
The title sounds very arrogant, snobbish, self-serving, "a-holeish" I'm not sure if that is even a word. But this is an illustration in economics and organic community building, not an illustration of why my free will moral compass is any better or worse than anyone else's on the platform. So don't worry my self righteousness in prose will be as short and sweet as I can make it to spare you the workout from your eye balls rolling.
I have told this to several people on here individually on discord and in comment sections of posts over the last three months or so but I thought it would be nice to write this out so that anyone that may care now or later would have some access to the information. The first few days on the platform I was reading and commenting on every topic I could and picking the brains of everyone here as much as possible. Which had to annoy the ever-living crap out of every seasoned vet on the platform that found my cross hairs. After a while I found another guy everywhere I was, or vice versa after reading comments of articles I had commented or voted again.
That guy is , the dude that about 5,000 people have followed on steemit, who literally started something like twelve hours after I did was even more prolific than I was. He wasn't spammy either, having real conversations with everybody. I started to wonder "Is this guy human or what?" Yes very human, as human as it gets. The guy has went on already to visit with the nether-reaches of the steemit world in ways that boggle my mind. The work ethic he puts forward daily has been remarkable only matched by kindness and sincerity to see others succeed mutually with him.
I began early on to become really obsessed with becoming a whale on here in as little time as possible. I became wrapped up in my success, my standing, and I saw this guy just exploding with 1,000 followers in his first week, then 2,000, then 3,000, then 4,000 and now probably 5,000 or even more, I wouldn't know I hadn't checked the last few hours...you never know with . What I found in being driven by personal ambition on here is that there are perks, your quality of post tends to be well thought out, you never miss out on an opportunity to capitalize on a personal opportunity, and there could be others but that was about it for me.
So after a few weeks of taking this approach of getting posts that literally valued in the multiples of steem dollar pennies, I went with a new motto of "Screw me, help you, forget about it." Passing on contest victories to newbies that I invite to win steembasicincome memberships/shares, passing out bot upvotes to the same users, chatting up with people of all walks like who has taken himself to another level simply because he won't be denied, kind of like other countless people I met on here.
Passing on growth to those that confirm they are indeed real people that are sincerely interested in posting quality content and building relationships with all forms of people from every reach of the planet is a Utopia for me personally. I like the economic flow of passing on a contest win to someone like who lives in Venezuela, is going through a hell in a disorganized mess while she is "uber-organized" herself being a college graduate having to hold off on the future she and her fellow Venezuelans deserve but have had to restructure themselves culturally to find a way (hopefully soon). Knowing you can help in nano economic exchanges that can help in the tiniest bit is game changing and reality changing in every sense.
My dad bought out a pet shop when I was a young boy, picking up all of the guy's fishing equipment, no joke fish aquariums and all the equipment the guy would give away. My dad is pretty cheap, so I bet that guy took a hefty discount for that sale. His focus was to obviously keep all the fish alive, of course. But he would segregate those that couldn't live together and integrated those that could over time. Eventually he found that the Chinese fighting fish were the only fish that couldn't get along with the rest as the bulk of these fish were guppies, algae-eaters, and goldfish. He obviously wanted to keep the adult grown fish around to continue to reproduce so that over time because he didn't want to have to go buy more (remember being frugal isn't always negative, lol) of a given kind. So he actually kept guppy/baby fish populations as best he could to determine whether his several ecosystems had any flaws, that and he really like to mess with things like that.
The moral of the story I believe is that the percentage gain of a highly driven growth oriented newbie on this platform is worth their steem weight in gold. A small vote their way does crazy things here, it wakes up talent, it shakes up minds, it gets the settled crap at the bottom shaken up and removed over time. The newbies that win when first entering the platform are momentous and need to keep happening organically as they had been for a long time so this great culture on this platform is not "farmed out" to the next pet store that happens to carry that kind of fish.