Many people join Steem, but many people also leave Steem after some time. What's going on? Why are some hooked and stay, while others don't bother chasing the Steem dream?
Made from source at Wikimedia
There are issues when people join, surely. They don't understand how the platform works. "get rewarded for posting". "Make money posting anything" they've been told. Is that all there is to it? No, because you need people to vote for you. And not just anyone. The voters need to have money in the form of SP to allocate rewards to you.
Then if they do get some rewards, well it's in STEEM. Then they need to covert it to fiat, usually by first converting it to Bitcoin. That's all so complicated for newcomers. They want things to be simple.
What would help, is a standardized explanation that was available on the main site for them to access. Then they could better understand it, despite it's complexity as an unknown process to getting their money in fiat.
Posting anything is pretty simple, but even then, do we just want anything being posted, where people try to make money posting things that comes from others? No, that's why there is SteemCleaners.
Steem isn't like Facebook, or Twitter, where you can just post links and now, because you're on Steem, you will get rewarded but such basic media sharing. Steem requires more effort. It only makes sense, since your going to make money, you should be putting in effort and doing some work to get some reward. Not simply link-dropping.
This is another barrier for the masses. They don't want to do the work. They just want to make the easy money by doing what they do elsewhere. And when that doesn't work, they often leave.
Is the blind drive to bring in more people all that matters, and not what the platform becomes? Should everyone just be rewarded based on being favored by others with Steem Power to reward them? Should we just inflate the blockchain larger and larger just to support masses of link drops to promote the adoption of more people staying and getting rewarded for it?
I think we should be realistic about how big Steem can get via a so-called social media platform. Unless we just don't care what is here, or how big the blockchain will get by supporting anything at all from being posted. It's not a company making money hosting the blockchain database along, but dozens of people hosting the exact same data, when it's not required. Nothing is required though, right? So we just accept anything because that the goal, to accept anything because it's cool to have it immutable that way? Really?
Is this the purpose of an immutable trustless decentralized database? Seems a bit overkill to me. What are we doing really? It's odd to me. Trying to wrap my head around this for the long term...
Anyways. What do you think is the reason for you or others staying, while others don't? Why do those of us that stay, stay? What is the Steem dream? What are we chasing? Are we being led like donkeys with a carrot? If there wasn't money involved, would we still be here, chasing the Steem dream?
Made from source at Wikimedia
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