Enjoy the Ride

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I was born in the early 80s so I was lucky enough to get to watch the use of computers grow from simple programs like the Oregon Trail game, to what they are today with Advanced Intellegence (AI) and quantum computers. The change has been incredible to be honest and incredibly fast when you put it into perspective, all of this in just a few decades.

I remember as a child when everyone used land lines to talk on the phone, it seems like forever ago but it really wasn't. I even remember when my dad got his first business cell phone, it was in a bag and it was far to expensive for us kids to use. haha. But over time all that has changed, now every kid has a cell phone in their pocket and most people don't even have landlines anymore. All of this within 25 years or so. Crazy how time flies!

Remember when AOL basically was the internet? LoL. I'm glad that passed quickly. To this day I still remember my first social media experience, ICQ. Haha, those were the days. ICQ was just a chat engine that was ran through the AOL interface, it was simple but at the time it was mind blowing! I remember being able to talk to kids from all over the country, maybe even the world when I was an early teenager. It was a new phenomenon and like a lot of other kids I spent many school nights awake typing instead of sleeping.

Back then everything was really slow, everyone had dial up internet so patients was a bit more important back then LoL. It wasn't as much about expressing who you are, like it is nowadays, so much as having the opportunity to be able to communicate with people from around the world that you normally couldn't. It unlocked so much potential into the world, communication was now king!

As times progressed we moved on to bigger and better social media sites. Ones that would allow you to make profiles, add pictures and create communities. Sites like MySpace revolutionized the social media experiment, made it possible for people from all walks of life to participate and were able to build massive platforms where millions and eventually billions of people could communicate on social media on a daily basis via the internet.

The next step in evolution was Facebook. It started as an exclusive social media club like none other before it. At first you were only able to join FB if you went to Harvard. After that they allowed other prestigious school students to come on board, schools like yale and stanford, trying to keep it as exclusive as possible as Mark Zuckerburg grew his empire. Eventually any college student could get a FB page and then not long after that they allowed anyone to join which ultimately lead to the success of the most popular social media giant ever created.

But now it seems like time may have run its course with FB. Between the data theft and scandals FB is starting to fall apart. New users have peaked and are now on the decline, it seems as though like all the other social medias, Facebooks time shall also pass.

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Less traditional social media sites are now more popular with younger generations, sites like twitter, instagram and snapchat are their social media apps of choice. But those too are starting to show more cracks in their foundations, so it's going to be interesting to see where social media goes from here.

I believe we are heading into a new evolution of social media now, even though many do not realize it. In the past only the social media giants reaped the rewards of users, our gift was to use their platform while their gift was getting rich off of our hard work and information. However now we have an answer for that.

Social Media sites like Steemit are popping up all over now. People are starting to realize that they can get paid for their information and participation on the internet. Is this going to be the next trend? Are people finally smart enough to leave behind the FBs of the world to come to a place that rewards users for their time and effort? Only time will tell I guess, but I can't see it going any other way to be honest.

I know steemit isn't perfect, but isn't the idea of things being more fair to the users make sense for the evolution of social media as we know it? Being paid for the information/time we spend on the internet seems like the next logical step.

Centralized systems should slowly diminish over time as the rise of Decentralized Platforms and Decentralized Apps take over the internet. The future of the internet will hopefully be tokenization, where we can be paid for basically every action in life. I know it sounds a bit ridiculous but we are already seeing this with cryptocurrencies especially on the Steem Blockchain.

I mean why would you use a fitbit for free when we could get paid for your daily activity by signing up with @actifit? Not only that we can actually get paid for a lot of things already on the steem blockchain. As of right now we can already get paid to find new gadgets and technology with @steemhunt. We can get paid for posting our videos on @Dtube. We can get paid to clean up the world by @cleanplanet. We get paid extra points/upvotes by front end Dapps (to steemit) like with @partiko and/or @esteem. You can get paid to play card games with @steemmonsters and even get paid to stay healthy by @air-clinic! These are all already options on the Steem Blockchain and we are just getting started! There are many more that I haven't even mentioned.

Eventually we will be paid for every action through tokenization. This transition to tokenization is basically inevitable, it is the next progression of the internet. Internet 3.0

However, since your are already here on steemit you are obviously a part of the innovator/early adopter group so you understand the power of blockchain and whats coming. So sit back, relax and enjoy the ride because we are just at the begining of awesomeness!

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