Hello! This is a part of my series of analysis and commentaries on Steem and the Steemit platform, hope you enjoy this post.

T is for Trust

Trust. It's one of the building blocks of society. It is the building block of our social, personal and intimate relationships. We could say that it is the building block of life itself. It is the basic necessity of the human life so to speak. But what if we don't trust each other? What if there is no trust?

Trust leads us to success. Without trust, it is hard to live in the everyday world. Relationships fall aparts, communities fall apart even nations, empires and countries fall apart without trust. So why am I talking about this again?

Trust and Steemit

Because it is the most important thing for Steemit. It is one of the biggest assets Steemit should have. My analysis on this can be divided into two parts which as follows.

1. The Hack

Prior to me joining the Steem community, a cyber attack took place in which many accounts were affected sadly. I have talked to some of the people who felt let down by the hack and decided not to join the community again even after the developers said that they would reimburse and reinstate the affected accounts. I wondered, why would anyone not want to come back, even when they are getting reimbursed. I asked a friend of mine whose account was affected and he said that because he didn't believe that Steem had enough security. That another attack may occur anytime and that he would lose all of his Steem again. I asked him many times on different occasions about this and he always told me different (if not the same) reasons. I came to the conclusion that obviously he lost trust.

Once someone loses trust in something or someone, it is almost impossible to get it back. He can never develop that same blind trust that he once had. He would always either be cautious (which is a good thing) or never trust at all (which isn't). Stephen Covey puts it brilliantly:

Trust is the glue of life. It's the most essential ingredient in effective communication. It's the foundational principle that holds all relationships.

It is indeed the glue of life! You see, it is the glue of communities too. It is the glue of countries, nations and empires. It holds them together. And if there is no glue, the whole thing falls apart.

What I mean by all this is that in spite of what happened, we should learn to give somethings a second change. Everybody deserves a second chance and we should always be ready to give them that chance when the need arises. In my honest opinion, the whole Steemit community including the devs have learned a lot from the hack. Even though it was the worst thing that could have happened, it held lessons that needed to be learned.

I mean, the developers have introduced a new security system as posted by @dan. And even now, there are a ton of amazing articles on how to increase the security of your account. I see these posts every day with the most recent one's being the one @arhag posted. I love these kind of posts as they not only add so much to other posts like them but they show how much the Steem community cares about its members.

2. Recent Userbase Surge and Poloniex

As I mentioned in my previous post, Steem has seen a tremendous increase in site visits and new users. A ton of which come from the crypto-currency exchange site Poloniex. For those of you who don't know, Poloniex which is one of the biggest crypto-currency exchange sites listed Steem which is well as close as we get to being officially recognized by the crypto community.

A lot of the respected traders and crypto community members use Poloniex as their favorite exchange site and Poloniex is deserving of such praise because of it's incredible community, moderators and support. If you go to Poloniex right now, chances are that you will see people talking about Steem in the trollbox, telling each other to go and sign up on Steemit if they haven't already.

People trust Poloniex. If someone respected and well-known tells you in the trollbox to go and sign up for Steem, you don't doubt him and say "I don't know you, you probably are trying to scam me!". You go and sign up for Steemit because you know that these kind of people are major assets to a community. They don't do petty things like scamming.

This user-surge means that a lot of new people who probably need guidance are joining and we should try our best to help them. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying to blindly trust either because that's very dangerous. You research and then if its all good and true, then you trust. Remember, there is nothing wrong with a little doubt.

H is for Honesty

Every once in a while, you come across a post that doesn't feel very honest or open. If you really want your post to trend, it is extremely important that you be honest. Honesty and open-ness are the keys to success. Some people put little to no effort in their posts and get jealous when someone's post trends. When they read that post, they don't try to see what's right with this one and what's wrong with theirs. Instead, without even reading, they immediately hit the downvote button. They feel like if they didn't trend, nobody should.

Believe it or not, there are some people like that. They are there in every community. But jealousy isn't healthy for an infant community. It eats them inside out.

My request here is that we should be more open, honest and welcoming to criticism. These are the ways we can have our names up in the Hall of Fame. We have the potential to become the next killer app, which is something we as a community should focus.

So let's make 2016 the year of Steemers. The year of Steem.