The little guy in the city

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I hear this term a fair bit these days on Steem and in some ways it is encouraging because it means people might actually be starting to think about Steem as an economy, rather than a free grab as it considers the various groups involved. Yep, I know that HF21 might cut Steem earnings from the "little guy" however, it is a move that has to happen in some way anyway.

I see Steem like a city under construction and unfortunately, people moved into take up residence before any of it was built, and these people were not necessarily builders themselves. There were no barriers to their entry and the potential for reward meant that people moved to greener pastures.

Out of curiosity, what monetized platforms were you earning on before your move to Steem? If this is your first real earnings on relatively social content like it is from me - these aren't greener pastures, they are the only fields we have known.

Anyway, the city is under construction but there are a lot of people who can't build but want to earn on the work they create. However to do so, they need a place to display their work; the opera singer wants a concert hall, the artist a gallery and the vlogger a video delivery application - but they don't have the resources to build these things themselves. So, people make do with the spaces available while complaining about not having better tools.

Slowly, the city starts to form as those constructing it begin to develop better tools and more space for creatives to do their work and have it seen, but the problem is, it is never going to advance quickly enough to temper the impatience of the internet culture.

Three years is an eternity!!

No it is not.

Also, what people are comparing that three years to is development within a centralized organization where a tiny group of decision makers not only decide and tell what is to be done and by whom, but also have the resources to pay them enough for their efforts that they do not need to go out and do other work for food.

Now, in the bad old days, cities were formed by collectives of workers with various skills who would come together and decide that some services would be better off centralized at a point that was more readily accessible for those who need them. You know, the post office and local store kind of thing. The people who would have the most accessibility to these services were those who lived in the city, but those who built and stocked the city services were generally those who lived out in the farm lands.

The land owners were always the ones who had wealth because they owned what kept the city stocked and paid for the development of the distribution points in the city. The city dwellers were generally the renters with narrow city-based skills that would only be useful when there was a city and people who would act as customers.

These days, it is the platforms that are the service points within the city but just like the old days, it is those who finance and build them, in other words, the owners who will gain benefit from them. We can see this in the way Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and all the others are able to take trillions of dollars and offer very little back to the user base.

When was the last time you got paid to do your grocery shopping?

But, it is very convenient to go and buy products that you have no idea how to grow or make yourself from all over the world without having to do any of the work to learn, source, order, gather, assemble blah blah, isn't it? Convenience is a massive driver of adoption.

It is too hard to sign up, the keys are confusing, there are no content filters, I am not getting seen!

The city isn't ready for all the users to have access to all the convenience obviously, so development is needed. But, that development isn't going to happen via all of the city dwellers who are waiting for better tools to show off their work, it is going to come through the developers and people who are looking to own the service points, the platforms.

The beauty of Steem is that everyone with stake is an owner and, pretty much anyone can have their voice heard to affect development. While there are people saying "no one listens to those without stake", there are other people getting listened to without stake. You want influence - you better earn it. OR BUY IT.

How I see it is that this city has the potential to include millions and maybe even billions of citizens without any of them having needing to be governed by a central point of service as pretty much anyone can develop whatever they want, as long as the code allows it. Not only that, everyone in this decentralized city can be an owner if they choose to be.

That ownership might not be at the city infrastructure level though as that require Steem and that is limited. But, through the tokenization of communities , business and every platform to come - the ownership of all the buildings above Steem, can be distributed far and wide across the land and in the hands of those who build and those who use and create for them. It is quite an incredible opportunity and because the resources needed to live and use the city are very low, pretty much anyone can take part and benefit.

But, benefit means what?

How much do you think the creatives on YouTube and Instagram made at the beginning and, how much of the first ones to be monetized did so through the centralized platform functionality? I would say that PewDiePie or whatever his name is wouldn't have been making millions in 2005 as a creator on YouTube, or in 2008. The possibility of "paid to create" on the internet is relatively new and, it has been driven by centralized platforms that take the lions share because they don't sell the creators, they sell the data the creators funnel to them.

You want access to those trillions? You not only have to own your data, you have to also have places to show that owned data that are going to let it be seen without having to take an exorbitant fee for the "privilege". What Steem is building is an economy where the relationship between creative and owner is not only symbiotic, it is also intertwined with a great deal of crossover.

The Steem city that is building is going to be a highly complex system of interactions that go far, wide and deep across the various layers to create a matrix that pins the highest points to the foundation and, the furthest points to the foundation. The only way to manage this level of diverse interaction and still be able to track ownership and calculate earnings is through a blockchain. And the very process of doing it this way takes a great deal of the hidden out of the economy so that there is a greater degree of transparency that people can not only learn from, but change their behaviors with.

What I find is that all of those people who claim to be or fighting for the "little guy" on Steem do not realize that everyone here has the chance to be a giant in a world where technology works for us because,

we own it.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]



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20 comments
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I use to write on Medium and now and again would earn a small earnings. I think that was my first exposure to earning any type of pay of my effort on a social platform. It was fun but not as satisfying as on Steem.

One thing that always annoyed me about Medium (and others too) was that they were secretive about how they determined who gets paid what, only allowing us a brief explanation.

So I will take understanding for how earnings work and freedom Steem offers any day.

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FRom what I have heard on Medium is that consistent support requires getting picked up by their publications and that is by targeting the editors. sounds like fun...

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That sounds about right. It's another form of having to deal with "gatekeepers" to allow our works "chosen" like in traditional publishing. sure we could publish on our own pages but to far far far less views and usually no pay unless you had a massive following and many of those followers took the time to spend on your page.....

Steem is much simpler.

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In a way it is. But on Medium you don't have some stockholders creating shitposts and helping themselves to large rewards from the company coffers as their stake allows.

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They don't really need to, they take the cut before it ever has a chance of distribution. Eventually the Steem layer might be the same I think.

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The shareholders meeting decides what ROI shareholders are entitled to. No shitposting needed.

Posted using Partiko iOS

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Yep. What percentage of the entire revenue of YouTube do you think goes to contributors?

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(Edited)

I don't know. But what I know is that there are no constant battles between shareholders visible to the whole world over what ROI a shareholder is entitled to and by what mechanism, some of which mechanisms are very harmful to to business. Infrastructure maintenance takes 10% on Steem. Development will begin to take another 10% as of next Tuesday. Steemit Inc, delegates millions of SP to bidbots. So do most other large stakeholders. There is not much stake left for contributors after all when it comes to content rewards that are not paid for.

It's still better than what most could earn from advertising on their blogs elsewhere. Much of that is still attributable to crypto hype even after the bear market. It's the crypto boom in which we still very much are that makes all this possible. Steem is a content creator's paradise because, I think mainly because STEEM is a cryptocurrency.

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Not sure about Steemit Inc delegating to bidbots.

It is going to be a much better situation when the various groups are separated out. Communities and SMTs should be able to do this more.

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Not sure about Steemit Inc delegating to bidbots.

@freedom is delegating half a million SP to bdvoter, a million and a half to @rocky1, a million and a half to @therising, and a million to @upmewhale. It is also delegating to many valuable projects and the quality-sensitie @ocdb, to which it delegates about three million SP.

I believe it belongs to Steemit, Inc among many other such voting accounts.

It is going to be a much better situation when the various groups are separated out. Communities and SMTs should be able to do this more.

I think abuse prevention will be much easier when curation becomes more of a thing in communities that at the base layer.

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Freedom is not necessarily Steemit Inc, despite all the rumours.

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Oh! I already clearly disclosed to who belongs @freedom account seven months ago. But if you or @markkujantunen don't trust in my word. Just tell me. either of you both. And I will release more blunt & convincing proofs to back my allegation and instantly dissolve the rumors. };)

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The gatekeepers hold more than what content gets rewarded these days and if one happens to get their attention - they are forever at the mercy of the gatekeeper preference and changing tastes. If you lose favor, all is lost in an instant - including the audience one might have worked very hard to build.

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If seems it is best to choose and build ourselves up to the point where we are not as depending on a few people and their wims. Not always an easy task but it's something to work towards.

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Full self-reliance might be out of reach on the internet, but there are ways to provide and reduce the risk of disenfranchisement - we are doing that here.

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(Edited)
That ownership might not be at the city infrastructure level though as that require Steem and that is limited. But, through the tokenization of communities , business and every platform to come - the ownership of all the buildings above Steem, can be distributed far and wide across the land and in the hands of those who build and those who use and create for them. It is quite an incredible opportunity and because the resources needed to live and use the city are very low, pretty much anyone can take part and benefit.

Most people seem to have a rather limited ability to help themselves instead of using middle men or demanding that an authority fix things for them. When socialism crumbled in Russia, a lot of ordinary people had no idea what the shares of privatized companies they were initially issued (typically because they were employees of said companies) were actually worth. People who understood that were often able to buy up stock at rock bottom prices.

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March in the streets and demand slightly better conditions from the slave masters!

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Well, I majorly agree with the way of thinking on this post. And just for this, I'm gonna ReSteem this post to fuel the discussion further.

I recall that most of our generation back in the days when we were childs. We tended to believe that only knowledge would be necessary to succeed, thrive & flourish financially and economically speaking.

In the measure I was growing, observing things closer around with dissective greater interest and deeper curiosity. Early enough, still being a child, I could notice that mainly the power of money, reputation (authentic, forged or fake), good contacts & relationships and the influence exerted on all these. Had way more muscle in the success department of this financial & economic earthly world. But admittedly, we didn't allow these facts distracted us from our previous premise and goals. We were obviously willing to change the world.

Once we had acquired all the necessary academic instruction and valuable longed knowledge. But above all, the responsibilities of adult life away from the comfortable shelter funded by our parents. We started to watch things with a whole new set of colorful glasses, where when we started to watch back in the past, wearing this brand new set of colorful glasses, things tended to look a bit greyish.

We then started to revisit and questioning why we ignored the early signals. Why we insisted to follow our own mirages. And why we didn't opted to be a little bit more pragmatic.

I reckon I am older than most around here. But I guess you youngsters get the point.

Certainly we are now on the verge of a substantial change of paradigm in the financial revolution and economics department. That probably, if anything, technologically just now, is that eventually the long-held faith and belief in the mirage that previous training, instruction and knowledge could manifest itself as the most valuable asset to hold in order to finally reach success & ownership in this earthly world.

I know that today, I've already arrived too late to this party. And most likely I won't be here to witness from the first row all these lifetime longed changes. Freedom, independence, equality, fulfillness, prosperity, self-sustainability, ownership and worldwide happiness among many other things which may well be around the corner, or maybe not. But nonetheless, we tried it.

Right now I'm living in Venezuela. And with a good bunch of decades on my back after childhood. I can still witness that neither tycoons nor wealth landlords, builder groups, industrial developers & field producers, technologists and scientific researchers, educators, artists, craftsmen nor growers of authentic skills & abilities, not even the mere workers at the bottom of the food pyramid who actually make possible the actual generation of products & services that we currently consume. None of them have reached yet the long-awaited mirage. Certainly never before and not yet either. But surely a change has to come. Sooner than later!!

Meanwhile, I am still able to observe that it still endures over time, that only the middlemen, brokers & traders, the merchants and a large amount of usurers and speculators of all kinds who never in their life have sown, cultivated, created or produced not even a single shit from zero ever. Without education, academic training or special knowledge of any sort. And the less scruples the better. Are indeed the ones who appears to enjoy and get closer to the proverbial mirage.

Obviously, until someone with enough pebbles in their pockets and a good sling, start to line up their humble artillery to make explode in thousand pieces the invisible mirror where they reflect each other.

P500B
[ a Steem original ]

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Great analogy! We are truly all builders of what we want to create here and the changes will not do anything less than continue that construction of what the ecosystem evolves into.

Posted using Partiko iOS

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Hello!

This post has been manually curated, resteemed
and gifted with some virtually delicious cake
from the @helpiecake curation team!

Much love to you from all of us at @helpie!
Keep up the great work!


helpiecake

Well written with a clear perspective.
Manually curated by @akiroq.


@helpie is a Community Witness.
For more information about our project,
please visit this month’s UPDATE post.

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