When I was first told about this site, the person told me that the dev's of steemit were concerned with making the world a better place by helping early adopters/innovators find community and resources. He had high hopes that the steemit platform/ community would enable innovators that have done well to help others that are struggling to get their ideas and inventions out there. I had doubts because through years of research and experience, I've seen that whenever money is involved with something, the crap and psychos rise to the top but I signed up anyway.
Because I'm not a person that's motivated by money, I figured that I'd be a black sheep here regardless of the quality of my ideas or the posts describing them, and guess what? I was right. A few of my posts got a few views and comments before being buried under drivel.
I was really hoping to find an open minded, forward thinking community here but the very nature of the platform does exactly what western industrial civilization does, create loads of crap and empower psychopaths.
So you and I both are wanting these psychopaths to sift through the crap, and despite their total lack of empathy, find "needy" people to be charitable to. Sadly, I think we're on the wrong platform.
I think that when I find a more permanent place to camp, and a better internet connection, that I'm going to attempt to start a movement to use the open source code to make a similar platform that actually has the intention of making the world a better place.
The first thing that will need to happen is removing "anyone can make fast easy money" from the equation. Maybe a user will need to get a minimum level of upvotes and verify themselves and their projects before being able to receive money. Maybe the currency will be setup to only be used within the network, banning it from being sold for fiat or other alt coins, essentially creating a merit based sharing economy within the network. People wanting to participate could pay a small membership fee and these funds could be used to cover costs. Leftovers could be split amongst the members of the site based upon their reputation. We could sell ads to community approved charitable projects as well.
The second idea, necessary to increase the amount of exposure to posts, would be to instigate a site wide post timer where the site can only take one post every 15 minutes. This wouldn't work for the pyramid scheme side of things but since gambling isn't the motivation, I don't think it would be an issue. This way, each user will have some chance of getting through the majority of posts in a day without having to spend hours scrolling through crap.
The other thing I'd want to implement would be a better tagging system, something that sorts tags into categories and limits posts to only a few tags, preventing the tag abuse that's ruined the chances of finding anything good on steemit.
I saw the potential for this platform in the beginning and realized that with the power that the whales have, if they stuck to their make the word a better place ideals, that steemit really could have made a dent, but as soon as I started participating, the problems with that idea became glaringly obvious. Their wish to grow the platform by any means just diluted the pool to the point that it's too nasty for me to keep attempting to swim in.
I'm here for the potential and not the quick money as well. Hoping we'll get through this stage of the evolution quickly.
I think the evolution will parallel that of civilization in general. For a looong time, humans were doing their own thing and living in harmony with their environment, just like the early adopter/innovators, moving along slowly but too spread out to make any big changes happen quickly. Then, sometime after the last ice age, for some unknown reason, people started agriculture, moved in to cities, started using money, and created government, probably due to a combination of laziness and fear, and civilization formed.
The only problem is that civilization is like a cancer to Nature. It is inherently unsustainable because it brings psychos to the top and requires constant growth. Steemit is attempting to follow this path by luring in anyone and everyone with money, centralizing their output, then placing lots of rules upon them through bots community rules, and it will likely end up growing virally, but as it gets bigger, the people and the content they post will devolve, just like has happened with civilization.
I'd like to help create something that doesn't need rules because the people allowed to participate don't need them. I'd like them to come based upon their desire to make the world a better place by collaborating with other innovators, not because of their need for money. I'd also like the platform to be decentralized so it's impossible for power to concentrate, or for one bad apple to spoil the bunch.
The more I think about it, the less valuable I think the open source code from this project will be. It might be better to base the new network off of something like diaspora instead, or invent something original.
Isn't 'people allowed to participate' just putting the rules up front?
I'm thinking that there will need to be something systematic that prevents people with the wrong mindset from completing the sign up process. IQ/personality test, some up votes from established users in a pre-forum, waiting periods, of maybe new members will need to get voted in. Anything to keep the masses out but let the intelligent, innovative, and altruistic in.
I will admit, I'm definitely over the infatuation stage with Steemit, but I see its potential. With announcements like Dan's earlier discussing a reputation system I expect it will in fact get much better, we just need to wait for it to come around. The first payout wasn't even a full month ago so there is a lot of stuff still to be worked out. As others have pointed out on other posts, there is still a beta tag on the top left of the site.
I heard the announcement too and at first, I thought it sounded like a great idea. Then I started thinking about how it will be implemented. If it's based on people's steem power and voting, it will be as inherently flawed as the main interface. I don't have any hope for the steemit version of this platform as far as creating change goes for one very simple reason, money is involved.
Steemit has been a neat experiment and I've learned a lot from it but since the whales running the show haven't shown any discretion in growing the user base, those wanting a platform that will create positive change are probably going to be disappointed. Instead of selectively upvoting people with altruistic ideas, they've opened the floodgates to the ignorant, brainwashed, masses. I'd really like to see an alternative where each member is vetted and upvoted based upon their actual merit.
Bring us such an alternative
I would love to but since having a stroke due to a neck injury, my coding/math skills evaporated, I have terrible chronic headaches, I'm busy with inventions that could improve millions of lives, and I'm home free and reliant upon a computer rescued from the garbage and free internet connections. I can spend a few hours per week posting ideas and collaborating with people that do have the computer skills to make such a thing happen though.
My intention with this post is to gather them, plant the seeds, and collaborate on the ideas. If you can help bring us an alternative, I'd love to work with you.
I've gotta go though. It's about to rain!
My 'coding skills' were learned at school on a TRS80 and at home on a Commodore 64.
lol! Mine were learned on 8086/88 xt's and Macintosh Classics! (There's no reply button under your comment. I think it's a bug here.)
I'll give you my upvote.
Please reciprocate in my post https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@gustavopasquini/hello-steemers-new-member-introduced-in-steemit-community-video
If you upvoted me just to get an upvote in return, please take your vote back. I found no value in your post so I don't feel like it should be upvoted.
Looks like this post's 15 minutes on the "new" page are over.... At least it managed to get one upvote! lol!