RE: Vlog 406: Why I never powered down in nearly 3 years.
dont you describe a problme there if you as one of the biggest believers (at least I think so) if you are not willing to buy Steem for 2$?
Tbh I caught myself thinking "dude, this guy goes to the cinema makes a pic and gets the money back for the movie, unfair random curses"
But yeah you build your account and network for 3 years and took the risks of buying and keeping your Steem and this is the reward.
Circle jerking is as you describe, pretty natural to a degree and fine in my book and I think even the loudest mouth is enjoying the autovotes they get and there are enough minnow circles which do that as well.
I think as a bigger stakeholder myself there is an extra responsibility though to keep planktons and minnows which proves themselves (meaning not cashing out the first posts etc) to keep them engaged with showing them some steemlove with a vote or two.
Circle jerking looks/is unfair if you are not a part of it but I see very little posts which decline payouts when they post how shitty Steem is.
prostitution is also natural
the point is that votes are filtering the content which appears in the trending and if it is not the content but the networking which is trending ... why should any reader care? This is exactly what we see. Trending posts with ZERO human commands. Nothing wrong with networking, even nothing wrong with selfvoting but it will not help the plattform, period.
trending is mostly shit and I have written about that before. There is a difference between networking and using your own stake and bots though
Find people that resonate with you and customize your feed that way. Just ignore the trending page. Or use other frontends like steempeak that has manually curated content in their home page. ;)
I pretty much only visit trending if I want to get mad :-)
Buying 50k STEEM @ $2 STEEM for an individual is most likely way too much, for me it would be impossible to do with Fiat.
Buying 50k STEEM for $100k for a business that needs an established blockchain is peanuts. And if that's too much they can always rent the SP they need.
I know what it's like to see a trending page as a minnow. I started here as one. You can scream at the unfairness and call steem shit or you can ignore it and start building a home here. That's what I choose to do.
Steem is different now, you can do so much more now with Steem then trying to make it blogging. Open a store and sell products for STEEM, develop an app or game, start a new community with a new token. The people that see the opportunity will seize it.
People that base their opinions about what's trending are missing the point of the what Steem can do for them.