The motto of the old oil-powered world is "what can you do for me?"
The motto of the new steem-powered world is "what can I do for us?"
I have a post somewhere along the lines of this analogy :)
There is so much potential here yet there are also many short-sighterd individuals looking to take what they can and buy back into the past.
Agreed. The problem IMHO is the way the playing field was created / setup.
It created many whales early on, that now dominate/control the world via tools/methods that have far to much power. A bit like MSM does in the 'real' world. A few creating the reality for most via a controlled enviro.
Steem need to look at the rewards system in general.
All just my humble opinion :-)
Yes, it's easy to see all the ways the system has been gamed, but thats just a natural evolution of things.. Theres always going to be people that come in and try to take more than they give, simply because thats what they have been conditioned to do. That sort of behavior will start to dissipate when those people gain perspective on their fruitless attempts at getting satisfaction through egoic gain. They know no other way.
I'm sure that steem will evolve as a platform as needed - but I don't in any way feel like a victim of the earlybirds (whales) getting so much intiial influence and tipping the scales in their favor. They earned their positions.
To me, it's simply a wakeup call that we can't do this alone.
Its not about doing it alone.
Our connectivity and togetherness is whats going to pave the way to the life and world that we're all here for.
This is why voting bots are so popular - they create a sort of pseudo-community of resource allocation and cooperation. The problem is that they are inherently empty and ultimately just feeding into the same purposelessness and isolation that leads to chasing $$$.
I think the key is to join forces with others to create concentrations of value, and to do it with a deep sense of purpose that goes far above and beyond money and lambos. :)
Everyone wants to be a whale - but we have the ability to come together and form new types of alien organism and social ecosystems.
There's always a way forward.
Ah awesome :) Yeah I feel like i notice new layers of depth to the simple concept of "steem" every day. Like how theres the analogy of the sea (whales, dolphins, etc) - but we aren't swimming in water, we're swimming in steem, which is like water but elevated ;)
Also, countries are generally divided by landmass borders. There are many continents, but only one ocean. I would love to know how @dan and @ned came up with the name and what sort of meaning they embedded in it.
Regarding short sighted individuals - I have a feeling that this sort of dodgy behavior is actually a good thing, because it motivates us to get our shit together and start moving mountains.
For this experiment to be a successful alchemy, we need to assemble on a scale far larger than we've seen before - a collaboration of collaborations.. All the foundational elements are here - its just a matter of elevating the conversation and finding effective ways to make big things happen.
It starts with comments like these :)