Yesterday, I wrote a bit of a rant on the very poor quality poetry that is often being posted on Steemit (not such a big problem) and massively upvoted (big problem). If you want to know what I said about it and are honestly open to hearing, take a minute and read that.

I will be writing a follow-up to that soon as well clarifying my position a little.

(hint: my intention is not to snuff out new artistic flickering flames or encourage us all to be cruel cynics.)

(image via www.pixabay.com)

Anyway, obviously if I’m going to stick my neck out and say, at significant personal risk of being disliked here, that a lot of what is being posted and supported is just plain bad and that that says something about us and about Steemit, it’s going to ruffle some feathers. It seemed to do that, but it also seemed to bear fruit in terms of a conversation of building a better quality culture on Steemit (amazing that these kinds of conversations are possible here, btw!). And so I feel encouraged to keep talking about quality on Steemit in general, and, specifically, about the arts as that’s my “arena”.

And that's what I want to write about today: the fact that, whether we want to acknowledge it or not, we are building a culture here; a new sort of quirky but real society even—and one that will have real effects in the world.

Steemit has the potential to eventually shift world dynamics. Actually. That is the potential I see in this platform—and not just in economics and with cryptocurrencies!

Steemit, to my mind, is ripe to be a leader in the curation of excellent culture, and to help us regain some semblance of taste and excellence again in the humanities and arts. This is for two reasons:

*One, that the community so far, on the whole, is an uncommonly intelligent community of people who are willing to have real conversations, ask hard questions, and tend to be people who don’t tow the party line, who see cracks in things and are willing to speak out about what they see--and all with a good sense of humour!

There are pioneers and thinkers and creatives here, and ones who are capable of rising to the challenge of developing a taste for excellence and quality, and using their voting power to share this excellence and quality with the (massively growing) user base, and to lift up the very best in the community.

In short, Steemit members are poised to be leaders in cultural curation because of their general giftedness.

(image via www.pixabay.com)

*Two, that Steemit is still a wee little baby in terms of being a successful social media platform.

If Steemit continues to take off, the kind of culture we set about building now will have way more effect than on a more established social media platform, because users coming into the platform will have to adjust to the existing culture we create if they want to succeed. It's much easier to set the tone from the start than to try to backtrack and fix it later.

If we are intentional about building a community that recognizes and rewards GOOD content at this stage, Steemit will continue to attract the most talented and intelligent and gifted people, and will challenge all users to be constantly growing and producing better quality content. And therefore it will also become significantly influential on the world stage.

Don’t we want that? And don’t we understand that if we reward poor quality, that that is what is going to become more and more common?

And the best writers, artists, thinkers, experts will leave due to such low engagement with their work. It won’t be worth their time.

This is already happening!

I’m not too fazed by poor quality being rewarded, at least in some respect from a personal standpoint, but it certainly is discouraging to think that I would have to compromise my work in order to make money on here. I certainly won’t be doing that, but it is the risk we take with our users—that they get frustrated and leave, or they lower the quality of their content in order to be seen.

For me, for altruistic large-scale reasons, I don’t want that dynamic to take over because I really think we could create something incredible here that would come at a key cultural time.

(image via www.pixabay.com)

However, even from an investment standpoint, isn’t the quality aspect of this platform the selling point? Because it’s a platform that demands a lot of its users, more serious bloggers and artists will be attracted to it. But those same people will get bored and tired and frustrated and will leave if they are not justly recognized. That’s just how it is. So even from a financial perspective, I think it is vital that we become VERY intentional about what we upvote on here.

Now, this of course applies to every subject matter under the sun that is being posted here. It is imperative that we only reward really good work, or people that we want to encourage because we see real potential in them. And I don’t mean everything has to be serious or perfect.. just good. I happily upvote funny things and silly things if they are done well.

Upvotes should mean something. You've got more influence than you realize. Make sure you make yours count!

Xx,
Kay

P.S. Happy to hear your comments and suggestions here!

If this conversation interests you, don't forget to follow @kayclarity. I write regularly about art, Steemit, life in general, and post my own poetry and music.