The steem price has come down a lot and post payouts have declined significantly since the beginning of the year. Steem was around at 6$ and SBD at 9$! A post that now scores 1$ would have been 30$ back then! That is a massive decline.
But today steeming is more important than ever before. What makes steem unique is not that it pays its users. Most people will not be living of the chain and will only have a little extra money on top of their earnings. Steem is unique because there is no (or almost no) company behind it. What ends up on the chain cannot be censored and everyone can post without requiring permission.
For this decentralisation the monetary nature of steem is essential. Paying users is only a side-effect. On Facebook somebody needs to pay for the infrastructure. That would be facebook who in turn reaps the rewards and makes the rules. But there is nobody owning steem. Everyone can set up a node and run for witness. But somehow the infrastructure still needs to be paid. Becasue of a working steem ecosystem, steem can created value itself and use that money to pay the witnesses to provide the infrastructure. That process is extremely unique. It creates a real world service without owning the infrastructures to do so.
An important consequence of steem being not owned by anyone is that steem cannot be censored or controlled and all profits remain in the community. It is a truly free medium. It brings the self-publishing opportunities of the internet to the next level. Users need no technological know-how and do not need to trust their data to a third party. For the first time anyone can publish whatever they want and be safe from censorship. And that is a strong power. We have seen the impact of twitter in the arab spring. And twitter can be controlled, it was only that these countries were not prepared to do it. Steem cannot be controlled as long as the steem economy is alive there will be witnesses securing the chain.
Just a few days ago we have seen that censorship in the social media is possible also here. The question is do we want that some people have the power to decide who is allowed to speak online and who is not? I clearly dont think this should be the case. And currently steem is the most decentralised alternative to the old centralised social media.
Now that steem is weak we have to work to keep it alive. We know how important free media are and we have to take this responsibility. This bear market will end. And then many new people will be flushed into crypto. We should present all these people our alternatives to centralised social media and they should find an active and alive steem community that they want to be a part of. Our task is to bear the candle in the dark times and make sure it does not go extinct.
Steem certainly is not perfect. It is not decentralised enough. The ecosystem has many flaws and we do need to fix them or create better alternatives. But as long as these do not exist, I will continue to steem and not let this platform die yet.