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During my university days, I majored in Sociology, the queen of the Social Sciences. And I can boldly say that Sociology is an interesting academic discipline because it cuts across every sphere of human life. In fact, there is a Sociology of everything - as long as human beings are involved.
Basically, Sociology is the scientific study of the human society. Sociology concerns itself with the study of social relationships, how human behaviours are shaped by cultural environment.
A bad cultural environment, produces toxic people while a good cultural environment produces good people.
And talking about cultural environment, we used to have a very bad cultural environment on the Steem blockchain. Although we have many good people using Steem, the bad culture, as it would we expected, negatively influenced even the good people.
We once had a culture of vote buying which gave us a bad public image and made a few persons to mistake Steem for a kind of ponzi scheme.
It was easy for people to make profit using bid bots even if they didn't interact with the rest of us on the blockchain.
I know many good people who used the bots largely because others were using it and it was profitable and okay to do so.
But the new Steem has a different Sociology. The new Steem prohibits the reckless use of bid bots for the purpose of profit making. Instead, the new Steem encourages organic votes and human interactions.
Another Sociology of the new Steem is that upvotes have moved from mere altruism to mutual benefits. There was a time when curators had little or nothing to benefit for curating a post. Therefore, authors had to do some bootlicking to get upvotes.
But now curators are hungry to upvote good contents because they are also promised hefty rewards for employing their voting powers, bringing about a new era where hitherto struggling but talented authors are getting rewarded for their hard works.
Another important Sociology of the new Steem is the consciousness that a bad behaviour could be severely punished. With the introduction of the free downvote tool, which is still very much underutilized, bad actors now know that bad behaviours will attract severe sanctions.
The other day, a newbie made a racist comment on my post. I could have ignored him under the old Steem but, knowing that a free downvote pool was available, I flagged him to show my disapproval for his malicious comment and to instill some discipline in him.
Such is the nature of the new Steem - it awakens the police in all of us. We can now freely downvote the things that are inimical to the progress of Steem while rewarding good behaviour.
Not only that, another Sociology of the new Steem is the idea of making sacrifices for Steem - especially when such sacrifices will likely impact the price of Steem.
Everyday we see more and more people burning Steem. This was a very rare behaviour under the old Steem but it is not uncommon to see this happening in the new Steem.
The old Steem involved grabbing everything that the system could cough out, even though it involved strangling the system. But the new Steem involves giving back to Steem, because we are Steem.
Since I do not intend to make a Sociology class out of this article, I'll like to stop here but not without saying that the new Steem is one of the best things I've seen on Steem lately.
Until I come your way again, I wish you a full Steem ahead.
👍
~Smartsteem Curation Team