I recently got done binge-watching the original Halloween series. And after finally getting to Halloween 6, I had two choices in terms of spending my free time. I could either:

• Figure out ways to encourage and get people on this platform to buy more STEEM more regularly;
• Or make sense of the goddamn clusterfuck that is Halloween 6 with two different cuts, both an equally jumbled mess.

Figuring out ways to get people to buy more STEEM seemed like the lighter task, by far.

I mean, seriously. Michael Myers was the father of Jamie's baby, what the fuck?

So anyway.

It's a bear market, right? Not just in STEEM land, but in the entire crypto sphere. It may be a long winter yet. Personally, I think the idea of a crypto downtrend is more than a little overblown, considering I have this rather vivid memory from rather recent times when BTC was worth no more than $500 a piece and we're still at $6,500, but I digress.

But STEEM is its own coin, so BTC shouldn't be the deciding factor of STEEM price, in my opinion.

The crypto slump has put us in this sort of holding pattern where we're kinda sitting around with our thumbs up our asses, waiting for a Korean whale or two to make a move.

That's what it seems like to me.

I've been thinking about this a lot the past few days, so I wanted to open a community discussion about the one thing that connects us all in this very dysfunctional community where no one gets along:

Buying STEEM

Why and why not?

I recently decided to start buying STEEM and building up my account.

I held up on the decision to buy STEEM due to waiting for it to go longer, but the more I thought about it, the more I felt it's silly to look at solely the current prices.

I figured that there's a lot about Steemit that I currently don't like. It's gone in a direction that isn't to my liking. However, some, if not most, of the things I understand. I don't need people explaining to me why A is A or B is B.

I probably know already.

The important thing here is that these things led to me deciding to build up my account again because even though there have been 20 hardforks, and the community and culture within the site have changed along the way, the one long-standing fact that still stands is the one that if you want influence, you need STEEM Power.

So, instead of whining, I figured it's better to start putting my money where my mouth is and gain that influence back.

In other words, I started to look at the amount of STEEM owned, as opposed to what it's worth in dollar amounts.

This lead to a wide arrange array of thoughts, and I'll try to convey most of them here as best I can.

I'll namedrop @whatsup as someone who I've probably had the most Steemit related discussions over the past few months. Highly enjoyable, too.

She and I look at Steemit from different angles, but both understand where the other is coming from. To @whatsup, this is a business endeavor. First and foremost.

I'm more old school where I still like and support the idea of content creators getting rewarded for their work just because.

However.

Both of us agree on the reality that content, in and of itself, holds little to no value. You can and I can dislike this as much we want, but that's like me disliking the fact that hot weather exists. Or Adam Sandler's movies. Not a whole lot I can do about it. It's a reality.

It's not a content funded reward pool, it's an investor funded reward pool.

In order for there to be a reward pool for us to enjoy, people to need to put their money into STEEM. In other words, buy it.

Buying and holding STEEM should be as attractive as possible. Now, there are some pitfalls, some avoidable, some maybe less so. But I have a positive vibe as a result of the Netcoins contest, so I'm interested in a community effort to try and solve this problem.

One major pitfall - pointed out by many - is that the amount of fiat value tied in STEEM Power that actually makes a difference is so huge, it's simply inaccessible to many.

And while this is true, I think it's a little short-sighted to think that if you can't buy all the STEEM you need right now, with one purchase, it's not worth it to buy it at all.

Let's say we have a person capable of purchasing 100 STEEM a month, for instance. That's 1,200 STEEM a year. And let's say we have another person like that. And a third one. And a fourth one. And a dozen. And a hundred And so on.

And let's say we now have a respectable amount of people capable of shilling out that 80 bucks to buy STEEM on a monthly basis. And this keeps going.

Then let's say that within these people there's a community who all like, say, fiction. They enjoy reading it, they want to reward it.

These people can gang up and put their collective SP to work together in order to reward fiction authors.

What I'm talking about is a formation of a middle class to where there currently isn't one.

Content creators trying to find their demographic within a large middle class - as opposed to within 12 or so whales - is more close to how a real economy works anyway.

Official communities aren't there yet, but there's nothing in the way of people forming ones. And there already are communities and cliques on Steemit anyway.

It's a pet peeve of mine that people here really seem to always be waiting for someone else to do everything. When, in fact, there's nothing in the way of the community itself organizing and accomplishing things. Like, hey, the Netcoins thing. That wasn't @ned, that wasn't Steemit, INC. It wasn't the whales. It was the community. Organizing. Getting shit done.

Gg, guys.

And speaking of "Gg". I spend a lot of time on Twitch. For those unaware, Twitch is a streaming platform where people stream their gaming runs. I mostly follow speedrunning, namely Mega Man speedrunning.

One day recently, I stopped to really spend time thinking why is it that I've spent more money donating to streamers than I've spent buying STEEM. Donated money is gone, wheras STEEM can be used to make more money.

For whatever reason, it's just been the more appealing option for me.

Just today, I donated money to a fund that is to be used to pay for the expenses of three people from different countries to travel to a speedrunning event in the US this January, to take part in a Mega Man race.

As soon as it was announced by a runner I respect that he was going to use his donation money to help these people out in their travel expense, I felt obligated to take part.

And the conclusion I came to was that it's the sense of community. The Mega Man X speedrunning community in general is extremely nice. At least it's been nothing but nice to me ever since I humbly joined it back in the day. People help each other out, want others to do well, succeed, and improve.

Even the world record holders find the time to help complete newbies out.

As I feel like I'm part of something nice, I'm inclined to do my part.

And now that you're all done yelling "But that's communism!" I'll continue.

Yes, self-interest is big on Steemit. Dare suggest altruistic strategies for any given situation, and you get laughed out of the room because altruism is dumb and you're a socialist.

But what if I told you that altruism can be a capitalistic strategy?

I have, in the past, powered down STEEM. And I don't really feel any sort of guilt about it. I also hold SCORUM coins, and I feel the urge to hold onto them and not power down. Much moreso even than my STEEM.

Why?

Again, a sense of community. It was an extremely warm welcome when I joined and made my first SCORUM posts. People read, engaged, rewarded. Just made me feel welcome. Much like the aforementioned speedrunning community, I was made to feel like I was a part of something.

In fact, my initial experiences on Steemit were quite similar back in the day of summer of 69. And by 69 I mean 2016.

The result? I regularly bought STEEM and powered it up.

Unfortunately, however, it started to change little by little. And as the community grew more and more antisocial, I started to care less and less.

Why shouldn't I just take what I can, right? This platform doesn't give two shits about me anyway.

Yeah, there's a tone of self-pity there, I know. But that was the feeling at the time. And I didn't think about things from the influence point of view yet at that time.

But while supporting users to make them feel like they're part of a community is something I would support, there's something else, and it has a lot to do with the price, coincidentally enough.

Something that is puzzling me is a number of users who I won't mention who have consistent, high-level support on the platform, day in day out, month in month out - and at this point already - year in and year out, who are also in constant dumping mode.

Large stakeholders use their voting power to allocate STEEM daily to people who regularly dump the STEEM on the markets - lowering the price.

That's actually quite bizarre.

Take that out of the Steemit context for a while and think of it as a different form of business. So, there's a business strategy that demonstrably and consistently, without fail, lowers the value of the business. Doing this has little to no benefits, while the negative effects are the exact opposite of what you're trying to do: maintaining value and increasing it.

Doesn't seem like a smart thing to do.

I know that the reason this happens is vote trading. The long-term effects on the price can be ignored because the vote trading allows for a lot of short-term profits.

But there are still some manual curators who do non-vote trading curation, so this me appealing to them, specifically:

Reward buyers and holders!

Holding and especially buying STEEM can easily be made more attractive if the culture of the community is changed to such that buying and holding puts you in good standing with the community.

Those who buy and hold increase the value of your stake, the dumpers decrease it. Why would you vote for a dumper? Why would you ever?

I'm disappointed that the 100% power up symbol next to the post never really made a huge difference in curation. Those posts should be treated as the golden posts on the platform, receiving preferential treatment.

The posters are making a short-term sacrifice in favour of the long-term game of the platform. It's a sin that this goes unnoticed so much. I know for a fact that it's why I've personally never really bothered.

Again, it's the strong sense of the community not giving two shits, which, in turn, makes me to not give two shits.

I also feel it'd be kinda cool to be able to earn "badges" that would show up next to a post's headline, indicating something like, I dunno, amount of SP held and stuff. It could work in tiers where a blue STEEM symbol would be 5,000 SP, then 10,000 SP would have a different color, and so on and so forth.

How about certain levels of SP held giving the user access to exclusive emojis?

Stuff like that.

You'd surprised by how much people are attracted to that sort of gamification. It works in environments much less serious than Steemit.

Things like this can be seen on Twitch, actually.

I'd see small, fun things like these being a good add in incentivizing STEEM purchasing for the smaller guys, too. In addition to the influence, etc.

TL;DR

• The reward pool is funded by people who buy and hold STEEM

• STEEM can be treated as its own thing, as opposed to a subservient of Bitcoin

• A good community builds loyalty

• A large enough group of people building their account allows for the creation of a true middle class

• We need incentives to buy and hold STEEM instead of dumping

Steemit is not the endgame for STEEM. STEEM is. I've seen it thrown around a lot that "Steemit is not proof of content, it's just proof of brain" and whatnot, basically disregarding Steemit as a publishing platform entirely at this point because it's all about the apps now.

But Steemit still has an important job to fulfill as the onboarding app. It was designed to onboard people to STEEM.

And here's my big thought of the day:

What if Steemit was used to onboard buying STEEM?"

Not just to earn STEEM, but to buy it. I think there's a big missed opportunity here.

My question to you!

This is an open forum now.

I'd like to get as many comments as possible, preferably from people with all different sizes of stake.

What are the things, right now, standing between you buying more STEEM? This isn't to finger point or any of that nonsense. It's for research and discussion.

What things should change for you to be more willing to purchase more STEEM and power up your account? Be it 50 STEEM, 100 STEEM, 1,000 STEEM, whatever.

If you read this post, it'd be cool for you to answer that question. And just like the Netcoins contest, commenting here is not stake-based; all comments are now equal, as it's the idea to hear from accounts of all sizes.

This post will be botted for added visibility.

All resteems are also appreciated.

It seems like I don't have a cool picture and thumbnail to go along with the post, so, uhh. Here's Yobby, I guess: