This started as a reply to "Do Your Part To "STAHP" the Steemit Circle Jerk!" but got so long I figured it merited a stand-alone post.

I'm new here, and still trying to figure all this out - what it is, what I want it to be for me, etc. - and then all that drama surrounding celebrity SD payouts just served to open my eyes about what's going on around here. What I've realized is that this platform isn't decentralized or censorship-free AT ALL. It's lord-of-the-flies-playground-politics meets a High School popularity contest. The way it's set up, it's ripe for gaming and manipulation and I truly fail to see how that environment serves to inspire useful content.

You're totally right: @dollarvigilate's #Introduction was lame as hell and certainly not worthy of a $15K-equivalent SD payout, but that's what happened. You know what else is lame as hell? That @berniesanders - who is clearly butthurt by this phenomenon - has provided little-to-no content creation here whatsoever but has a pretty impressive collection of curation payouts, yet without any clear consistency in topics, concern for quality or contribution of feedback/conversation via replies to what he/she/it upvotes. I imagine him/her/it sitting around, trolling for whales, timing his/her/its upvotes to ensure maximum curation payout, probably without even reading the post.

Jeff Berwick didn't provide content that was worth $15K SD, the excitement of his celebrity status on this platform did that. @berniesanders hasn't provided a quality of curation worth however-many-thousands of SDs he's amassed. Other than the fact that the topics he chooses to upvote/troll-for-SDs are active, there's zero consistency in their content or quality. You know what there IS consistency in, however? @berniesanders relatively high curation payout history.

Don't hate the player, hate the game.

Honestly, I give not one fuck about who makes how much SD on here or why, but it occurs to me that the way steemit is set up, it is RIPE for such types of abuses which, ultimately, do not serve the community or inspire the submission of quality work. I feel like there are a LOT of ways this could be fixed, but the only thing that's up to me is whether or not I care to participate in the game as it is and for what reasons, despite the fact that I do not like how it’s set-up.

I was inspired by the concept of consideration-for-my-efforts to try and develop a voice on this platform, but I am SO put-off by all this bullshit game-theory. Ultimately, I will simply have to decide whether what I get out of this platform in the short-run and my hopes for what this brilliant idea COULD BE in the long-run can outweigh the tomfoolery and clusterfuckery that result from how it’s presently set up.

If the founders of Steemit wanna realize the full, long-term and yet-unknown potential for this amazing idea, I feel like some serious changes need to be made in how participants and products become valued here.