SteemSTEM has grown a lot in the past few months, but with the growth came the problems. Our goals were simple:

• Promote good STEM content on the Steem blockchain;
• Create a community (with engagement and activities).

The first of these goals was achieved quite nicely, thanks in particular on some comfortable delegation we received a few weeks ago. Here are the statistics some of you may ask about how we use this delegation.

In blue, the number of posts we upvote with the steemstem account week after week. We are reaching some maximum those days, but very importantly, the exponential growth of early 2018 can be observed.

In green, the same information but presented in terms of the number of unique authors we upvote every week. We are probably not distributing STEEM as much as what could be done with memes or development projects, but this shows that the scientific (or actually STEMistic) community on STEEM gets sizeable.

Finally, in yellow, you can see that our weekly available voting power is mostly used at the 100% level.

However, to achieve this goal, our team members were slaved away to find, read and vote good content, engage wit the users on discord, in the comments of their posts. In other words, they work as much as you would expect for a full-time job with getting minimum pay. You can check the @steemstem wallet to see how much each get. And remember, none of the 19 involved people is eligible for curie-votes. In addition, some of them have a 60 hours per week job, dedicate 40 hours to steemstem every week and have also a well-filled private life.

In short, we do that mostly on a voluntary basis.

More and more people joined, more and more posts were voted ... more and more people complained. Yes, we all work for free to get barely a ‘thank you’ and mostly people complaining about their super-hyper post not being upvoted, or because their pay-check is not large enough.

The feeling of entitlement grew. And at the same time, number two of our goals barely happened. One small team cannot replace the engagement of a community: commenting, voting, encouraging each other. That is what we hoped our members would do. Some do. Most do not.

As a result of all of this, we will now take a break of a week and try to restructure.

There will be next to no votes from the steemstem account. We will not explain to you in detail why your post was not voted. We need some time to figure out how to carry on, why to carry on.

Because if the community is not a community but just a bunch of people trying to milk steemSTEM as much as possible, there is no reason to keep going. This does not have to be the end. We don't plan to shut it all down for good. We just need a break, some air to think. I hope you all can understand that.

And if you have ideas about how to improve, or about what you could do for steemSTEM, feel free to comment our post. We will try to answer everyone.

The steemstem management