I haven’t been the most regular poster on Steemit over the years. I’ve had months off at a time and always been a little sad when I’ve returned, only to see the value of my little bits of work slowly tanking. That’s how it goes, I suppose.
I first got onto Steemit to take advantage of the security of the blockchain. I run my own blog off of Steemit but wanted the security blockchain technology offers. I’d done a lot of research and here was a system where the time of publication was securely recorded forever. I wanted to publish my blog work on Steemit first in order to benefit from that. The payouts were initially a bonus.
So, by reputation 52ish, my account was worth 5K. ‘Cash out’! My son told me but no, I wanted to see where it would go. Look where it went.
So I took some time off, came back, took more time off and came back again. I’m ready to publish a couple of books and wanted all the information locked onto a blockchain.
Then the world started to fall apart, so my goal is now to get all the info that I have out there, herbs, food growing, permaculture, energy efficiency. All out there so folks can access it and benefit.
I’ll still publish, but this is the main goal now. In my view, the runaway buses of climate and economic chaos, driven by madmen, are not things of the future. They are now. We are in the accident, not staring at the headlights, hoping they will swerve away. Some of us are being hit hard as I write this.
Some have made the leap out as far out of the way as our means enabled us, nobody will avoid the impact completely even though those buses are hitting the brakes. There’s a lot of momentum to control and not much political will to do it with.Some of us are still trying to pull others out of the way with us.
Tonight, I’ve been going over my account on SteemWorld, looking at the folks I have been following for a while. I noticed some trends in the midst of it all. Anyone that I was following with a reputation of 40 or below was long gone, no posts for at least two years. So I unfollowed them. Then I went through the remaining accounts, one at a time. So many names from the past, gone now, not likely to come back after two years. I wouldn’t. Some of them hadn’t even cashed out, just run out of steam I guess (pun intended). I got rid of all of the bots and the people taking SBD or SP for votes, and all the dubious looking folks who have been blacklisted multiple times. Also those who just wrote praising Steemit and nothing else.
So, over the course of the evening, I went from following 492 people down to 264. That’s 228 people no longer with us or not deserving to be. Some of them were quite high flyers in the day. I am genuinely sad that some of them are no longer with us.
One thing I noted was that nearly everyone who I could remember flooding the platform with those inane ‘gratitude; and ‘why I am on Steemit’ cheerleading posts are long gone. I’ll never have to wince at another ‘Steem to the moon!’ post. You get that sort of fluff anywhere I suppose where folks try to blow their own horns. I remember being so frustrated when those crap posts garnered hege rewards for their authors and those authors who just reposted other people’s work with a catchier title and maybe some better tags while some of us wrote good, heartfelt, useful material that we thought could benefit others.
Many of those I’m still following I recognise as being currently active and even communicate with quite often. Most of those are in the homesteading or prepping communities that I'm part of. There are others who are in a grey zone. SteemWorld only lists their last efforts as ‘last year’ and that was only a short while ago.
I’m wondering how Hive will take us?
