I first heard Maneco64 on YouTube say he was trying out some kinda crazy money-making social Steem-thing. Well, I'm thinking, that's obviously nuts ('cause you know the info never takes the first time). Eventually, I came across Jeff the Dollar Vigilante saying he made a million bucks on his first post (okay, $15,000, but the point was made). Maybe, just maybe this misspelled Steem-thing is something to look into. (Yeah, I came for the money.) But what gave me particular hope was the matter of content: no content, no Steem.
You mean, you guys want words? I can do words. Words and I are old friends.
Even better, an inviting place to get all these crazy ideas out of my notebooks with real-time feedback--sounds about like something I've been looking for my whole life.
But wait: there's more. As I poked around the Steem-i-verse a bit, I saw posters alluding to larger social transformations (or at least social media business modeling) hard-coded into Steem. Now what I'm seeing is something like this: what the money does is create much of the inherent incentive towards continual self-improvement (kaizen) of any entrepreneurial undertaking: it makes you give the best value in order to receive same. So what I witness here is noticeably more positivity than trolling, more encouragement than disparagement. Why? Because we're all invested in creating the personable, companionable atmosphere necessary for a thriving community. ("Don't open a shop unless you like to smile," right?) Likewise, the (polite) competition for eyeballs means folks work to post engaging, well-crafted material, meaning the content also seems qualitatively better. Better conversations over better material, with a payout at the end...maybe Maneco64 wasn't so nuts after all.