Taboo
Today I want to discuss a subject that has been the cause of much drama in the Steemit community. This subject is almost taboo, because you can not discuss it without loss. It is the cause of divide in our community and a lot of pain to some.
Added Value
Added value was not a term used in the original Steemit whitepaper. Steemit started as a reddit model competitor and quickly deteriorated into a Medium model competitor, I say deteriorated because at the time Medium's business model was failing.
Steemit started with a huge influx of people, then the influx died down. People were welcomed with a wall of "Added value", content value, and presentation.
We simply shut down the door on the casual social media users, who are not interested in becoming the target of investigation as soon as they walk into the community, or posting "Quality Posts".. This is not a defense of the ID thieves or plagiarists. We simply set the bar too high. We were not willing to accept the fast expansion. Yet, if you ask any social media expert, a social media network's biggest wealth was and still is the number of users.
Witch Hunts
Why do we have witch hunts on Steemit? why did a community divide on itself? why label some large investors "whales" evil and some "whales" as good?
The fact is we created this divide, for one reason , and one reason alone. MONEY
We rewarded Steemians to go after other Steemians for exposing abuse, I almost fell for that myself, I looked the situation and quickly realized how bad this can be for Steemit on the long run, so I started an opposite approach, try to mend things between the opposites.
What is abuse? @nextgencrypto voting for OZ is abuse? so what was the developers voting for dollarvigilante ?
But the story does not end with one whale or another, the story continues, we still have the door locked, and we made it worse. Now we go looking for people who are a success on Youtube, Twitter, and Medium, and invite them here to reward them. They will do better for now, because they are not on one side of the fence yet. Oh and that "added value" is inherited from their previous success, until they make the mistake of joining the divide.
I will not talk much about the past and where we made the mistakes and created the divide. I will give instead a recent case of discussion and explain why "added value" is splitting one community and creating borders.
I know him from the early days of crypto, yes he PM'd me several times on IRC before slack was invented. What I knew about him then is he is a go getter, he never quits, will reach to the end of the world to deliver his message. What I know about him now, he is a successful Steemian, runs the fuk.io crypto blog and he is a Mod on bitcoin.com
You might not like his style, or do not appreciate the message, but when you need to know something about something, he is the one to ask. He spends 18 hours of his day keeping up with news on crypto projects.. ( and : I do not know why this "and" fell here, it was a typo, or a pm on slack that changed my line of thought )
So yesterday a case came up where @transisto thought his presentation of :
was bad enough that it deserved a 100% downvote and another article about the same subject was better presented.
Of course @transisto have every right to his opinion, but here I will present why I think he is wrong. And why this falls into the same category of an illusion called "added value"
The other writer could have well presented the article in a much better way, could be using spell correction or better at grammar. Could be better at selecting words or images, or better at selecting the layout. But is that all that counts?
What we always ignore is what comes after, @kingscrown has reach, thousands of followers of his blog, thousands of followers on twitter, and hundreds who read his posts on forums. If we go back and track those Youtube famous people who we invite to reward blindly, I can show you how they get these views and followers, simply an ad inside an app on Apple appstore will get you 10 million views on Youtube. Yes those Ads you see in apps of videos playing for 30 seconds from youtube. Yet we decide to invite these people and reward them for an imaginary following, but we will "hate" on kingscrown and his reach.
We decide to reward the unknown and punish the known. How many people did dollarvigilante bring to steemit other than those people who were writers on his blog so they get rewarded just like he did. How many of you know about the playboy model scam that he planned with one of his friends to scam the community a large payout? where is that Model now with her millions of followers?
Did @kingscrown stop posting when the reward pool went down to pay nothing? or did he continue to write while those so called influencers gave Steemit their back?
If we do not learn to appreciate our own, we will never learn. Yes, @kingscrown makes typos, so do I, and so do you. But one thing I know, he delivers his message with honesty, he tells it like it is, hate him or like him, he is a better Steemian than your subjective "added value" playboy model.
@kingscrown can go buy a nice camera and post pictures of himself in Bikini everyday, but then I will probably downvote him myself.
For Steemit to expand we need to open the doors, if people see someone write like Charles Dickens on the trending page they will have fear, they will think "this is not for me". Yes it's that person with typos that will make people think " Hey I can do this "
