Hey everyone!
I made this post yesterday for the Italian community and prepared it in English with the same or similar contents and different tags for the English one too. I got asked a lot about my absence from the platform, and want to address the reasons that made me take a break from Steemit or even abandon it.
I want to deeply thank @ethandsmith for being a bright lighthouse of the platform and a kind human being, @awakentolife for it's life motivation, charisma and great attitude, @dreemsteem for being the pirate we all are, @crazybgadventure for it's commitment to the platform and many others that I am surely missing and @thesweeneyguy for it's amazing projects, in particular @thesteemhouse.
I surely missed someone, but I greet you too!
@thesteemengine is amazing and a real hidden gem in this ocean called Steemit. Check it out
Amazement
You type in steemit.com and you approach a platform where users are rewarded from upvote, with a solid structure at its core that brings more value the more you are invested in the platform itself (AKA SP). What can we expect more?
Arriving on Steemit you are really amazed by the site, by the functions and mechanisms and by the use of cryptocurrency in a social environment. After all, you get to discover a "parallel world" that's really growing, the cryptocurrency one, among a wide arrange of fields. I firmly believe that each of us has been an astonished child in the beginning steps of Steemit. Seeing awesome contents with great reward is indeed AMAZING!
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Enthusiasm
Finally our account get activated. After a long waiting we are in the first million of Steemit's users!
Woo-Hoo!
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We start reading the best posts. In the evening, we start spending hours studying Markdown/HTML; after all, a great layout it's a strong part of a good post! We read even more. With fear, we publish our first post, knowing that it will be a fail. Steemit really requires a lot of reading and commitment if you want to succeed. Personally I started to dedicate at least a couple of hours each evening, going to sleep later, to gather the highest possible amount of informations. Whitepaper, roadmap, official profile and @ned videos of conferences are all gold to really understand what the token Steem truly is, aside from the economic value.
We start to develop our ideas, we discuss, we propose good contents. The first rewards kick in and we are really happy! JOY!
The initial amazement is overtaken by enthusiasm of showing the world our projects, personality traits and ourself in toto to the community. Sooner or later we start understanding that either we power up or we remain plankton forever.
I never did a single withdraw from the account. Always converted Steem and Steem Dollars to SP, knowing that I wanted to hardly commit in the platform in a long term project.I have to admit I got extremely happy about reaching in a short period of time 500 SP or a reputation of 50, probably even more than the rewards per se.
Knowing members and communities it's an invaluable perk of Steemit, and I have to thank each one that interacted with me in the past 2 months. Unfortunately, that's not everything Steemit is about.
Bitterness
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It really seems that everything is great, what's the meaning of this post after all?
With the time passing you will soon understand that SP system heavily rewards "early-adopters" and bidding bots, changing the Steemit nature to a lending environment and nullifying any growth possibility for a new user, or a user that doesn't want to heavily invest in it.
You might think that I am complain too much given the growth I effectively had in the platform, so I'll give you some examples of the real problem that a user as to face, almost everyday. For a serious, well-written and with a good layout post or projects, hours are needed. Hours acquiring contents, writing, formatting, translating if needed. You need to be on the platform, relate, interact, reply, comment, read. Than do it all again.
I really tried myself to give something to the Italian community and the English one, and I feel that I did it, in some ways. Taking a break, looking Steemit from a different angle and prospective, I understood that:
- Bot are way too popular, with the result of a Trending page almost meaningless.
- Spammer are everywhere. Spamming on profiles, trying to steal coins and accounts, using chains or bot or perverse systems to get 400$ in rewards with a cup of tea and writing breakfast as a title.
- People with thousands of SP do whatever they want. A small number of individual, users or bots, choose the destiny of everyone posts and work. This is not democratic at all and not sustainable. I am not even talking about flag wars, I am talking about sustain of the platform.
- Without connections, friendships, lending platform with whales you can't growth.
You really can't. I tried as hard as I could to be the user of Steemit, but when you see meaningless post with insane rewards, each time upvote from the same group of individuals, you really give up. To give you numbers, my most serious and best project got in the 10 to 40 range in rewards, being super active and winning contests.
Some posts single handle take 50/100/200 upvote, which is more than 2 months of Steemit worth. - Meritocracy is really far away from Steemit. There is no mathematical correlation between ideas, time, energy. Try to think about @dtube for example, with a small group of individuals that get massive upvote under every and each videos.
You might now ask me why did I talk about rewards so much.
Many of you know me already. I firmly and strongly believed in the platform, always powering up. I didn't and I do not care about cashing out, I just wanted to grow as a user to really contribute to the community. The bitterness comes from a lot of absurd and paradoxical situations, each day, everyday.
Not reacting to this means to be succubus of the system, being trapped by it.
I am taking a step back from Steemit. Maybe is a pause, maybe is a goodbye.
I have to thank @kevinwong for being one of the reason I am in this platform.
What do you think? Did you ever see Steemit from a different point of view? Do I have too many expectations? I hope in the comments we can have a nice dialogue.
