The tragedy of the commons is an economic theory of a situation within a shared-resource system where individual users acting independently according to their own self-interest behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting or spoiling that resource through their collective action. [source]

I was very proud of a recent piece of mine the other day about a geometrical fact I had taught for years.

So much so, I decided to tweet it out into the world. I don't often share my Steemit pieces with my circles of friends because I am ironically more shy with them than I am with folks on here.

Predictably, my tweet fell into the abyss of nothingness, with very few engagements. In other words, just the usual.

But, weirdly, out of the blue, I received a reply from a good friend of mine. A very simple reply that gave me pause for thought:

"lol wat?"

Which is just awesome, because I'm getting a lot of this in the recent weeks of writing pieces for Steemit.

My Friends Just Don't Get This Place

This is not to say I don't. But, almost everyone I try to get onboard with this place either scoffs at the idea, or breaks off into the "ponzi scheme" discussion. Yep, that one. The same you have all probably had with someone in your life about cryptocurrency.

I wonder why they would have this impression 🤔.

Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

We are all so excited about this technology, I think it is scaring away new people to this site.

One of my favorite follows, Hive account@daut44, had a great piece about this just last week. When consuming content here, we are in a massive echo chamber and start to accept arguments and behavior we see daily as common.

For instance, I don't flinch any more when I see the "OMG, I Haz All The Followerz" posts. It is just a sign of exuberance I've taken as normal. Or the "I've made all the moneyz, so canz you" posts. Because those people, like the ones I've screencapped, have worked their tails off to be where they are at, and probably deserve to brag.

However, I'm on here maybe 4 hours a day and I get the culture here.

Granted, Reddit, our closest competitor, is probably not much better.

However, their front page isn't littered with advertisements for booking.yeah or how to become a cryptothousandaire.

If we are to scale, and I mean, $10/steem scale that I see all the dreamy posts about, I think a lot of us need to take a really hard look at our own short term economic incentives versus what will be most beneficial for us all in the long term.

In other words, I am done voting for authors, in principal, because I know they generate high dollar posts.

I've been experimenting with Steemvoter this past week to see how well that whole process works. It actually does, but more mildly than what I've thought. I've actually gotten more enjoyment, and ironically more value, by setting voting rules for my favorite authors I was already reading but sometimes had no time to upvote during the day. The same authors that produce the content I've loved no matter their dollar value.

Is that crazy? Or should I continue to willingly vote for post I have no interest in whatsoever for my own economic curation interests? I would love to hear your thoughts!