Do you wanna create your relationships based on political borders?
Blockchain has often lured people by its characteristics of being decentralized, uncensored, borderless, trustless and universal appeal. We come to Steemit to be part of such a community which is open and free in real sense. But we are so much accustomed to our old ways of living our life that even on a blockchain platform we refuse to understand or participate in such an unrestricted and free eco-system. We are habitual slave and would like to build our own prison walls if we are suddenly let free by any miracle. It’s because we never dreamed of such an existence and we prefer to live in the old way as it is more familiar and seems normal to us. It’s human nature to resist change however better it may be.
Isn’t this exact same thing is happening in the blockchain arena too? ICOs are being subject to centralized control, KYC verification is the preferred or mandatory norm by most exchanges & governments as well as investors & traders of crypto-currencies, crypto exchanges are functioning within geographical limitations, etc. are signs which are going to limit the power of blockchain to a large extent. Unless and until we change our old mindset, we can’t move ahead in this revolutionary system.
What disappoint me on Steemit?
When I joined Steemit, everything looked good to me initially. But soon I found that it’s still not a truly decentralized, uncensored, borderless system of blockchain as I had previously assumed. We still have a long way to go for that! Currently, in this post, I’m going to talk about the presence of rampant regionalism which is creating imaginary boundaries amongst this amazing Steeming community here. I’d like to have your views on your acceptability of such discrimination and whether or not should we keep continuing with that.
Rampant Regionalism and Closed Community Culture
With reference to the political boundaries that humans have sketched on this planet, I’m an Indian citizen. Since birth I was declared an Indian citizen and remained as such. I never felt otherwise. It was only on joining Steemit community, I felt like a global citizen. But unfortunately for me that feeling was very short-lived. For a person or society accustomed to a citizenship of a specific region, it’s hard to transform into a cosmopolitan mindset. Soon I found out that there are several country-specific closed communities here who are interested to extend support and interactions only in their own community. There are several whales who belong to such groups and who upvotes accounts only from their regional community. E.g. a Chinese whale will upvote posts written only by their community members even that post was completely written in English. There are closed groups from countries like Philippines, Nigeria, Italy, France, China, Canada, Spain, Turkey, Pakistan, India, Indonesia, Australia etc. Many of them have their own Discord Servers or exclusive rooms on various servers. We all know about the Russian version of Steem, but that’s a different story. But there are many small countries which don’t have sufficient presence on Steem yet (and probably a lot of them won’t ever have) and couldn’t form any effective group in response to other groups. So they are perhaps unfortunate to be left out.
But I belong to a pretty large nation with a total number of Steemians ranking among the top 5 in the world. Naturally a group is present for all Indians. Indians not only have got their exclusive Discord server, they have their own rooms on Steemit Chat too. I’m constantly noticing requests to assign a particular tag viz. #india to all my posts so that fellow countrymen and whales can easily find you and show their solidarity with a huge upvote. Check a sample invitation post to launch such a server, I came across recently. I don’t know what other motive these country specific communities have. Yes, it do help when one wants to connect with people from particular area when he/she is travelling to those place, to seek local information or for any other reason but this can’t be done in these groups as membership is restricted to people from their region only. So these kind of initiatives are promoting a separatism, discriminating on the basis of a geographical territory and jeopardizing the opportunity for an open inter-exchange of culture & experiences openly across the globe.
#india Is The New TAG SCAM
Apart from creating a closely guarded regional community, there is another serious problem about the use of the tag #india by all Indian bloggers. When you are concerned with local issues and updates, you would search posts from the relevant tag. I think that is the whole purpose of tag to facilitate easy navigation to the intended content. So earlier I use to search this #india tag. But you now find all kinds of post created by Indians under this tag. If an Indian is writing about his / her trip to a European country, he will tag it with #india. How stupid! I find all general contents, crypto news and analysis, software news, philosophical articles, photographs, poems etc. under this tag. Ultimately, I had to stop navigating through this tag because of its widespread abuse..
Personally, I never use #india tag unless the article I’m writing is in someway directly related to India. I also expect to read the coverage and outlook of my country by foreign tourists & visitors under this tag. But Indians don’t expect them to use this tag! It is exclusively for Indian Stemians.
I think they should better do it with a tag like Indian or IndianBlogger to make it discerningly clear. Otherwise I consider this to be a tag scam. In fact, 
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