How to Run Your Steemit Account in a Gift Economy - A Project For Minnows By A Minnow!

ghulammujtaba (59) in gift-economy • 7 years ago (edited)

So I have been reading a lot about the Gift Economy these days , a system opposite to traditional or market economic systems and I never knew about this system before joining this platform. Why am I writing this post? There are three objectives that I want to achieve from this particular post!

My Philosophy and why I think this system could be more beneficial for the humanity
How Steemians (Whales, Dolphins, Minnows) can do the same for the betterment of this platform
My little project that I want to start for minnows

First thing first, we all need to understand how gift economy works. I would infact call it a Nature Economy where everyone helps each other (Not including the monetary thing only) without an agreement to get something in return. You will find some great resources on the web where you can read more details about this system. I would suggest to read the information on Wikipedia and this article. Watch this video as well to get a better understanding of this system! I am done with the introduction thing, let's get back to the main topics!

Section 1 - My Philosophy (a)

Before I start explaining my boring philosophy, I want to ask you a question. Have you ever paid your mother for a cup of tea or coffee she makes every morning when you wake up? Or have you ever paid to your father who is providing you a pick and drop facility from your house to school/college/university?

No?

Then my next question is

Why?

The answer in most of the cases would be

Because they are our parents. We don't trade or exchange anything with our parents, infact nobody does! Since they are our parents, they don't demand anything in return for their favors, so that's a simple logic and how it works in a real life!

Quite right but now what I am going to share will sound stupid, lame and illogical to most of the persons reading this post, infact most of them would declare it as something impossible to achieve in this modern world! No worries but I will still be defending my agenda of this post and that is: We can implement the concept of gift economy in our daily lives!

Imagine you go to a coffee shop, drink whatever you want and in return, you don't have to pay anything, no bill, no tax! Next time, you go there, you see the owner holding a utility bill in his hand making some calculations if he would be able to pay the bill this month! You have been drinking coffee in his shop from a long time, so you think that this is the perfect time to return his favors! You take the bill, go to the bank and pay it! Sounds stupid, right? But this is the same thing you have been doing with your parents, siblings and friends, so why not showing the same gestures to someone who needs the same help? Yes, I agree that we won't be able to such a harmonious system in our lives, our corrupt governments won't let us live in peace and obviously, there are many people among us who may not accept this economic system but can't we implement the same in our daily life, like on a small scale?

Section 1 - My Philosophy (b)

My father was a millionaire person till 2000, I have seen him many times helping people in his office and some of my relatives who were not financially strong at that time but when he faced the same tough circumstances, nobody was there to help him. He lost his business, house, cars, everything except for his children and wife. I remember he sold his camera that he bought from Dubai just because he had no money to pay the rent! At that time, I was in 6th grade and being an immature and unaware of people's greediness, I used to think!

Why my rich relatives aren't helping my father? My uncle has four cars in his house, can't he give one of them to my father? We have to pay a lot of rent and my other uncle pay huge taxes every year on his 3 big houses that are located in posh area of Lahore, can't we live there?

These questions were answered when I grew up and myself experienced the changed behavior of people who immediately become strangers when you don't have a good bank statement. People don't invite you in their family functions because they don't want to meet people who don't have a car and ride on a Rickshaw. BTW, if you don't know what Rickshaw is, click this to see yourself!

Sufferings overloaded, enough! I decided to work hard, hard and yes HARD just to show some people that I would be showing the same attitude to them when I'll be a rich person (Though there were secondary objectives as well)! I worked 18 hours a day for almost 5 years and after destroying my physical and mental health, I realized that I wasn't on the right track! Earning money isn't bad, earning excess money with a germ of greediness isn't good, that's what I have learned from my own life!

To summarize this whole boring philosophy, now I try to bring a tiny positive change among the people around me through giving them some money out of my pocket. I won't be asking any donations or charities for them here, my philosophy is that if you want to help someone, you don't need someone to help you and then you help others! You help as much as you can easily afford and the same thing I want to implement on Steemit planet, I will explain the details in section three! Let's move forward to section two!

Section 2 - Steemit And The Gift Economy

I often read IF and WHEN statements on many posts like

IF I get the delegation from a whale, I will start the bla bla project for the Steemians

WHEN I start getting upvotes on daily basis, I will start helping the minnows

IF I get the delegation from @blocktrades or @ned, I will go to the moon and this will help the community!

Can't we do anything without whales/dolphins on this platform? We sure can do and you will see the details in the third section!

Let's come to the point! Apart from just upvoting, some whales here have been generously gifting their earnings to small accounts but yes, the number is too small! Opposite to that, a large number of big accounts are showing the usual/expected greediness of accumulating and hoarding their wealth, delegating their Steem Power to bots and in return receiving some great rewards on daily basis. I am not against this approach but isn't it like a CEO of a big corporate, wanting the maximum ROI? Whatever you decide, it's up to you but today, I imagined some major behavioral changes among Steemians while using this platform and would like to share them!

People here have started sharing their rewards with small accounts. @imagined-whale shared half of his SBD's to @imagined-minnow - Gift Economy
In return, @imagined_minnow transferred half of those SBD's to @imagined-minnow2 who has been working so well with consistency but with no success - Gift Economy
Though @imagined-minnow2 doesn't have enough SBD's in her wallet but she has decided to work with some unskilled people, teach them how to draw, code etc. to make sure she is also adding value to this platform! - Gift Economy
People have started some great contests for minnows but not with the restriction of upvoting and resteeming their posts. The sole purpose of these contests is to help emerging and creative talent on this platform! - Gift Economy
People have forgotten how the curation thing works and are manually upvoting the content they like! - Gift Economy

Paid bots are used by only whales to appreciate minnows work or to delegate some SP for one/two/three months! - Gift Economy

Pindrop Silence!

Section 3 - My Little Project!

From today, I will start finding some good Steemians, people who are sharing some quality stuff here! You don't have to do anything and there are no rules! I myself will look for people with a reputation score between 25 - 50 and have less than 50 SP. Once a week, on every Saturday, I will write a detailed post about that person how he/she is working, my reviews/suggestion on his her work and rewarding him/her 5 SBDs immediately! Adding to that, the rewards of that shout-out post would also be transferred to the winner! Okay, to be honest, don't expect some high rewards from that post, I don't use bots and I won't be pasting the link of this post to whales, asking them to help me grow this project! I would appreciate if someone voluntarily helps me expand this project but I would be perfectly fine with no big account sponsoring this project! Whatever SBD reward I will get, whether it's $1 or $100, it will be yours and will transfer them as soon as I receive my payouts!

Apart from this monetary reward, I will also offer my services of guiding him/her how he/she can start earning from the very first day and little tips to grow his/her account! It would be like a continuous coaching, gifting him/her some SBD's in the beginning and at the same time, keeping him/her motivated in the future, so that's the plan!

@anomadsoul made it quite easy for me to determine a good Steemian!

Is not permanently Powering down - nothing wrong with powering down a few weeks if you need money, but permanently powering down means you don´t trust the platform and are not very committed to Steemit.
Posts original and quality content - quality is subjective, but we all have a certain standard.

Cites sources whenever part of the content does not belong to her/him.

Tries to reply to the comments on his/her posts.

Comments on other people´s posts and gives some feedback to the author.

Does not selfvote more than once a day.

Does not use bidbots to get votes - nothing wrong to use them once in a while to boost a good post or to promote an initiative or project, but come on, not on every post.

Spreads his/her votes as wide as he/she can within their SP posibilities.

Hangs out in some chat channels regularly.

Approves at least 10 witnesses (30 would be better but well).

source

That's it! I will be posting my first shout-post this Saturday! Again, this isn't a contest but a project to look for some quality creators and reward them as much as I can, so don't spam my wallet or on Discord asking me to give you a favor! I will do all the legwork myself!

Love!
@ghulammujtaba

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gift-economy steemit minnowsupport community money

7 years ago by ghulammujtaba (59)

$19.53

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anmeitheal (45) · 7 years ago (edited)

sounds like a very noble undertaking @ghulammujtaba, I wish you much success with your gift-economy. Bye the way, my name is an old Irish word which means "a community working together to help and look out for each other". The community helps an individual within the group and then moves on to help the next member and so on. Thank you.