Seeing a lot of posts this morning about how minnows are getting the shaft on Steemit. Being minnow-like myself, I feel a lot of the same things everyone does. @aggroed had a damning chart showing that the top 1% of Steemians control 93% of the SP, and admittedly, man, that was a little hard to take. Steemit has brought aboard tens of thousands of new users just in the last couple weeks, and to have that influx not result in a major boost to the payout pool--to have the pool shrink, as a matter of fact--is frustrating.
All that's above my tiny pay grade. I don't pretend to know how those things are calculated. I do completely understand the mounting grumble from the hundreds of thousands of minnows in the school. I'm one of them.
But, people. When you start talking about Steemit like a pyramid scheme, or some kind of massive scam, that's when I gotta push back. The truth is that Steemit owes you nothing. Not. A. Blessed. Thing. And when we start thinking it does, that's when we should take a deep breath and quaff the red pill.
Whales vacuum up most of the rewards on Steemit. Yes. Who disputes it? But who's giving them those rewards? We are.
You are getting paid to post words and pictures on a website.
Let that sink in for a moment, good people, my dear friends.
You are getting paid to post words and pictures on a website.
And here's another salient fact: we are getting paid by other people, who are using money they don't lose when they pay us. Heck, they get paid to give us money.
Yes, Steemians, this paradisical wonderland actually pays us to give money to other people.
Is our complaint that we're not getting as much of this more or less free money as others are? Boo-bleeping-hoo. Here's the solution: surf some porn instead. How much you getting paid for that?
If the rewards are poor, and the activity isn't worth it, then make the sensible calculation and go do something else. Steemit isn't here to make you rich. The site--the community--has zero obligation to us. If our tender sensibilities are offended because @curie and @abit and @jamesc and fifty others are making more of the rewards here, then the solution is to go ride a bike. That won't pay us anything from one of the ten most valuable cryptocurrencies on earth, but we'll be healthier, and that's no bad thing.
Everyone is free to make their own calculations about that. We decide--it's hard, this adulting thing--whether this activity is worth our time. As for me, I'm writing anyway, and until Steemit only a very small amount of my writing paid me anything at all. Now, a lot of it does. So it's $5 a day. So what? I was getting that someplace else? Who, exactly, owes me something just because I learned to type? To shoot a photo? To minimally HTM-the bleep-L?
Nobody, that's who.
Personally, I feel bloody thrilled that these words are worth anything at all, and that there's someplace where some of that value can end up in my pocket. Maybe we should all try to remember that. We'll sure as hell feel a lot better.
~Cristof
