This post will be an all text, messy, no proof reading, a few silly jokes sprinkled in, but also a lot of value for the creative minds out there: Call it artistic. Why I'm going this direction? Because that's just how our minds end up working some of the time. We need time for our brains to breath a little freer, Am I right?
With this post, I'm giving you a look inside my brain, so prepare to go scuba diving in those tiny gray cells of mine.
Also, this post was written without any intoxication what so ever. Promise. But it might be a better read with a glass of wine or two… You've now been officially vetted (well, you read this far after all didn't you?) and properly informed. Let’s get down to business!
"What can one man do? How big a deal are individuals compared to the collective body and mind anyways?"
Well that's what we get to find out if we accept the challenge!
-Nicely done huh? I ruined the blog post already. ; )
After much thought about the future posibilities of the Steem Pub server on Discord, I as the host have decided that due to so much change where it actually matters for the worse these last few weeks to months I will entirely stop working on it.
This has not been an easy decission to make, because I'm not the type that gives up easily on a project once I've decided that I'm doing it. But sometimes we have to make decissions that are hard and even unpleasant at first, to keep on moving forward.
(For a secret tip about marketing and making Steemit more attractive to users who are totally uninterested in hearing about how fantastic Steem is, skip way ahead or prepare for a long read)
-This next sentence will be important, not only to me, but to all inventors, "entreprenurial minded" people or should I say "vissionaries" out there to really take notice of if they want to succeed in business or in life, whether they get it from me, from within or from somewhere else: I do this not to "quit", but to resolve and redirect the spotlight where my effort truly ought to be focused. -Am I speaking your language? Maybe not so far. If this is new for you or if this is something you enjoy reading about, there's more where that came from, so stay tuned for future and more "well pollished" posts.
Should anyone want to take over and re-brand the server, then please reach out to me in a direct message, because I still very genuinly think there is great opportunity in the market place (of ideas, at least) to start a server with the intent for one thing, of presenting all of the different podcasts now available in this community, in a common place and format.
Even each by it's own of course, these podcasts can (should, I mostly hope) grow and continue to be their own thing. This will not be minimized. But likewise all individuals can benefit from working together. - I personally shun all "collectives", but praise the cooperative. Together, each and every one of us can achieve so much more.
As with a beam of light, or so: Alone it is a beam of light - a small splendor, make no mistake - but when consentrated in a common area, as if shining on a common purpose, it can reach much broader and further as the combined effort make it visible even in those usually darkest of corners, where as with the one small beam alone... it could only light up so many corners on it's own.
I'm just not the guy to organize such a thing at this point in time. Not alone at least. There would have to be a very conscious coalition, maybe at first in close proximity to a single podcast or other content user base, to successfully make this move. Innitiate it of course, anyone could. As do I think I proved conclusively.
However, so far I have neither of those other assets (Work on podcasting with @beanz was stopped; sadly out of disagreements, that in hindsight, I think should and could have been avoided had I been at the top of my game at the time and just realized when I needed to stop responding in "short form" text messages. Yes, let me take part of the blame for that) and frankly I don't have the energy to put this together anymore due to all that's happening in my life right now (future post?), Steemit aside...
There have also been some claims made about why I've commented the way I have about Fyrstikken - on his own posts and posts of others - and even some that this was due to "jealousy" over his influence in the community. I've made it no secret, because truth is truth, that once I discovered how unstable he was I wanted to create a better podcast and host our server for better people. That was a big motivation for me since some time after the SteemPub server had already been launched on Discord and beanz and I both had already done a ton of work on it.
But the comments I've made on Steem have all to do with my distrust of and originally disinterest in certain community organizers, among whom Fyrstikken in particular show emotional immaturity and constantly attempt to use populist rhetoric here on Steemit to rise in the ranks and influence more people. It had nothing to do with the actual competition of the servers as such and certainly wasn't motivated at all by jealousy.
-Now, this is probably gonna be turned against me by someone, but let it be said that I don't want to trust people that all of a sudden snap, start cursing and start flaming all developers and all opponents of their views, (would you?) when asked a perfectly normal and harmless question on his own radio show, to ever so blissfully guide us to the promised land. I just don't. That's that. I'm a bit sorry to let this even take up this much space in the post, but sometimes things need to be said. So that's where that ends.
Still, considering all of the events that transpired since the weeks just before Christmas and up until now, I must emphazise that I'm in a fairly happy state for the moment, not sad or disappointed at all I must say, but rather I can look back with a deep sense of pride at what litte, yet clearly visible, and personally important deeds I was able to accomplish.
Sitting down?
Shocker: I originally set out to do none of it.
In the beginning I didn't even intend to participate much in the community at all. At the time I never intended to do much more than maybe vote a little bit, test out the platform to get a sense of how it worked and maybe - yes maybe - write a post about the topic that drove me to discover Steemit in the first place, which was anarcho-capitalism; The simple idea of promoting peace and freedom between all individuals, at all times - and make a bit of money. Oh yes, the money was a factor for sure! Other than Youtube and now Steemit, I really havn't had an active profile on Facebook, LinkedIn, or any other typical social media platform for these last 10 years at least!
But with using Steemit came content and interaction, or should I say; With Steemit comes Steemians.
So I started commenting on posts, following my favourite authors... and voted like a rabid person. Until, of course, after a while I noticed my voting wasn't doing much for my own accounts wallet.
It was at this point that I started to play around with the features of the platform a bit more. As a newbie on social media, I quickly realized the way I could "manipulate" users to follow my account simply by following theirs (yes, this is gonna look shady, but public information is already public and I'm writing this for the story) and so I started to massfollow among others the accounts followed by the most popular accounts I could find on the site, until I reached a comfortable number of followers and fell exhausted at my keyboard because I had to click "follow" manually hundreds of times. Oh yes. No money, no funny. No bot? You're gonna click a lot.
There were a couple of similar techniques that I tried out I think - all socially "questionable", none criminal - but it's a bit blurry by now. All is fair in war and business (That's a joke by the way) which was all this was about at this point. But soon, and the timeline is not entirely clear here, I became a much more savvy user that voted only for particular things and people.
By now, I only commented and put in the most effort where I either knew I really liked the material, thought that I potentially could get an upvote (money) or that I really wanted to contribute with some knowledge on an imortant enough subject. Money was the biggest driver, but it did have me doing some actual productive stuff.
All in all, I started to really enjoy the commenting here in much the same way as I had been a notorious Youtube debater. (Oh gee... this is gonna get me so many unfolllows..) Which in turn led me up to the point at which I discovered @stellabelles post.
What intriguing title she had chosen I no longer remember, but that's where my thoughts started going to the creation of a "virtual bar" for Steemians and I laid out some of my thoughts in the comment section.
After I while, it seemed like things had kind of died out, which caused me to start doing a bunch of stuff in order to kickstart the discussion again. Am I tenatious or just a sore loser? I'm actually usually pretty good at distancing myself from the "failure mentality" but if I'm honest there's probably a little bit of both.
A few more details about how I proceeded to start the "Steemit Bar" channel on Steemit.chat and what went down afterwards can be found in my introduction post. -Yes, unfortunately because of how Steemit currently displays resteemed blogposts you will have to scroll past a few of those untill you get to my first blog post, but it's down there alright and includes all of the awkwardly taken selfies you can wish for. HOLD UP. We're not done here yet.
What's point of all this rambling, spilling out words that seem to be going all over the place for no reason?
Let me share with you: It's a new year, ever year, all of the time. Have you made a new years resolution?
This video is the rest of the reason...
Sorry, I wrote "all text". Flashback to SteemFest though; I wasn't there, but it was great anyhow because among other things the streams and uploaded content got me listening to the words of @neilstrauss again.
"Just write" he said. 2 shitty pages a day. Was that what he said? And that's it. That's all you need to do to get going with writing. So maybe I'm taking that a step too far here, we'll see... Nope. It seems to be working alright.
So what's the constant in this post. What's the common thread here? Is there a silver lining to all of this?
Sometimes life changes and the time warp paralax takes a swing at you with new and uncalculated for information. Keep this scenario in mind.
This blog post and clink clink clink this toast will be dedicated to RESOLUTION. To resolving.
Food for thought; What is a revolution without declaration? What is speed without direction? What is determinism without decission? I'm not giving you the answer.
Resolve. Resolution is how we solve tough situations. It's how we move forward... and how we make sure we move at all.
"Sometimes life changes and the time warp paralax takes a swing at you with new and uncalculated for information."
What do you do? Did you duck? If you didn't think of doing so already, try to memorize the first two sentences of this paragraph. Keep them alive in your head for a while.
You may not always need to duck. That's not the poin here. But sooner or later you will find yourself experiencing a sittuation that you are not fully content with. What exactly you do then is important, but perhaps most important is that you don't freeze. That you don't stop your thinking; Your flow of wisdom.
Successful human beings - sucessful in any sphere of our culture - resolve when it is the hardest to do. They don't freeze. They know what to do; Just keep moving.
A soldier hears the sound, sees the dust, resolves. A boxer that was unprepared for the exact time that his opponent struck, resolved. Usain Bolt, a distracting thought flashes through his mind just as the starting pistol goes bang and he sets off; he needs to resolve it. Slow motion please. He doesn't know how exactly, his heart and mind races for a split second. Then he knows; Just keep the motion going and then slowly inch your way back there... back to regular speed, resolved.
I've been here before. I know what to do ladies and gentlemen. I'm on it. And now you know it as well.
So as we're coming to the end of this blog post and I'm hoping that you've actually read the entire post, at least for a good laugh at how my brain works ; ) here comes my simple tip that I wanted to share with you.- I would just like to tell everyone here that there are crazy good results to be had Steemit promotion wise, from linking "interesting" content for the masses(!) on reddit.com as long as you choose a subredit with lot's of users and current readers. It doesn't even have to be a link to Steemit.com, it can also be a video that somehow relates to or lets you mention Steemit in the title or the comment section. How do you know that it's "good content for the masses"? Think about what things everyone of a particular subredit would want others of that particular subredit either to post about or to read. Not both for now. That's gonna make it too hard for most people.
Youtube videos from SteemFest are great as examples for this; One of the videos I linked in a "writing" related subredit ("The secrets of addictive writing by Neil Strauss") recently racked up over 200 upvotes and already drove a lot of new traffic to the video itself, which in turn improves visibility for the video, the channel and in the end Steemit.com on Youtube.
Do what you want with this information, the only thing I ask is that you act on this opportunity.
Let's see here... wow... I think I may just have written a post so rambling that it could make Guinness World Records. Remember that one? Pretty clever marketing right. Maybe you should think about that before you post to reddit...
Cheers!
