favorite lines in this post but this resonated so much with me because as being in HR and championing people's rights I often have to go against management if they want to do something that is not right morally or legally. They invoke the management mandate and I go out of my way to fight it.
Thus I am often branded as a troublemaker and one that is an anarchist.
I don't follow rules that morally wrong. I stand by my conviction and my integrity is more important than a paycheck.
You can always find a job but you can't always be selling your morals.
Thank you for this one Marly!
I agree with you on this Ashley is intent on spreading love on the Blockchain. Her Human of Steemit initiative is an indicator of her presonality
Aaaaaw, you just made my day! What a nice comment and huge compliment, thank you so much Maverick! :-)
Well then we have even more in common!
When I started my career, all my decisions and actions were exclusively driven by monetary success. That also had a huge impact on my private life situation, and I basically defined myself through status.
Now - a few years later - my focus and my values have completely changed. So I still haven't done a 360 surfing but I did it on the ground, hehe :-)
It feels good to do the right thing, when this means human value exchange.
Thank YOU for this one!
Beautifully and wonderfully stated! <3
@virtualgrowth, what an honor to have you!
Thanks for your nice compliment, I reeeeally appreciate that :-)
This is the kind of post that helps people see where all this is going. Steemit seems a bit chaotic sometimes. And as I have been creating good content, I've seen post that were simply an image get triple digit upvotes. And it seems frustrating sometimes.
But, as we know there are a lot of people who care about building this community for the benefit of all, it's time to say thank you! So, Thank you SurferMarly!
Thank YOU, @fakeinternetnews!
I think chaotic is not the main problem, since creativity and chaos are quite good friends usually :-)
What actually concerns me more with regards to steemit.com is the way it's been governed during the past year. It all started with an amazing vision, many many creators, curators, investors and general crypto enthusiasts were willing to share:
Now that vision may still exist, but it's not lived anymore.
Steem is now giving value to those who're able to pay for it. There's been a shift from an ideologically driven strategy to a monetarily driven strategy.
Now one might say that with Dan Larimer leaving the original vision of Steem died.
I don't know if this was the reason, but it's at least a possible explanation.
This post is meant to open people's eyes and to motivate them to not content themselves with anything than 100% :-)
See you around!
Referring to both your post and some of your comments below, I have to say that I've never understood why Ned et al don't prioritize Steemit. It is their flagship product, but they almost seem embarrassed by it, or at best slightly annoyed.
I took a look at Ono whitepaper recently, but wasn't all that impressed. The thing that's special about Steemit is that it is already operational, with lots of people posting. While it isn't easy to interact as a group on here, because there are no groups, I do find little tribes growing in the comments sections of folks who are all following each other.
Of course, I wasn't here in the early days, so I have nothing to compare it to. I haven't done anything on dlive yet and honestly wouldn't even know how to get started. Does your wallet from Steemit carry over to other steem apps?
Anyway, as I'm just getting my bearings here, I'm not that happy to hear that old-timers are wanting to leave. I'm still excited about what I've found here. It is much more meaningful conversation than I get to have on say Facebook, or any other social media site. (I just don't look at the Trending page and always search by topic of interest instead.)
This is one quote that sure has its place in how we are seen by what we do and how we do the the things we do.
Steemit has been a life saving platform for many, myself included but the groove we all once saw, felt and associated with suddenly fizzled out, giving birth to more bots than humans.
I have read the ONO white paper and still reading and must confess I love that this is one platform that seeks to make it about the people first.
Nice post with some education. #onobuilders
Thanks for your great comment @ejemai!
You’re pretty right: steemit was a game changer and helped a lot of people to improve their life standard.
I remember that there was a moment in time when things started to be different here. Some of us raised their hands disagreeing with the direction the ship was gradually navigated to. Now we’re on a completely different route many users don’t agree with anymore. But now it’s too late to turn back.
So we need a new ship! :)
The glorious times of the application belong to the past? There are more users daily and there are new projects here on a daily basis? How could this be past the glorious times?
Don't get me wrong - I am interested in the things around ONO as well (in the end, any serious competitor can be good for Steem). But saying Steemit is history and ONO the future based on a few lines without an actual product seems a little bit - well, overenthusiastic at least ;)
Oh I looove being so enthusiastic 😃
Still doesn't answer the questions on why Steemit's glorious times are over :(
There’s no community building taking place on steemit.com. People have started to use other applications on the Steem blockchain in order to engage with like-minded people, such as DLive, DTube, utopian-io,...
Steem’s main stage is actually discord, which means that people even leave the blockchain in order to find what they need.
That’s why I believe that steemit.com (such as it is today) won’t be able to compete with the future generation of social media dApps.
Thoughts?
I don't agree that there's no community building taking place. Though there's plenty of room for something else to come along and eclipse it.
What I see is chaos forcing adaptation, evolution. Evolution is neither good nor bad. The most effective adaptations will thrive, and go on to reinforce one another.
That's quite philosophical, and if we were not talking about steemit.com I'd probably agree on your point of view :-)
Exactly. I'd like to quote Ned Scott (Founder and CEO Steemit) here who said in one of his interviews on beginnings of 2018:
Steemit.com is no priority for Steemit, Inc anymore and we're now seeing the consequences.
The problem with this strategy is that they've abandoned their no. 1 application and the place where most of the established users actually created their home and where most of the new users are still getting in contact with Steem for the very first time (including creators, curators, investors and media).
Competition is good for business. So I'm excited to see how this market will develop during the next months!
Thanks for stopping by, and keeping the thread alive :-)
I agree with the points raised by this post. The choice people make is directly related to their sense of value .
Man needs some entertainment and entertainment really well, my friend I wish you spend the most beautiful times
A beautiful picture of a serious trio really fun