Journal #4 | The future of Steem is in our hands!

9 February, 2018

On Commenting

They say comment your way to success on Steemit so I spent the past two weeks on commenting on others posts and my post count rose from around 800 to 1300. I followed this strategy of posting an article and spending the whole day browsing and commenting on content that I find interesting. Feeling a little burnt out doing this. I was doing 30-40 comments everyday and plan to reduce it. 

Was it worth it?

You will have conversation on comments with a few people. They will check your blog sometimes but most of the times they won't. Some will not even bother replying to your comments but most do. So it feels good. But maybe I'm doing something wrong here. I'm not really able to draw audience to my blog. Perhaps because it is subjective? Maybe. 

Discord Groups

Joined a few discord groups last week and made a few friends. Nothing much to report from here as I've just kept my foot into water and haven't really learnt much yet. So wait for my next journal. 

Steem Power

I just realized that I started this journal with the intention of keeping track of my Steem Power and to motivate myself and others to reach 100,000 SP but I haven't been keeping track of my Steem Power at all. Anyways, I'll start from today. As I'm writing this blog, I'm at 993.030 SP and will hit 1k soon. 

Contest: 

I started a contest two days ago and finally am able to check this off my Steemit Goals list. What's been bothering me though is there's not many participants. I boosted the post as well so that the prize amount is decent and it even got 174 views but not many entries. Maybe, it's too early to judge and they'll start pouring in soon. Anyways, let's get to the important part. 

Where will Steemit be in 5-10 years?

I've been on Steemit for around 7 months now and from what I've noticed, it's not even close to perfect. Can't blame the system though because it's pretty new and we all are figuring out the ways in which we can bring the best out of it. What's really bothering though is the reward system that's being abused. 

The future of Steem depends on the number of people that join Steemit and stay here posting and curating content. We currently have thousands of people signing up for Steemit everyday. They post awesome quality content for a few weeks only to get 0.06 $ on each of their posts. This leaves them demotivated and compels them to leave. 

Imagine what opinions they will give about Steemit to their friends. "It is a scam man, only a few rich people keep getting all the money, content has no value there, shit post earns, don't join it, it's hopeless." What will happen when this happens on a large scale? 

Huge number of sign ups yet only few active members

There are currently 60,000 active users on Steemit compared to 700,000 signed up users. Why do you think the remaining 640,000 stopped posting? Do you think they would've stopped posting if they earned atleast 5$-10$ on a post? No. They would've stayed and would've even brought their friends on Steemit. 

Instead what we see on Steemit is a select few keep getting all the votes from the whales. They get rewards more than their post actually deserves. $300 on a post with a single picture and a line which takes 2 minutes to create where as some people who put 3-4 hours of efforts into their post get shit. If this keeps happening, Steem is bound to fail. 

I've noticed the whales on this platform are just LAZY and keep their votes on autovoter on the people who they know will get them maximum curation rewards. 

If they don't wanna vote manually, they can delegate their SP to some one who has time and is active on the platform. If they want the curation rewards, they can hire an assistant to do the curating work for them by giving their posting keys. This is the least they can do to help the platform grow. 

Keeping on autovoter and going about your business is not gonna help Steem grow. 

There are so many who do this but on the positive, there are many good whales who are giving their best to the community by actively interacting and helping minnows grow. The Minnowsupport project is one such example. 

Reward Pool Suckers

Then there are other categories of people harming the community by sucking the reward pool. I'm sure most of you are aware of these guys and what's happening. They take the max out of reward pool everyday which leaves the rest of us with less. Then they sell it on exchanges. This weakens the value of Steem. 

Flag wars

Then there are flag wars. These are similar to real wars. Whoever gets stuck in these wars ends up getting injured, in our example, getting flagged and losing out on all the hard earned rewards. That's why most of the smaller guys prefer to stay out of this. 

What we need to understand is, if we want to thrive, we need to work as a team. We need to work to help each other up. That's the only way we as a community can thrive together. Selfish guys may profit today by cheating the system but what's all the steem they collect worth if the value becomes 0? Of course they will sell it off before that happens but it will end up doing damage to all of us SP holders.  

Steemit's Cycle of Trust

I was reading an article titled Steemit's Cycle Of Trust by @getonthetrain and that's when all this hit me. The future of Steem is in our hands. You should give his article a read and enlighten yourselves guys! 

I don't know how many of you will actually read this till here but if you are reading it, you're one of the guys who care. Let's stop the wars, stop sucking the reward pool, reward authors for their content and not for curation rewards, spread the wealth equally, not be greedy, welcome the new comers and post good quality content. Let's join hands to make Steem the most valuable crypto.

What do you think about the future of Steem and how can we improve it still? Let me know in the comments below. 

Thanks a ton for reading and have a good day.

Cheers!

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