If we're honest with ourselves, most of us are here because of one little symbol:

Many of us like to think we're here for a decentralized, peaceful revolution leading to a utopian meritocracy, but are we fooling ourselves? Anyone who's been around cryptocurrencies for even a little while knows we have a long, volatile future ahead of us with regards to the STEEM price.

Will you be here next week if the price drops, and you no longer see $10,000+ posts on the home page?

Is it really about community with quality, decentralized, uncensored content?

Here's how you can find out for yourself:

1. Go to the Chrome store and install the Stylish extension. This lets you customize how you see other websites by automatically applying your own CSS style rules.
2. Create a new entry called "no prices" for Steemit.com with the following code:

.FormattedAsset {
    display: none;
}

It should look something like this:

Turn it on. Browse the site.

How does that feel?

Does it change how you vote for content? Does it change how you feel about the content you read? Does the site keep your interest as much as it did before or will you gravitate back to Reddit, Facebook, or Twitter?

I'm not bashing our emotional responses here. They are very real and important. They help us survive and thrive, and we've been programmed by marketers for quite some time to respond to the all mighty dollar. What I'm asking for is perspective and clarity. We don't know what the price of STEEM will be in 2 years. We don't know what the price will be next week. If we focus too much on the dollar signs all over the site, we can set ourselves up for disappointment.

Things will be volatile.

I for one am very hopeful. I'd love to pay off my house with STEEM and be in a position to give generously to others. That said, that's not my only motivation here. I truly want to see this work. As I said in my explainer video, Steemit is a decentralized social media platform built on blockchain technology which pays content creators and curators in tokens of real value.

Regardless of what the $$$ amount of those tokens ends up being, this is an amazing experiment, and I'm grateful to participate in it.

The Challenge

I'm going to keep my Stylish no prices plugin running for a whole day. For 24 hours, I won't see the dollar amount of the posts I vote on or the ones I write. Will Steemit still hold my interest? I'm about to find out.

What do you think about the motivational psychology of Steemit? Leave a comment, especially if you're joining me in this challenge. I'd love to know what your initial impressions are of the site without the mighty $ attached to every post and comment you see.