I still remember that hype about crypto in 2017. I've seen steem to be priced 8 bucks which seems so crazy now and everybody, well almost everybody was convinced it will turn 100 bucks in the near future and replace reddit, facebook and any other social media platform. Steem was being flooded with great quality content, genuine engagement very interesting people to engage with even thought at that time there were almost no dapps build on the blockchain apart steem.blog.
And to tbh it had it all to be there until it was corrupted bu human greed. Even in Steem whitepaper it says it is an experiment, and as any experiment it might always have two possible outcomes. And it is a bit sad to see that it turned into the less desirable one, at least for now. At first it began it's downward journey with autovoting which was dealt with through multiple forks, that it continued with curation trails. Quality content creators began leaving the platform, genuine engagement diminished to comments of few simple words if any and big numbers of autovotes for curation rewards.
I am still convinced that splitting curation and author rewards to 50-50 was a mistake but those types of things are decided by the majority and i am in minority it seems. And that is probably ok, i do not have such a deep knowledge of blockchain as witnesses have and might be they have a longer time frame perspective on things, i can judge only as a user and content creator.
I have even started a photography community that would reward photographers in steem for their quality images, onboarded quite a number of people onto the platform i.e. to steem as well. Sadly with the diminishing price of steem it also came to a halt little by little.
All that being said, it became a habit to come and share a post, a photo or to engage with few old school blockchain users in a few short words, but the overall experience is far from what it used to be, i can say that for sure.
I have earned quite a bit of crypto on my posts, so thank you for your votes even though my posts get voted automatically. I see some great initiatives like @Qurator @steemcleaners and others with the manual quration being performed on posts especially when i understand how time consuming and hard it is to find content on Hive, which is a bit weird considering it is a content based platform.
I might sound like a broken record, but i will repeat myself again. There will never be quality content created until there are convenient ways to search and discover that content. And for today it seems it would be the best way to engage with the platform by setting up a bot that would post content for me on a regular basis and auto vote on posts of selected users. And maybe it's what the future will look like: content generated by AI and consumed by AI and maybe that's where the future economy lies.
As for me, i'm an old school guy that used to love real engagement, discussions and differences in opinion, shared knowledge and discovering new things by interaction.
Bottom line is, that even though i have earned quite a stake through my content creation my biggest achievement is my rating of 70 that I've just achieved since monetary reward in today's valuation in not an incentive to me. full disclosure, i power down occasionally and trade my Hive on exchanges since in that way i can earn much more influence, than from my curation rewards. It is a protest in a way i guess to what this new paradigm turned into: money making machine based on how fat your wallet is.
I will continue to accumulate my stake through the means i find most effective in hopes that one day Hive will become what we wanted it to be. That we find a way and a key to a meaningful and rewarding online social engagement and i will be able to experience that thrill i used to have on Steem in 2017.
I am almost sure no one will read this text wall because time is so scarce and attention spans are so short, but it will remain here on blockchain as a testimony for myself and maybe some day i will read it again and be happy that things changed and turned out the way it was meant to be.
Thank you to all people that i was fortunate to meet here and have interesting discussions and share our experiences. However it turns out, we were the pioneers that were discovering new ways and new possibilities, however it ends. Have a great day everybody!
David
It's a long road to 70, so congratz! Agree with the need for true searchability on Hive - hivesearcher.com is functioning well, I'd hope it gets integrated in all Hive apps and built on for even more exciting and spontaneous content discovery as well. Cheers! See ya at 80!
I hope so too :) It seems you'll be waiting for me there at 80 lol
I'm with taraz, every vote i've given you has been manual, congrats on the 70! I'm just almost to 69 ;)
Thanks mate :) You'll be there in no time :) There are not that many 70és i guess lol
Congrats on your 70 and just so you know, every vote I have given you has been manual.
I even read a bit of it ;)
Thanks mate, you are one of a very few :) You are a super user of Hive, and that 81 speaks of that. Appreciate and value your support, your time and your genuine engagement :)
Don't know about Super, but I do have a lot of fun here - even if it is playing with myself ;D
Congrats on your 70 and I read it all 😁👍
Yeah, right lol
But thank you for your congratz!
Congrats on attaining 70! :)
Ahhhh, the good ol' innocent days of believing you work hard, put in good original content and get to earn from it! How could it all have gone wrong... Humans! And their human nature!! May we one day get back to that 'innocence'... (even if we have to force it down their throats!! 😂 ) Happy 70!
Yeah, you are so right, and i miss your sunsets so much, that have become more rare and rare :))) Thank you dear :)
Relatively new here, pretty clueless what it’s all about, I only joined to post my photographs and enjoy looking at others work.
Totally agree there is a less than average search method on here, it’s laborious which I don’t have the time for.
Exactly, and all devs are mostly focused on tweaking the reward system... which i quite pointless if overall content discovery is not enjoying. You can also take a look at BeScouted our attempt to bring a better UI and UX for photographers. It has remained on Steem however.
Ah! I’m not on steem anymore shame.
I agree the reward system isn’t clever,
I'm not on steem either, but the project still remained there since i can not find a dev that could migrate it to Hive :)
Ah ok,
Congratulations for that 70's REP score in only three years brother.
Lucky you and thank goodness that you've only dedicated yourself to publishing your photographs without adding too much sense of humor with weird, extravagant and cryptic words in your posts like me. One of those Old School chaps who has one year more than you on the blockchain and I've barely reached a 68.122 REP score so far.
Hahahaha
Cheers!! :)
Hah hah, that got me intrigued and i'll definitely follow you, love controversy :)
My name is Bond. James "controversy" Bond!! LoL
Congrats on reaching 70. I've been one of those manual voters and have always enjoyed your photo work. :)
Appreciate @captainbob and thank you :)
@tipu curate
Upvoted 👌 (Mana: 11/22) Liquid rewards.
Congratulations on hitting 70 Mate, great feat. Nostalgic feel too about the good old days of steem 😊