2017 is drawing to a close. It's certainly been an eventful one. We have a Twitter troll in the Whitehouse and a young dictator has been showing off his dangerous toys. It's not like there's not enough suffering in the world. When we have the tools to bring us together people are killing others just for being different to them. We can get excited about Steemit and cryptocurrencies, but you have to have some perspective about how bad life is for a large portion of the world population. I do think tools like Steemit have the potential to empower some of the poorer people if they at least have access to the necessary technology, but some need the essentials before that.
I like to think there is hope for the world. I believe that most people are good and that it's a tiny minority who want to stir up trouble. We can't let them win.
Now I've got that off my chest, let's do a quick run-down on what this year has been like for Steemit.
The Steemit site has rocketed up the Alexa chart. It's currently the 240th most visited site in South Korea and doing really well in many other countries. The trend is still upwards.
The Steem price has gone up over 15 times in a year. People worry about it dropping a few cents, but it's really doing okay. It's been higher than this a few times, but it could be worth a lot more next year. Of course Bitcoin has also gone up by a similar amount, but I expect it to lose dominance.
I'm not sure how many accounts Steemit had a year ago. It was probably around 100k. Now it's well over 500k. In a year I expect it to be many millions. Hardfork 20 will bring changes that will allow this to happen. That's going to make it a very different place. I hope we get the tools to make it manageable.
My own journey has been fairly dramatic. The Steem Whales chart has not been updating lately, but you can see I've really powered up. I've gone from 300 followers to nearly 3000. I appreciate that many are bots or inactive, but I get far more responses here than on any other social site I've used.
We can't ignore that there are disruptive elements here. Some of the whales seem intent on causing trouble or just on enriching themselves. That's the price of the freedom we want here. I hope they don't choose to attack me. I've been trying to avoid confrontation, but I have been supporting some of those who deal with the abuse. In some cases we would need the biggest whales to counter the attacks as most of us fear retaliation. I will continue to flag some of the lesser spammers to discourage their behaviour. I want Steemit to be a friendly and productive place. I'm supporting some people who are doing good work here. It's up to us all to try and make this the place we want it to be.
Steem on into 2018!
I'm Steve, the geeky guitarist.
I'll buy guitar picks for Steem Dollars
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