Hello all Steemians,
I'm still very new to this platform being in my first week, but thought I wanted to share with you all my very first observations. Do feel free to engage with me and correct me if you believe I'm wrong.
First I would like to clarify though that I still think it is an amazing platform and offers so much promise.
I joined for two reasons:
I'm fascinated by the potential of the Blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies as a whole.
How we read the news, communicate it and understand what is going on in the world I believe is going in the wrong direction. This combined with the event of fake news and information based on emotional arguments rather than fact is very disturbing. I do hope that Steemit will play a huge role in reforming that.
Based on that I believe in the organic spread of news, not paying to promote content for money like social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and others are doing. Furthermore, I believe that more and more news organisations are starting to adopt click bait strategies which are indeed a very worrying move.
Now I do not believe one should ask people to follow them, vote for their content and so on.
Maybe I have so far been reading the wrong kind of content on Steemit, but my feeling so far is that people are more concerned about making money than producing good and accurate fact based content. Many of the posts I have seen authors have been asking people who read it to follow them, vote for it and so on. And many people commenting have done the same thing. Saying if you follow me I will follow you. This was also the core base of the comments I received on my first post.
Why am I worried about that?
Because surely this should happen in an organic and automatic way?
I worry that commenters are not being thruthful, but are more concerned about gaining a follow or earning tokens for their comment. I do understand the temptation, but if we are to transition to a new way of producing news we have to adhere to the core principles of the Blockchain technology that of transparency and trust.
I am confident and hopeful that Steemit can be a place where that will happen and where the number one priority is to produce good and accurate content. Number two priority is, that it is, of course, a huge bonus to be rewarded for the work you put into creating that content.