Hi @calybos,

Most Steem users are selfish and that is why communities fail. Let me explain.

Many Steem users are on communities for the money and not for the love of the community. You can easily identify them.

They look for communities where the founders have large SP and where these founders upvote community content lavishly, sometimes regardless of quality.

As a community member they are not interested in the welfare of the community as whole. If they are interested they would ensure that they would regularly power up their earnings without undue delay and upvote other members content regularly to encourage participation. Instead these selfish members transfer out their earnings to elsewhere regularly leaving a meagre amount of SP in their wallet.

Recently a group of users with accounts older than 3 years with hundreds or thousands of posts but less than 50 SP each (in most cases less than 15 SP) started posting on ask.steem community. That fact alone shows that they were not interested in powering up their earnings and upvoting others with their earnings (and increase their SP)

They appeared to be separate individuals but it was quite obvious that it was actually one or two persons with multiple accounts pretending to be many users. Their wallet clearly showed that they were there to channel off their earnings and not interested in the welfare of the community by powering up their earnings and upvoting others. Fortunately they were not upvoted at all by the founders of this community although they posted quality content for awhile and eventually left the community after that.

When members don't power-up their earnings regularly, it simply means they are not interested in upvoting other community members and let then grow along with them. That leaves the founder(s) alone to continue supporting the increasing posts being posted. With the increase in the number of posts the founders will be forced to lower the upvote weight to cater to the demand and eventually making the upvotes not worth for these selfish members to participate.

Up to now I have not come across anyone in this community with that kind of community spirit (although community spirit is one of the requirements of this community in its Rules) and therefore I don't see this community progressing in the future either. The remaining members may meet the same fate of being ignored sooner or later as the founders may find themselves wearing out of patience.