Hello My beloved Steemit friends,
As a Steemit/Crypto noob, one of my initial attractions to Steemit was the idea that we, the producers of content, would get paid for the very content underwriting the value of the platform. We look at Facebook, and we see a multi-billion dollar company, profiting off content they didn't make. Billions of dollars are generated off our content to ensure the Zuck gets to have a garage with a spinning pedestal in the Mission District of San Francisco (true story, it spins so that he never has to back his car in or out). But what are we, the content producers, left with at the other side of that equation? A place to connect with friends differently, pretty cool. A place to get in political arguments thus losing said friends, hmmm. A great place to receive Russian propaganda. And of course, a place we go when we want to provide FaceBook with all the information they need to garner a massive chunk of the world's digital advertising revenue.
Now I'm not opposed to people and corporations making their billions, and I am one of the reluctant fools providing FaceBook with the data they seek. But something about my relationship with FaceBook, for some reason, just grinds my gears. I can't articulate it easily, but something about it just makes me feel like a tool.
I'm not opposed to my social media platforms making ad revenue on my content, but I would feel much better about it if we were partners in the process. I pose the following two questions to my readers:
How would you feel if Steemit started doing some harmless banner ads? What's the harm there? Practically every website we use has banner ads, why should our community be any different?
How cool would it be if they rebated a portion of that ad revenue back to us, and distributed it based on how popular our postings were?
I can't wait to hear what you guys think.
