Steemit Core Value - Kindness is as Important as Greatness

I wish to start by saying that this is not an official stand of Steemit Inc., and is merely based on my humble opinion from my short experience in the platform. In this series, I will try to present a value system I observed from steemians who do really well here.

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We always tell our kids that being kind is as Important as being great. We hope that we are setting good examples to them in our daily dealings with humanity. I wouldn't dare say that we are perfect, we are far from it. We also do not have some unrealistic expectations that our kids will be all good. We believe after all that humans are not born naturally good, and because of that belief we try our hardest to try and keep a conscious effort do good.

We always try to make acts of kindness a big deal around the kids. We do this in such a way that helping an elderly, or being nice to another kid will be celebrated no less than being a top student in a grading period. Winning a declamation contest for example is just as big as a deal being courteous in day to day conversations.

@dandalion and I did not always belong to the same school of thought when it comes to this subject. Years ago, we were at each extreme of the spectrum. @dandalion believed that generally speaking, humanity is bad, and that people who believe otherwise becomes vulnerable to abuse. I on the otherhand believed that people are good unless you give them a reason to do you bad. Through our journey in life as employees, members of the community, later on spouses, and then parents to our kids; our beliefs evolved to this: People are not born naturally good, but everyone have a real potential to do good. This video we saw last year reaffirms that belief. Not that we needed confirmation, it's just beautiful to see your own belief in another person's perspective.

Now how do I say that this is a Steemit core value?

The System is Built on Give and Take

I quote this from the whitepaper "Steem is designed around a relatively simple concept: everyone’s meaningful contribution to the community should be recognized for the value it adds . When people are recognized for their meaningful contributions, they continue contributing and the community grows. Any imbalance in the give and take within a community is unsustainable. Eventually the givers grow tired of supporting the takers and disengage from the community."

The very system is built in such a way that people will give and take, and an imbalance between giving and taking results to failure in the long run. This is why it is no surprise that we have project like @minnowsupport from Peace, Abundance, Liberty, or our very own @bayanihan curration project from Steemit Philippines through efforts from the Filipino curators and the love from @donkeypong, @acidyo, @surpassinggoogle, @jrcornel, and @hanshotfirst. It is in everybody's interest to make deserving minnows who really contribute to the system stay.

Abusive Behavior do not Get Rewarded and Eventually Lead to Failure

I quoted this from the whitepaper "Eliminating “abuse” is not possible and shouldn’t be the goal. Even those who are attempting to “abuse” the system are still doing work. Any compensation they get for their successful attempts at abuse or collusion is at least as valuable for the purpose of distributing the currency as the make-work system employed by traditional Bitcoin mining or the collusive mining done via mining pools. All that is necessary is to ensure that abuse isn’t so rampant that it undermines the incentive to do real work in support of the community and its currency."

While Steemit do not take a very stern stance against abuse for the reason tackled in the white paper, the community understands that such behavior leads to failure soon enough. Even the whales with huge Steem Power restrain themselves from abuse, minnows just don't get a shot at success with abusive behavior.

Steemit Makes it Rather Easy to be Kind

Here you've got nothing to loose for being kind, in fact you have everything to gain from it. Have you ever seen a whale who is unkind or abusive? Do you think they got to that level from being abusive then transformed themselves when they became whales? I think they all understood that kindness is the way to go. If you haven't figured that out, I wish you do soon enough.

Kindness is shown here by appreciating ones work with your upvotes, engagement through your meaningful comments, occasional support for someone in dire need, encouragement through sharing a well written content, and participating on enjoyable contests or challenges.

What have you got to loose from being kind?

The inability to upvote your own comments because of depleted voting power that will recharge the next day
The time you'd rather spend gaming the system or figuring out how to

What have you got to gain from being kind

The support from the community who will soon enough notice your good behavior
Leading to better reputation score and bigger rewards from upvotes
Friends
Helping hands when you really need them
Engagement from your post or your comments

Thank you for reading this post. I hope I am making sense to you and did not waste your time. Please let me know your thoughts by commenting. If you like what I wrote and you feel it is worthy of your upvotes, I would really appreciate it if you do actually upvote it. It will encourage me to continue writing and sharing my thoughts to the community. As mentioned above this is going to be a series that'll talk about observed value system in Steemit. In the next post in this same series I will write about