Introducing:

Project positivity

Many thanks to @kushed for lending us his posting key to get this project off the ground. It’s something we, @honeyscribe and I, hold close to our hearts.

What’s it all about?

Well, as you know I’m all about spreading that good vibe into the community, and, as of late we’ve been hit with a lot of negativity. I’ve not been very vocal about it but I’ve certainly watched people unfold and tear themselves to pieces over who deserves what and so on. 

So we aim to cut through that mess and create a more cohesive and collaborative community; one that celebrates the rewards of others and embraces humanity for what it is. We may all be different but there are definitely similarities in every one of us on whatever level.

The Challenge 

We are divided. Naturally, we see each other in divisions of geographical area, skin colour, ethnicity, sexual orientation and so on. It’s what we’re born into. We are bred to believe that we’re different on every level. But as someone that has worked closely with people from all walks of life I can guarantee you that we’re not as different as you may think. Some of us may like the same music, or have the same friends, it could even be as simple as liking the same politician. Whatever the case, we plan to focus intrinsically on what binds us together rather than tears us apart.

Our community will be one without labels. A hard feat, but one that we hope to accomplish.

Project Aims

• Create a cohesive and collaborative community, one that backs each other up rather than strips each other down

• Host weekly challenges; challenges that will test the very person that you are inside, articles that we enjoy will get a whale upvote, and hopefully more whales will join us

• Create a labelless community and in our channel on steemit.chat

• Encourage people to write on a higher level

• Help people process their feelings better through experience based writing

• Inspire and encourage free thought and different ideas for Steemit.

The Landscape

You guys are great, you really are. You are the bread and butter of this platform. We need the minnows just as much as the dolphins and the whales – we’re a nice little tightly run ship. There are lots of great potential writers out there because we know, we’ve seen it in you! And we see you sharing valuable content daily. And we all co-exist in a lovely little technical eco-system.

What we haven’t seen though is much thought inspired differentiation. There are some others out there which have taken Steemit into gambling, and art, which is awesome, but we’d like to see more. Google ‘writing niche’s’ for an example of how many there actually are.  

This platform was designed to govern itself, and create idea forks through that. We hope to be the pivotal idea fork that drives Steemit into a thousand other idea forks; limits? Endless.

The Problem.

I’ll will be the first in putting my hand up and stating that I too have been guilty of writing ‘for’ the platform and not for myself. You see, the reason why I am hosted on the Huffington Post is that because every time I take to writing I do it for myself, for the love of writing. And this platform has separated me from that. I’ve been caught chasing the money. And that’s not what it’s about.

Writing should be about you. All the best writers do so because they love it. Because learning to write and becoming a good, published author takes hours and hours of alone time, with only your thoughts to play with, and a great amount of self-oomph.

And we’ve been afraid to take that creativity out of its boundaries in case our rewards are effected, who wants to be stuck on 1p all their lives through thinking out of the box, right? We’ve been writing for Steemit, and not bending Steemit to our writing.

The Solution

Okay. Here’s where we are so far. There’s myself, @honeyscribe and @kushed on board at the start. So, firstly we’ll be looking for great content. People that show themselves to go above and beyond the call of duty when it comes to writing, people that take that leap into the unknown and allow themselves to be vulnerable. We also won’t just be looking for hardcore writers, we only ask that you’re ‘trying’. We’ll be looking for lived experience, non-fiction and a plethora of other stuff.

We absolutely understand that no-one becomes a professional on the first day; that’s just silly. But we also understand how frustrating and demanding getting started can be. All participants will find us dropping hints and tips on how to better their work in their comments sections – so we fully plan to help you grow as writers too. We have a commitment to you, as well as ourselves.

At first we plan to host weekly writing prompts on our feeds that anyone can join in. Posts that I like will get an upvote from me and @kushed. Similarly, since @honeyscribe has different interests to me, posts that she likes will get an upvote from her and @kushed. We will also encourage all whales that like the idea of this project to follow suit, but, we respect diversity and if you don’t like what we share then don’t upvote it! But we hope you do :)

It will also be highly encouraged that participant minnows and dolphins to get busy on upvoting – we will want to encourage cohesion, a community that rewards each other for being what it is, a community.

And remember, positivity is an integral theme to this project, so not only will you be rewarded for positive posts, we’ll also be searching for and up voting positive comments from people on this platform as a “way to go for being awesome to one another”. We’ll be ignoring all the hate.

The future

Well this alone is no easy feat, and I’d hate to put a timeframe on achieving what we initially plan to do, but I’d like to say the choice is yours on the future. We’ll be encouraging new and forward thinking ideas as part of our brief, so who knows where we’ll be a month? A year? Down the line. It’s all up to you. And this is your awesome chance,

To make Steemit fucking awesome,

FOR EVERYONE.