It seems as though a post is expected when milestones occur, so here's one. Thank you for the 50+ repscore milestone, its greatly appreciated!
I'm sure most of us have accounts on other social networks. As a software engineer, I've always wondered about the value of my contributions on these sites. How much money are they making off my posts, comments, liking/+1ing/upvoting, etc... We are all lured in with the ability to so easily share our thoughts as well as our life experiences but someone is generating revenue off of that. Those things have value.
Steemit isn't the first social network to try to reward users for their contributions, but for the life of me I can't remember the one or two other sites that tried - and its definitely the first that I know of that offers a chance to invest some or all of the value back into the economic system (much less use a cryptocurrency). I read a few posts here and there that keep coming up questioning whether or not Steemit is a scam, or a pyramid scheme... I honestly don't know. Whether it is or not I'm willing to take that risk for now and time will tell. This community has a great bunch of people - some I may stay a little farther way from or bite my tongue and move on, but overall it has been a very pleasurable experience thus far.
It has been a whirlwind couple of days trying to figure this thing out - and I still haven't got it figured out, but I like what I am seeing and I hope that my thoughts continue to have some type of positive impact on our community.
To date, I have generally focused on an optimistic future; in addition to those I have ideas on topics that may not be as uplifting and probably very controversial. We'll probably get some heated arguments along the way if enough people view them, but at the end of the day hopefully conflict handled properly will lead to understanding, understanding will lead to tolerance and tolerance will lead us to dealing with differences better than how we deal with them today.
Just be prepared, you might like me now, but you may not like some of my posts in the future ;) Fair warning. But no two people agree on everything, so we will all learn and grow together.
For those who were motivated to upvote my thoughts because they felt they were worthwhile to the community, I say thank you for getting me "over the hill". It may not seem like much, but being acknowledged by peers is a seriously underestimated thing that could do wonders for the individual on the receiving end. We just never really know how impactful it can be.
Take care everyone and see you out there steeming.
