Did you come here to get paid for likes?

Steemit is a truly innovative social media platform, however from the point of view of user comfort, contacts availability, and unique content it still seems at a level of a large discussion forum and is far behind the corporate giants.

And yet we are here. Each of us joined for our own reason, but I wonder how much of that motivation do we have in common.

I remember back in 2017 when I was joining in on my first account (@wellwild - to which I unfortunately misplaced the master key) my reasons included mainly excitement about block-chain technology - I was investing in multiple block-chain projects and currencies at the time and it felt like being in on the early days of internet. The feeling of freshness and innovation.

I wanted to contribute and be part of everything as much as I could. I loved the idea of enhanced privacy, complete transparency and people being in control of their own data. When I' heard there are projects that pay the users for viewing ads (instead of paying corporations to display those ads to users for free) and platforms that reward users for creating value through content and social interactions it seemed so utopian to me.

I've created my account and over the span of the next two weeks I wrote a couple articles. I got some likes too, and here likes mean money. At first I was super excited. I thought "wow, that's for real". But as with all utopian concepts the line of flip to dystopian execution is very thin.

Most of us know, that social media is so addictive, because of the endorphin release caused by our brains reward system, which fires readily when we get our content liked and when we receive attention. If you've ever received a large amount of likes for something you posted, you know what I'm talking about. For many users it didn't take long before this pleasure became the main motivation of creating content.

Social media became a race to share better things - better looking selfie, be on a better holiday or a party, be more trendy with the pop-culture. And all of this at subconscious level was motivated by the potential reward.
In my personal opinion, it flooded the internet with repetitive egoistical low-actual-value information, making it even harder to find really worthwhile content on these platforms.

And as easy it was to forget that we were there to share and not to compete on fame with the likes alone - how much easier it is to forget that when likes mean payouts, especially if you live an poor country?

I see a lot of content on Steemit, which seems to be created with the point of getting these payout likes. Is it being flooded with this content? It's hard to say, I wasn't here regularly for a while, but there's a lot of it. A lot of careless re-posts of information from media and very little actual passion and originality.

Steemit - to me - has a face of platform where people go to post stuff, not where they go to read and consume. This cripples the potential significantly, as it makes it "creators-to-creators" platform. I feel like there isn't enough actual passive audience. I don't consider myself a passive audience on steemit, I came here to share. I'm sharing because I believe I've got something interesting to show or point out and I can do it in an efficient, easily digestible manner, but the moment I start getting upvotes and payout likes, it's hard not to assume the hoarding mindset and try to promote my posts to get even more of this steroid likes(often by weird means, like commenting on other peoples post, referring back to my post).

I don't have any real life friends who use steemit, so I feel like I'm here alone, I would really like to feel like a part of a community here and not just a random blogger. It would be welcome to have some more "connecting-people" functionality built into the platform.

Of course I wouldn't dare to completely generalize and I'm sure some of you who invested more time and explored it more deeply managed to find loads of value and actual social fulfillment in this platform, but it doesn't seem like it's part of the design here.

So? Why did you come here? What is steemit for you? Do you agree with points I made and do you see these problems as problems? Can you point me the socially active and alive part of Steemit?