Embracing the Tribes

When I first came to STEEM, I struggled for a long time with Steemit Inc not focusing on all of the changes that seemed so obvious to improve the user experience of the site. When we started seeing different front ends pop up, I felt like it was a move in the right direction, but eventually the distribution problems with the STEEM token started weighing pretty heavily on my mind. I argued, ranted, and reee'd a bit, but at some point I finally got the vision of what SMTs could be and I've been waiting for them to get here like most others for what feels like an eternity.

I had the opportunity to get involved with Steem Engine pretty early and learning about Nitrous was cool. I was a bit skeptical at first about whether or not it would actually turn out as well as it has and if the community would even embrace these new tokens. After spending well over a month helping design the economics and governance of PALnet, I started to really see how much more versatile Nitrous could be than I had originally envisioned for SMTs. Today I'm now a part of helping build several communities and Nitrous instances and this is the most bullish I've felt about STEEM in a long time.

I just joined @neoxian's server and decided to check out Neoxian City and I think it's going really well. We have the power for communities to launch their own currencies and governance now and we are essentially decentralizing the blockchain even further. We have users that overlap into multiple communities organically and of course there are the random opportunistic token farmers that are just using as many tags as possible, but I think that eventually what's going to happen is we will see so many different niches and communities to choose from that users will have to pick ones that are really on topic for their posts or that they actively participate in to be successful.

Something I learned over the last few years is that I need to focus less on controlling things and more on allowing them to manifest organically. Maybe communities and SMTs didn't get here the way I thought they should or look like what I expected, but I think they're here either way. Why worry about something that doesn't exist when we already have the ability to accomplish the same goals? Maybe it's not perfect and it doesn't have the Steemit Inc seal of approval, but clearly it doesn't need that.

As usual, I have things that I still want to see come out of Steem Engine and I know its still in the building phase, so I can't complain as it's better to have something that we can work to improve instead of an idea that never came to be. Eventually we need to see federated nodes that are earning ENG for decentralizing and maintaining the network, but I think it'll come. For now, I'm just glad we have the opportunity to get to work doing what matters the most to me, which is building the communities and fixing the user experience. I wonder what it will all look like in another two or three years. Until then, I guess we just have to keep on building. Much love.