Steem Blockchain Frees @Aggroed from the Corporate World! #1

@aggroed just took a leap of faith out of the corporate world and into the freedom of the Steem blockchain. Will his journey inspire us to make the same transition?

In this edited interview transcript formatted for reading, we chat here about cryptocurrencies, earning as an author on Steemit, serving as a witness, and our purpose for growing Steem together in peace, abundance and liberty, alongside @minnowsupport and http://minnowsupportproject.org.

This blog post is the first part of the interview and you can watch the video at the end of it if you wish.

Steem Blockchain Frees Aggroed from the Corporate World!

Would you join me in meeting @aggroed on Steem because he has an amazing blockchain story to share. He's just left his job in the corporate world to do Steem full time. He's one of the top witnesses and authors in Steem, and I think this is a great case study in the power of blockchain technology to change our lives, and to get to know one person who is in the middle of that.

Aggroed:

Thanks, Jerry. It's great to be here. I appreciate the warm introduction and I am looking forward to chatting with you for the next little bit here.

Jerry Banfield:

I appreciate you doing this interview here with us today. You can find Aggroed on Steem at https://steemit.com/@aggroed. To begin, I am curious how you say your name and where it came from?

Aggroed:

A lot of people want to say, "aggro-ed" or "aggro-read" or something. It's actually from "World of Warcraft," a game I spent a couple years playing, maybe a decade ago. I was a tank and "aggro" is a thing that happens in that game.

But the name actually really suits me. Aggro is the verb, aggroed is past tense and it roughly translates into, "You had been peacefully sleeping, and then you were disturbed into an awoken and sort of like responsive, sometimes even violent state."

I was very much in a sleep human being and got violently awoken by the system, and have been an aggroed individual, and so I like that name quite a bit.

Jerry Banfield:

I love that. I appreciate you going into details because I played some "World of Warcraft" and Diablo, but I wouldn't have thought to explain all the details to someone who'd never played any of those before.

Aggroed:

I'm a Ph.D. chemist and I've been a professor for four years. The educational process or learning or teaching is actually really important to me and that's part of why in the Minnow Support Project the whole community standards is built around an educational vehicle that's meant to go help train and retain minnows on the platform.

That's an educational experience. Part of this is that, without really even thinking of it, yet people ask me questions. I get nerd sniped all the time. I'm just answering those questions probably more detailed than what normal humans want.

Jerry Banfield:

"Nerd sniped," that's my favorite word so far.

I translated it as violently disrupted in the system and what it seems to me is that we are very grateful and lucky to have your calibre of service essentially because you just literally quit your corporate job where I'm assuming you probably had full-time pay, benefits and everything, and you have taken a leap of faith on the blockchain.

Would you tell us about how all that has worked?

Aggroed:

Well, for me it's not that hard.

I left the nice paying gig in the corporate world where I did higher education sales. Again, my job was basically to be a nerd and talk to other professors a.k.a. nerds, and get them to adopt software or curriculum tools or things like that for their classroom.

I liked that job and I continue to like that job, but I've always had an issue: there are way too many students that go into colleges, then fail, and then they get left with huge amounts of debt and that entire thing is scary.

Just as a society for individuals they don't tell you in the admissions meeting, "Look to your left one of you two won't graduate," but that's literally what they should say before you sign the checks.

That makes me quite angry and as much as I always liked trying to help students through that process and get them to be better at that, there is always some queasy part of me that's saying, "You know, I'm not sure that this is a system that I entirely want to support."

I will keep repeating these until the day I die, but my values are peace, abundance and liberty.

I actually think Steem is a phenomenal platform to share these in that the platform teaches peace because if you are out of line you are going to get flagged and there are economical consequences to your behavior.

It teaches abundance because all the people that are participating in this through clicks and through interactions are actually experiencing a change in their wealth and livelihood.

And I think it really supports liberty because I was on my fifth Facebook account. I'm getting booted one last time. I think I saw a post by @stellabelle and I said, "You know what, F. this. I'm done. I'm going to go try this Steemit thing."

The money seems neat, but what I really needed at the time was a platform where I could be an activist and be a political activist to fight against the system, and not get banned every couple of months, especially when I had a couple thousand followers.

Now, I'm up to like 10,000 followers and I haven't been banned since I've been here and that's been extremely rewarding to sort of get this message out of peace, abundance and liberty, to question what our government's doing because there's a lot of malfeasances and we should be protesting and stopping that, and not supporting what they are doing.

So, you asked me, how did I quit my job?

That is a value statement of like, these are the things that I care about. So, for me, it was pretty easy to walk away from a corporate gig. Part of this is that being a top 20 witness you get paid a bunch of Steem, so I have faith that Steem is going to go up, enough faith that I'm willing to go risk my economic livelihood on a crypto.

Well, you are sure now, I don't think people are going to say, "Oh. That was a giant risk." I think they are going to say, "Hey, he was a genius for doing that," or something.

But honestly, what I fundamentally believe is that the Federal Reserve is this evil organization and every single time that I spend a dollar I support it, and I don't like that.

Anything I can do to withdraw myself and my consent from that system and build something different, I'm more than happy to do that and I think Steem presents a great opportunity. That's what I'm looking forward to, trying to keep building on.

It makes my wife nervous, and my dad who's a baby boomer is not thrilled that I'm quitting my job for this, but I think economics online and I believe in the platform. I think that technologically we are pretty advanced for a crypto and I just see more and more adoption, and that's going to drive higher prices and I'm okay with rolling the dice on this. I actually think the pot odds are pretty good.

Jerry Banfield:

Thank you for explaining that and for the laughs. I am enjoying listening to the values and the action you have taken.

You have taken a big leap of faith essentially that right now everything looks like it's great. The top 20 witnesses, at five-plus dollars per Steem, are making about a thousand or fifteen hundred dollars a day in Steem Power, which has to be powered down, and you can also delegate it to a bot.

Anyway, you can make a whole lot of money off of it and that's a big leap of faith essentially because if the Steem price and everything goes to hell, if it goes down to 10 cents, that turns into about $20 a day, not nearly as much to live on.

You can see there is faith there.

Aggroed:

Well, part of this too is that I'm fortunate as a Ph.D. chemist who's been in higher end publishing, that I've made enough money to sort of build up a safety net, and I think it's entirely possible that even if Steem is the best crypto out there, that we are going to have some dips along the way, but where I need to be is in a spot where I don't really care about what the average price of Steem is, I just care about the price when I have to cash out some of it.

My current plan is to cash out small amounts every single day and mostly do that from the posting that I do, and that can help make sure that the family budget is supported. Then, when we get to super highs or we make it, like if @haejin is right and we go hit $14 per Steem in the next week or two, then who knows?

Maybe I will cash out a bunch and not have to worry about it for a year.

My plan is to keep building my portfolio.

I'm currently powering down, but again I was telling you before this thing started recording, I want to go build a studio in my house to record and sort of make more videos, and have a bigger presence on @msp-waves, which is the radio station that we built for the Minnow Support Project and for the Steem community in general.

I want to do more of that and my wife says, "So, you're basically going to build an echo chamber?"

My answer is, "Yes, and we are going to spread the values of peace, abundance and liberty, and tell people about the Steem platform."

I have faith that this platform is going to keep growing. The technology is going to keep working in part because fiat currencies are such a shit investment, it is going to continue to grow the crypto sphere.

Jerry Banfield:

We are honored on Steem that you have taken a leap of faith on the blockchain because it seems that people ask, where does the money come from?

How do these cryptocurrencies have value?

In my opinion, the main thing that gives these currencies value, is the people who are contributing to them.

Aggroed:

People are the value, that's a hundred percent. I've stated, for maybe a month on the Steem platform, that the absolute value that comes from this is the people that are on it.

Jerry Banfield:

Exactly, and when we are buying into cryptocurrencies we are really buying into the people that are not only using them, but especially we are buying into the people like @aggroed here and like me who are all-in on Steem.

We are buying into those people of service to that specific blockchain, which brings up the question for me to ask you, how did you end up picking Steem?

I heard what you said about not getting banned, but what experience have you had with other cryptocurrencies and how is that relevant to Steem?

Is Steem the only one you use?

Aggroed:

Steem is mostly the only one that I use. I double in some trading. I literally started the first power down I've ever done three days ago. Every single dollar that I've taken out of Steem has mostly gone to trying other cryptocurrencies and seeing what they are like, and that experience has actually been pretty shitty.

I'm trying Bitcoin or trying to work with Litecoin, it's slow and I don't even know if it worked. I've been trading some EOS and that's been really frustrating. Ethereum isn't even working, the transactions keep getting bounced, the prices that I thought I was buying them at, and I don't know, the entire thing has been sort of less friendly than I would have hoped for, but it's still better than banking, right?

When I take any money out of Coinbase, then it takes like six days to hit my bank account, but Steem is just so freaking fast, it's good, it confirms in three seconds. I keep thinking I want to expand my portfolio in other currencies just because one of them might pop, but most of the time I regret having done it. I really think I ought to just keep all my money in Steem and ride this as far as it will take us because I think Steem is ready to freaking explode.

Jerry Banfield:

I absolutely agree.

I think we are about to go over $10, and maybe even to $20 or $30, especially as voting bots allow us to essentially make huge earnings out of just holding Steem Power. There's that incentive to just hoard Steem Power that we have really kicked off with these voting bots and turn it into immediate liquid rewards. You have touched on the same thing.

Several people have come to me, friends, long-time followers saying, "Jerry, alright. I want to make money. I want to buy these high-risk high-reward currencies," and my look at it is that Steem is low risk. I see exactly who is involved with Steem. I see what's going on with it.

In my opinion, Steem is not a high-risk investment. Buying into something I know nothing about, that's high risk.

Aggroed:

I basically feel like I own roughly 70,000 shares of Amazon when it was first starting. I can go look back and look at this and say, "This thing is going to be a winner."

One of my main purposes right now as a Witness is to go try to do the great steemification of social media. You compare Twitter, which is doing this really creepy looking at what websites you look at before and what websites you look after and either banning you, shadow banning you or temporarily disabling your account based off of that, that's some creepy Orwellian nonsense, and that's the same with YouTube.

You know the reason why @davidpakman is here and why some of these other YouTubers are here?

They are getting demonetized and the best possible excuse, it's because corporate sponsors don't like that specific person or message or something, but in my opinion, it just reeks of centralized censorship and the sort of money powers-that-be don't want to have certain viewpoints shared or expressed.

Facebook has been a crap hole for years.

My basic sense is that Steem is not a risky investment. Steem is an early investment, but the technology works. It's faster than anything else that's out there. It has a good community and I'm going to say something a little heretical in the crypto space.

Most people don't like inflation at all, they think that it's evil and bad, and one of the great reasons why every cryptocurrency is amazing is because there is zero inflation on it, but I happen to think that having a slight amount of inflation, even though I know this is heresy, is actually really good for the coin.

In part, because when like, if Dogecoin goes up by 3 cents or something, or some portion, it's not like I immediately have this intrinsic feeling of, “Holy shit I need to get in on that right now,” because there is no way that I can earn it, right?

But because Steem is going up and there is this inflation that's happening and I have a chance to earn Steem, when the price of Steem goes up, people go ballistic, they have to get on Steem immediately. They want an account and they want to post. If they know about it and they know how much they can make they want to be here.

I don't know if inflation is going on every single platform, but the way that it's been devised here I think works exceptionally well and it kicked off with a high SBD price that a lot of people started saying, "Hey, we got to stop this. One SBD should be equal to $1."

Look at what this has done for us, a high SBD spike just freaking kicked off and we have 50,000 active users now. We are going to blow through the Alexa ranking. I think we were at 1,700 in the United States. We are at 690 now and I'm betting that we are going to be in the top 500 by the end of the first quarter of 2018.

We are just going to keep growing and as you grow, the demand for Steem grows, and that means that the price goes up and as the price goes up the demand for Steem will grow. I think we are going to be caught in this like really violent upswing that is self-feeding.

Jerry Banfield:

That's the same vision I see.

If I look in your wallet, you have 68,000 Steem on here, which is, according to the account value, worth $467,000.

What I love about Steem is that you can see what each account actually has in it. There is full transparency there.

How much Steem of that did you actually buy versus how much did you earn through service in being a Witness and posting?

Aggroed:

I've purchased $5,000 worth of Steem. I have sold a little bit less than $5,000 or something, it's in that range. Although, most of what I've sold wasn't actually Steem, it was SBDs because I have been very tight with every single Steem that I've earned. I have done everything I can to keep.

Like I said, I started my very first power-down. It's for 200 Steem a week and it's not even all that much. It's not to run away from the platform, but it's to have money to invest to build the studio to be more involved in the platform. It's a different way to invest in Steem.

Now, I actually don't know the split anymore. I used to have it roughly in my head, but a good chunk of this is from witnessing. It's probably, at this point, 60% from witnessing and 40% from posting, but I actually don't know that number for sure.

Jerry Banfield:

I'm amazed that you have done so well. You have made essentially about $400,000 of Steem now.

Aggroed:

I've done that for a year and a half.

Jerry Banfield:

Yes, and doing that while you had a full-time job too, that's incredible.

Aggroed:

Steem has been good to me and that's part of why I try to be so good back to Steem. One of the things that I've done is delegate my Steem Power, I think I have right around 5,000 SP on me, but the other 63,000 SP or whatever it is, it's all delegated to Minnow Support Projects.

Some of the Steem that I no longer have, has gone back through scavenger hunts to minnows, a bunch of it is through programs.

I started a program where if new users want Steem right off the bat to get going, I said that I will pay them $20 for a story that I can post on @lovejuice. That's a net money loser for me, but I like this platform, it gives me enough money that I'm trying to do everything that I can think of to give back.

I started a radio station, I have a 7,000 person group, which has built all these projects. We have a resteem contest that has been going on for months now.

There are lots of things that I try to do because I recognize and feel the benefit of having been given so much by this platform, and it is a high priority for me. It's actually one of the main reasons I quit my job, to be able to give back to this community.

It's an amazing remarkable space and it feels like home, and the people in the Minnow Support Project call it home.

This is our digital home.

It's their digital homestead and I want to spend more time in it, I want to do more things to help it grow.

Jerry Banfield:

That's a beautiful way to contribute.

I’ve pulled your Steem, my attention is not that easy to catch because I spend so much time doing my own stuff. You caught my attention out of generosity. I noticed that you were delegating almost all of your Steem Power back out to all of these projects intended to grow Steem.

That's why I wanted to talk with you because generosity is my big thing too, which could be argued as selfishness because I know when I'm giving to others I will get that back. What I give to others, I get back. If I want to feel good I help others feel good.

I'm looking at your delegations and you have funded so many of these Minnow Support Projects with huge amounts of Steem Power and voting power. I would say that's one of the most generous delegations on the entire platform.

Aggroed:

Well, I will keep doing more.

My family is taken care of. I've been telling my kids and I've been telling my family that we have enough, right?

We are fortunate lucky human beings, we have enough, and my lifestyle isn't frankly all that expensive. I drive a truck that's like a 2002 beat-up Dodge Dakota and I don't care. I don't need nice vehicles, I don't need nice stuff. I basically need a dorm room for me to go function.

I know that my family needs more than that, but we are lucky and we have enough, and it's important that the people that are lucky enough and fortunate enough to be in the situation that we are, help other people that are aspiring to get here.

The world economics of this planet is so broken, but Steem actually has a method that I think can work to help fix it, and that to me is a lifelong goal, and so I don't know, I'm happy to go keep delegating, and I'm going to keep delegating more.

I need to keep some to provide for my family, especially now that I'm doing this full time, but a lot of that can come from the posting. It's important to me that all the Witness money that I make goes back to this community, particularly the Minnow Support one, but also the platform as a whole.

Again, to help new users because the whales don't need my help, the dolphins don't need my help. The people that have been successful don't need a ton, but those new people that are just coming here do need my help.

It took me eight months to get anywhere on this platform. Literally, I think it was eight months to get a thousand followers. I just did a post the other day where I reminisced about five posts that I made in a row collectively made seven cents. I recognize what that struggle is.

I came here with nothing, I didn't know a single person on the platform. I had no connections to anybody here and I had literally nothing else. I think a @stellabelle comment or a post that I happened to catch on Facebook was the only thing I knew about this place when I started.

I've never been in on another crypto, so helping other people do that faster than what I was able to do is of central importance to me. I got to give back, that's just how I was raised.

Jerry Banfield:

That message came through.

That's how we have ended up talking today because that's the same message which resonates with me. I have enough.

My family is provided for even though they got us good, even though we have been paying down the debt, we don't have an extravagant lifestyle.

We have a two-bedroom, one-bathroom house with my wife and daughter, and the most extravagant thing I do is get a massage every week.

Aggroed:

Pretty fancy, Jerry.

Jerry Banfield:

Yes, and we do have one nice new car, and then a ten-year-old car for the other one. We have over $200,000 in student loan debts alone between my wife and I, which is crazy.

Aggroed:

It's crazy!

Jerry Banfield:

We have degrees that basically require us practically, slave level service. You are going to work forty-something hours a week. If we didn't have the blockchain and all these things online, we wouldn't get to spend much time together.

My wife and I would have to be at work, and my daughter would have to be at daycare, and that's the message, that's what resonates with me, we got to pay this thing forward. I'm extremely grateful. I stay at home. I work at home. My office is in my bedroom. I want to help as many other people have that same opportunity.

Aggroed:

I want a different world. I mean that's the short of it. I don't like the way that this world works. I don't like that poverty is guaranteed by the financial system that we have. I don't like that wealth is funneled from the poorest members of our society to the riches. I don't like war. I don't like the giant spy net that exists.

I want my privacy and some of this I'm willing to give up. I'm willing to give up privacy on the blockchain and have my transfers be known and things like that, but my private conversations and what I choose to do in my house that harms no one else, I don't think that's their business.

There's no authority between me and my creator. There's none. If I don't voluntarily choose or if I don't knowingly contract with another group, I don't think that any other group should have any say over me.

I resent a lot of how the government assumes power over us and does it from birth. No, I just don't believe in those things. If you want to associate with something like a government, I think you should have the right, but I don't think that those governments should be able to say from the day you are born, "We own you," and that's roughly what they do right now.

Jerry Banfield:

We are on the same page with that. I like some of the critics, you might say, on my posts who try to basically show how my main interest is just to have money and succeed in this system we have, but my main interest is to essentially help collapse the entire system we have, for a system where we each work directly with each other.

There's no need for governments, no need for companies. We literally, perhaps assisted initially by the blockchain, we can pay everyone we need to pay straight through the blockchain.

We can govern however we need straight through the blockchain. We can essentially just trust and be a part of the human community without all these mind creations like governments, companies and laws, that essentially assume we are bad people, to begin with, and then must use force to coerce us to be good.

Aggroed:

Yes, for a while, I was a statist and pretty pro-government, and now I just am not. It took me a while to get un-brainwashed, to go figure out, "Hey, all these things that I grew up learning we're good, aren't actually all that good, and that having a 70% or 60% overhead on every single thing that I do mostly to support wars that I don't like, that's not a good investment either."

From a liberty mind, from a financial mind, this thing is not a helpful organization and so I would love to see the end of the nation-state in my lifetime. That would be important to me, and I don't mean some giant power vacuum where there are warlords everywhere, but I think that people can be peaceful with one another, and especially if there's economic incentive to trade and behave, and be kind to one another. I think that we can have nice things without necessarily sending troops into third-world countries to kill people for the resources.

I've been protesting. I went to graduate school down in Texas and I went down to Crawford, Texas where basically the first Occupy event ever happened, where the mother of the slain soldier just sat out in Crawford and said, "I'm not leaving until you give us an answer why my son had to die."

I've been in marches down there. That was like 10 or 12 years ago. I don't even know how long anymore, but I've been protesting violence in our society for a third of my life now, and I'm going to keep doing it.

I didn't know how important that was initially, but now I want a different life. I want a different life for me, I want a different life for my kids and I want us all to have a different life and different possibilities.

Jerry Banfield:

Exactly, and I've been through that same journey.

I, in fact, used to carry a gun and badge to enforce the laws of the state until I simply couldn't live with doing that anymore.

What has helped me, is to realize and remember that our human brothers are staffing everything. Our human brothers are at the NSA right now listening in real-time to all the communications on earth, assisting with computers. Our brothers and sisters are going into jobs every day collecting taxes that fund the government. Our brothers and sisters are going into companies that suck the wealth out of the poorest and give it back to the richest.

Our brothers and sisters are going around and doing what appears to be good and right, which is going to work and providing for a family, and yet to me, if you want to look at evil, one of the greatest evils is a good person going to work and just doing their job to provide for the family without the context of how they do it.

No one could collect taxes if no one went to work. There would be no taxes if simply the people that worked at the IRS, the good people who go in to work there, who have families and want to provide, and just basically survive, then if those people did not go to work we'd have no wars, if good men and women didn't put on uniforms and think, "I'm going to go help serve my country," if parents didn't raise children, etcetera…

Aggroed:

It's not always their fault.

They got brought up in a society that taught them the other is an enemy:

That person is our enemy.

You have to protect your home and protect your own people.

You have to protect your nation.

Our nation is the greatest.

These people have been brainwashed for as many years as they may have been alive.

I taught at a military school, so my kids that showed up in my college courses were military cadets.

"Yes, sir."

"No, sir."

These were good American men and women that wanted to see a better life and thought that protecting this nation was worth it, and there are parts of it that's extremely admirable, but they get served a little twist of the best way for you to protect this nation, which is to go kill those dark-skinned people overseas and take their resources.

That's the twist where they sort of get suckered into this and maybe they go in for a nice strong patriotic, "Let's protect our homeland region," and in my opinion, that sort of element of patriotism that's especially found in our public schools is itself a weapon of mass destruction.

I don't want to look at them and say that the guy that's doing a mortgage is evil, the bank teller is an evil, the soldier is an evil, but what we have to do is inform these people that the decisions that they are making are based off of false premises, and it's an educational experience to say all the things that you have believed up till now are not actually true.

I'm sorry for the depression that this is about to cause you, but we can work through that and actually you can learn how the world really works, which might actually give you a second depression, but ultimately it is an empowering thing because now you know how we can actually change it.

Protecting the world and making it better, and making a better economic livelihood for our family doesn't start by working for the banks and giving mortgages, and it's not working for the IRS and taxing people, and it's not being a soldier to go kill people in other places.

It's walking away from the system as it stands and trying to find every single way that we can to do something differently in a mindset of peace, abundance and liberty.

Jerry Banfield:

Exactly, and that's where Steem fits into this picture. In my opinion, it seems like Steem helps us connect directly on a human-human level and helps us each to have a chance to really get our voice out there, and to earn enough money that perhaps we can afford to stop going into those jobs and just work on connecting directly with other people.

I've read some amazing stories from people all over the world in Pakistan, Nigeria, Indonesia and Nepal. Countries that the users in those countries say it's almost impossible to reach me in the USA with their point of view because of all this behind the scenes censorship that we are not aware of, and I think we need somewhere too that we really can say whatever we want and not get banned.

You have talked about getting banned from Facebook. I've got banned from almost every website I've been a power user on, except Facebook somehow. I don't know, that's been nice. I still have a YouTube channel thankfully, but I even got my account suspended from LinkedIn. How do you even do that?

I'm grateful that in Steem we finally have a place where if people don't agree with us, we won't get any rewards, but we can still say whatever we want to, even if there's no money behind it, we can still have a voice.

Aggroed:

Yes, and that's not true in other places. Anybody that follows me on Steemit can go see what I post and it just hits their feed, and in other places like Facebook in particular it's not.

I've posted for a while, a series called, "Meme the news" and one of the reasons why I like "Meme the news" is that a meme is one of the best political weapons I've ever seen created. It is an extremely short, easily digestible, cognitive dissonance tossed in your face and it makes people start questioning their own beliefs.

I have zero doubt about it and there's no better confirmation for me than when I used to scroll through my Facebook feed I could go find memes all over the place, and that company has systematically removed them from like constant circulation and I don't think that's like people got less interested in memes.

Memes are amazing and people love them. They are funny and they are quick. I think that Facebook is basically a CIA project to go spy on Americans. They recognize that the social tool that they had given everybody to talk about dish soap and whatever, turned into a political tool by a lot of people, and their approach to countering that was to go censor these things by changing your feed.

I've been on Facebook for five to seven years or something and I watched how my Facebook feed changed to no longer include these things and what used to take me 15 or 30 minutes to find a nice rich vein of memes that I could go post and show, and here's some good libertarian values we should all hold, now it literally takes two to three hours to do the same thing and constantly scrolling through way more content that's garbage, nuts, nonsense and crap I don't care about, but that's what they have infected my feed with.

Memes are these incredible things, but I've also recognized that I'm not the only person that recognized that. The people in charge over at Facebook have seen that and as part of their censorship, they have removed that political attitude to basically, you get to be a Republican, you get to be a Democrat, you get to vote for more government, either way, you are not allowed to think outside of that range.

You can be as angry as you want at the other group within that range, you can really support big government or you could support a big military, or support more spending, but you want to start talking about individual civil liberties, that's not really what Facebook is going to tolerate you talking about.

Jerry Banfield:

The problem is that a lot of us hold out this hope that if we do something amazing on Facebook, then we can actually get it out there, but the truth is that the discreet censorship on Google, Facebook and YouTube is incredible.

My friend posted an article. I think it had the "n" word in it, like "n" word "please" in it where he just shared his opinion on a recent news story. That went viral where hundreds of thousands of people have seen it.

It was going out all over on Facebook, and then they banned the post. I think this happened just based on user reports or maybe something else happened with it, but you couldn't send traffic to his whole website anymore.

It almost instantly disappeared from Facebook within the first 24 hours on it, and that's something the average user does not realize how much censorship goes on.

Aggroed:

There is an even worse case with "Knowledge of Today," which was a great Facebook page. It was really thoughtful with lots of existential things, meditation things, some conspiracy things, libertarian memes, some different opinions and they literally nuked the 1 million like, subscribed or whatever page.

They just said, "This is no longer in the Terms of Service."

Dead.

There were a million people and this was like four years ago and I've watched other groups like Liberty Memes.

Liberty Memes is hilarious. They are charming, funny and sassy. They have some snark that's built in them. They are great memes and I know that people like viewing them, but they have been stuck at like 300,000 or 400,000 Facebook followers for months, if not years.

It's not because people aren't willing to look at that content, upvote it and enjoy it, it's because those algorithms are designed to silence people that don't fall into the trap of, you are either a democrat or republican, either of which supports more big stupid government.

This path that I've been on has been politically rewarding to be able to go share a healthier set of views, to be able to do so without censorship, get paid for it, and then to have my voice be larger than it's ever been before.

I've never had an organization. I haven't had a 10,000-person follower group. I haven't had a group like I found at Discord which houses the Minnow Support Project that has seven thousand members.

My second Steem account, which is @minnowsupport has another 7,000 - 8,000 followers now. I can reach something like 18,000 people with two clicks and that's remarkable.

Every time that I got like 2,000 on Facebook, they would kill my account. Things have gotten better from that realm. The one thing on Steem that I continue to hate is the distribution that's on it, but watching the price spike and watching some of the initial developers start cashing out, that makes some people angry, but I'm like cheering.

I don't want him to cash out so much that they don't have any stake and they feel like they can walk entirely because we still need some work on the site. I'm hoping the high prices will actually change the shift of the distribution because I don't like 93% of the Steem being in the hands of less than a hundred accounts.

That's no bueno!

Jerry Banfield:

I agree!

Final words

Thank you very much for reading the first part of this interview.

Would you please wait for my next post to read the second part because I believe it is easier to read shorter posts?

I love you.

You're awesome.

I hope you have a beautiful day today.

Thank you for reading this blog post, which was originally filmed as the video below.

If you found this post helpful on Steem, would you please upvote it and follow me because you will then be able to see more posts like this in your home feed?

Love,

Jerry Banfield with edits by @gmichelbkk on the transcript from @deniskj

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