Choosing to write and struggling to make a living of by writing is a long-term plan. Any type of short-cut is just not going to work. Steemit seems like an interesting place, in that it mirror the world in many ways. Including the greed, the political games, the short memories. Including the whims, the people who focus on instant wins instead of trying to find their voice, their talent, and build on that.
Instead of whining about how it makes me angry to live in a world that seems to reward those that do NOT invest in a future, that do NOT look at a long-term goal, I will focus on the only available remedy:
Community.
Individuals can make mistakes. Communities can make policy, long-term choices.
Individuals can gamble on the short-term. Communities can make investment in the long-term possible and doable.
Individuals can expect praise for nothing. Communities can develop mechanisms of sustainable growth and learning.
How to invest in the future?
Choosing long-term quality and learning instead of aiming for short-term payouts, means more than simply learning and developing one's own skills. It also involves investment in projects that provide health for the whole. At Steemit this for instance means to vote for active and committed witnesses. Or to support good curation users and use your voting power to upvote high quality posts.
Creating a healthy environment also means making sure that Steemit acts against plagiarism. People steal content, from the internet, from books, even from other Steemians, and copy-past it. NOT GOOD. And @cheetah doesn't catch much of it. Many people rewrite entire sources. And even if you list the sources, and you rewrite every word, you're still not using original content, you're still acting in violation of international law. Research is good, telling people where you learned about things is good, but you need to give it your original spin. Otherwise it's just you trying to make money of something that is not yours.
First goal in my investment in the future is to investigate possibilities. Some time ago, I saw a post about steemauto by @scrooger, which includes ways to automatically upvote specific people (fanbase) and to schedule posts -- both these options are very nice for me as an individual. (No more waiting for the right time to post, when all timezones are up.)
Power of community
But steemauto also offers something that is a way to support the community--by allowing to following curators. Which means, that every time some curator or curationteam upvotes a post they have screened and consider good by their standards, you will also upvote that post. Being a small fish myself, following a trail like that seemed like a good thing to do. So I started following @muxxybot. I was very interested in seeing what would happen, and who I would be upvoting.
Going through my logs, I found out I was actually upvoting plagiarists! I spend some hours investigating, and figured out that some people delegate only a little bit of SP in order to get upvoted. Which is fine, unless these people turn out to be plagiarists.
I contacted the user behind @muxxybot and others joined in to find out what was actually happening. I reported many scammers to @steemcleaners, and @gmuxx realised he needed to revise his system to make sure this kind of abuse wasn't possible anymore (see his latest update on taking care of this issue in this post. And while we were investigating and listing these abusive users, @swelker101 also realised he was being used as part of the same scam. So he started to take care of this problem as well.
To me, this was the work of a community. It shows how every one individual, no matter his or her high or low reputation, his or her voting power, or his or her understanding of everything that goes on, is important to the whole. That every individual can make a difference.
I'm grateful to be part of such a community, and am looking forward to our continued and ever increasing battle against the signs of a failing world. A world in which spam and short-term gain is believed to be more important than the slow and difficult process of community building. I don't know much. But I know the world is wrong in this.