What is Value & How Do We Create It?

There is an on-going movement from almost all sectors of the platform to look deeper into the subject of value creation a couple of years from inception. This is a very important event in my view coming from years of initiating, leading, and turning projects around from a clear path to failure. In the corporate world we often refer to this event within the steps involved in Capability Maturity Level. What is interesting is how this is happening from all the major groups within the platform as much as it is being driven by Steemit Inc., whether we recognize it or not.

The latest monthly witness panel from the @minnowsupport channel covered the subject of encouraging value creation throughout the session on Saturday. It will be great to follow along this path since it is a very important subject in building and telling our story as the waves of the tokenized internet adoption unfold.

This is one of those post I am not very comfortable writing due to lack of numerical guides, so I am hoping YOU can redirect me from any false beliefs based on your lengthier experience. There are three major groups in Steemit and the way each group creates value differs.

Who Is Steemit?

The Developers
The Big Money
The Story Tellers

I did not list this down in any particular order, and I am certainly not insinuating that any of this groups is more important than the other two. The overall health of the platform depends on maintaining a symbiotic relationship between these three groups.

_{In an earlier draft I used Human to refer to the last group. That would have not only been inaccurate, but also dehumanizing for the first two groups.}

The Developers

https://ipfs.busy.org/ipfs/QmPv393TuTVJ3dBKFmWdWHyrRLxjQWqLsfE7xmgdv1XEBc

It is rather clear how the developers are contributing value into the platform. Steem Tools created by @roelandp and maintained by @transisto lists down nearly 200 usable applications. Some of these applications make things easy, some attempt at making things more secure, some were made to reward what they truly value, and most make the Steem experience more enjoyable.

The Big Money

This one's rather easy to quantify too. These are the believers who keep their money invested into the platform so that we can all enjoy our share of the bigger reward pool when converted to fiat.

The Story Tellers

This is everyone else. This group can be subdivided further into multiple categories; existing communities, the community builders, the active promoters, the individually contributing content creators (bloggers, artists, musicians, vloggers, analysts, etc.), and curators. Here is where value becomes less defined, more difficult to quantify, and correlating activities from this group linearly against the platform's progress is impossible.

https://ipfs.busy.org/ipfs/Qmdy2MUDmrryQYpGG4mnQqEqCa536HAHxJAoPotsQBR7ZB

That as it may be, this group is the bulk of our story.

What are we all about in the eyes of the outside world?
The potential reason why a stranger from the search engine buy into Steem.
The human aspect of Steemit.

What Is Value & How Do We Create It?

In this section I will focus on the third group for a few reasons; 1. Because the value created for the platform by the first two groups are easily quantifiable, 2. Because I am neither a big investor, nor a developer. 3. Because the third group is the majority.

I feel we should start with defining what value is. I took these definitions from dictionary.com:

Noun "Value" - the worth of something in terms of the amount of other things for which it can be exchanged or in terms of some medium of exchange.
Verb "Valuing" - to consider with respect to worth, excellence, usefulness, or importance.

https://ipfs.busy.org/ipfs/QmPpcwxw6wgnHqBf7D3kkv6iS1rETLyYuC1XQt3EwCabAv

Here is where the problem begins; unlike in trading of stock, precious metals, or currencies, we are not really doing valuation of contents through any set fundamental analysis to get its "intrinsic value". Rather we are doing so with some application of the "subjective theory of value". A post that is worth the world to me, may not mean anything to you, and vice versa. This makes defining value when it comes to a Steemit post, more so teaching how to create value nearly impossible.

Are we doomed then? No!

"Mutual aide society"
"Micro-insurance in the blockchain"
"How can we empower people to be able to help each other across this blockchain medium peer-to-peer?"
"How do we do distributed judging (subjective things)"

These are not my words, if you watch this video uploaded in August 2016, you will learn who these words are from. This tells me that by even attempting to define what value is for everybody, or teaching anyone how create value, we are going to outrightly go against the core ideas that brought Steemit about.

There is No Cost to Kindness | Your Upvote is Not Free

Taken together this is almost paradoxical.

_{"There is no cost to kindness. A smile, a word of thanks, a good deed, a friendly gesture — there is no cost to these things, and yet the benefits are priceless. " ~ The Cost of Kindness By Lissa Coffey (HuffPost)}

https://ipfs.busy.org/ipfs/QmXknw7nb2LaYSZcZ2Uz84n2aAdmABtUsMPe7wNUSf2QMd

Your Steem Power is as much a responsibility as it is a benefit. The bigger you influence is, the bigger your responsibility becomes in shaping our story as one big community. While it is not right to define what value is for everyone, it is your right to give more monetary value into what you value. Kindness is the way to go, but your upvote should be based on more critical thinking. Kindness ≠ Upvote, believing otherwise is a very myopic view of the world.

Please don't confuse kindness with pity. The developing nations have done well in the platform so far not out of pity, but of kindness (or this might be what I want to believe). It is your kind belief that we have the capabilities to emerge from our rather poor economic conditions through our rich creativity, culture, and brilliance that brought our relative success about; not your relief that we are suffering, therefore your life is so much better.

_{“The difference between pity and compassion: Pity just feels sorry. Compassion does something about it.” ~ The Simply Luxurious Life}

Your increased upvote came at a cost of the car you elected not to buy, the vacation you delayed, a fancy gadget, a seemingly better investment opportunity. It is not free, spend it with the application of critical thinking, not just for yourself, but for all of us.

Valuing What I Value

Since joining the platform in July 2017, I've always looked at it as a big experiment. So I experimented with it in many ways. Powering up has allowed me to increase my influence over time, expanding my laboratory. I've tried delegating Steem Power to multiple communities for free, not voting my own content for a couple months, creating accounts for participants of SteemPH Meet Up Caravan with temporary delegation, and delegating to communities that does circle upvotes. More than anything, powering up has allowed me to add in an increasing fashion to the valuation of things I value.

Just like in attempting to define what value should mean for everybody, expecting everyone to power up will only result to frustration and disappointment. Not everyone is in here to invest, and that's a choice everybody is free to make. People who invest are free just as much to encourage the behavior of investing back into the platform by using their influence.

Moving forward, I will veer away from the mechanistic view of the world, attempting to correlate numerical values with my (or anyone's preferences) all the time. In my ten months in the platform so far, I have seen how human behavior are often disproportional (as it is in real life). This does not mean that I will stop analyzing things that can be quantified, this just mean I am sold that not everything can.

_{"Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts." ~ Albert Einstein}

I will enjoy the rest of my journey keeping satisfied with my joy, how pleasant my experiences are, how enjoyable reading or watching the content I upvote, and how much I help in the valuation of what I value as measures. A rather simplified (human) way of looking at things.

_{“The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said.” - Peter Drucker}

You can take this post in its most literal form, and you'd still be fine; but try to extract what truly is being said, and benefit more from your eight minutes. I love how Terry does this, if you are still reading his post literally, you don't know how much you're missing.