This will be my final post on Steem.
I've turned off voting on all of my accounts, redirected the customers of @ottermaker and @herons-unlimited to Discord and my website, simplified my witness votes, and I'm generally shutting down most things. Oddly enough I've been powering up again, and expect to continue, because I have profitable use for resource credits making custom JSONS and ignoring all the bullshit.
This decision has been coming for a while, but the catalyst for it was the fact that the current war managed to drive away one of the nicest people I've ever met. If you can't be nice to Serena, I'm more than ready to be done myself.
There has always been a significant part of Steem that's angry it doesn't have 100% discretion over where the rewards go. Before the EIP that group could at least be isolated, and the rest of us could mostly go on with our lives, trying to build community and make cool things, with the occasional broken window to deal with from the likes of Bernie or Grumpycat or FTG. Now it's everyone, and everywhere.
Two weeks ago I went back to Twitter because it's more fun there than it is here. Which, if you know anything about Twitter.... But even in the deepest pits of the culture war, there are people making jokes and riffing off each other and being kind to each other, and where the hell is that here anymore?
There are people here because they're trying to make money, and there are people here because they're heavily invested and can't quite cope with how they're not millionaires anymore, but everybody who was here because they enjoyed it is gone. And without them, why keep it up?
There comes a time when you have to admit a project has failed, and it's now that time for the content/voting system on Steem. The Steem blockchain itself is amazingly capable, as you can plainly see from all the non-content things people have built on it with essentially no base-level support. Those projects are going strong, providing value to the blockchain and to the world, and the best thing you can do to support the future of this blockchain is take the voting system out behind the barn and put it out of its misery.
It's no longer salvageable, and all it is anymore is a bunch of miserable motherfuckers advertising that no, you really don't want to be anywhere they are. SMTs aren't going to help, they'll just split it up into a bunch of different communities with their own conflicts. We've already seen that in SCOT tribes.
Social media on Steem is no fun. There's no reasonable path for it to ever be any fun again. One way or another, all of this will eventually die. If you'll take my advice, put it out of its misery quickly, and let the projects with hope for the future carry the blockchain forward.
Or you can just keep going until the downvotes eat everyone, and it dies on its own.
On a personal level: Steem Is Bad For You. Some of the people I've thought very highly of seem incapable of getting out of this conflict that just turns everyone into jerks. Anyone who spends a lot of time on Steem anymore could probably use some time off to consider what you're really looking to accomplish here, and how likely it is.
Having taken my look at that question, I'll leave you with this:
