I recently passed 1000 followers.
And I didn't really do anything to mark the occassion when it happened. But in the week (week-and-a-half?) since then, I've had time to take it all in.
Establishing yourself as a personality on any kind of social media is such a difficult task. The odds seem hopeless on pretty much any platform.
Except for here on Steemit.
Because on Steemit, moreso than at any previous point in human history, it has become easy to be generous.
Generous?
Yes.
On Steemit, you can give people monetary rewards without sacrificing your own monetary stockpile. There are systems in place to put limits on this generosity, sure, but it's still a more liberal environment for giving than anything else we as a species have encountered so far.
And if anyone is wondering how you get 1000 followers on Steemit, the answer, in my experience, is to be generous.
I give 50% upvotes. And I give them to people who could never give me the same amount in return. And even when I can't give these large upvotes to everyone who upvotes me, I try to give them to as many people as I can.
And of course it's not that simple. I also have a moderate amount of Steem Power, but almost all of that has been earned through posting content. The only time I ever bought SP was back in July of 2016, when I paid $30 for a tiny bit (I can't even remember the amount).
So most of my Steem Power has come from upvotes. And a lot of those upvotes were given by people who liked my generosity. In short: giving away money has increased my capacity to give away money.
It's like a self-birthing cycle.
It's really quite uncanny.
Incentivizing Generosity
What has impressed me most about the Steemit platform is the way that it incentivizes generosity. And it does this more effectively than perhaps anything this world has ever seen. I don't even know if such a system is sustainable (the Steemit system often seems to good to be true), yet I would like to believe that Steemit, or something like it, could lead to a more generous world.
Despite the world's near-constant turmoil, I still have hope that humanity is progression toward a ZION society. And I can't say that Steemit is the beginning of that, but I can say that Steemit links community with prosperity in a way that has potential.
I hope to live long enough to see its end result.