Last night, I was in a bad mood and was feeling terrible. I'm too busted up to do what I like, at the pace I like, which is invent and build things that have the potential to free people from slavery systems, but after speaking with a friend about this site and reading the whitepaper, I really thought that I'd found the community of forward thinking people that I've been searching for for so many years.
I thought that the idea here was to upvote ideas based upon their creativity, positive impact, and entertainment value so I spent quite a few hours fighting site/computer/connection issues, posting content that if taken seriously and acted upon could lead to true freedom for anyone brave enough to do so. I posted ideas and comments that cover transportation, energy production, food, shelter, community, police brutality, fair tax structures, rewilding, cannabis, and so on. I think I posted about 20 blog posts and a bunch more comments and was very excited to see the votes come in and see discussions start. I didn't and don't care whether the votes were from whales or plankton poop(do plankton even poop?). I am just interested in building community and interacting. I've seen next to no interaction on most of it.
Disappointed skeptical face.
I figured that if posts about makeup tutorials and truck driving were on the trending page, that no one with interesting content had found Steemit yet. I searched tags and found a few very interesting posts but they were buried deep and virtually unnoticed. There were in depth, well thought out posts explaining topics clearly that didn't have a vote at all but posts on the same topics with bad grammar, logic, and rhetoric were trending.
Then I read a few posts about the trend of the whales to upvote posts that they thought would appeal to the masses, just hoping to grow steem while devolving the steemit community. I felt like someone had bought a keg, a bunch of meth, and invited the football team and cheerleaders to the awesome hackerspace that I'd just found. It made me sick because I realized that, due to the flawed concepts of capitalism and democracy, this site was more like a catalyst for a ponzi scheme than a social platform of free thinkers with rewards based upon merit.
I am a little jaded regarding meritocracy/democracy already because I've made millions for companies and because I'm not a cut-throat psychopath, I was never rewarded. Throughout my life, I've also proposed awesome ideas that I knew for a fact would work but have been frequently voted down simply because the average voter lacked the intellect to comprehend them. My experience so far at Steemit has mimicked those experiences to a point that I'm sure that any system where meritocracy and democracy are combined will become an unbalanced and easily manipulated system.
A view from outside of it all.
So here's my offer to the Steemit community. If you'd like to see more posts about DIY greentech that could change the word for the better, music with a message, posts showing you how to thrive offgrid, either now, or post collapse, my books, or blog posts about the life of someone that's been boycotting civilization for eight years and living as a green tech enabled, freegan, neomad, go look at the stuff I've already posted and comment or vote! Again, I don't care about money. I rarely even use it. I care about interaction and community!
When I have at least one post, hopefully one of the posts that I've poured years of my life into, that reaches 100 comments or votes, I'll start blogging again. Until then, I'll probably come here occasionally to watch what seems like might be a train wreck and keep commenting/voting in hopes of preventing it. Any steem power I earn in doing so will stay vested because I just can't shake off the tiny shred of hope I have left for this place.
Basically, if you want me around, show me some love!
