The Politics of Steemit and the General Monetary Ickiness of Life and Steemit

I’ve only been on Steemit for about two weeks. There are things that I like about the platform and do not like about it. It is still in Beta and of course is a work in progress.

So I finally voted for my 30 witnesses yesterday. Well, actually, I made @jerrybanfield my voting proxy because I didn’t really want to figure out what all of those witnesses were up to and whether or not they were worthy of my vote. So yes, I find politics generally confusing and not very emotionally rewarding, so I don’t pay much attention to it. (Side note: if you are a newbie and unaware of what witnesses are, etc, you probably want to check out Jerry’s post. The link is below)

https://steemit.com/witness/@jerrybanfield/steem-secret-6-witnesses-votes-give-the-most

So according to Jerry, these witnesses stand to make a lot of money when they receive our votes for them as witnesses. In his article he says that

“Votes on posts pay once. Votes for witness pay indefinitely up to 0.18 Steem every 63 seconds equal to over $300 A DAY in Steem Power for the top 20 witnesses!”

So, wow, these guys are basically the whales that everyone talks about right? They have the power to dole out money to the articles that we plankton and minnows write.

Then I started thinking, well, hmm, these guys have all the power to upvote what I write, I should find some way to kiss up to them, right?

But wait, no, that is wrong. That is me being purely self-interested and hoping to gain the favor of these guys in order to get money. It makes me feel icky about myself. This probably makes me a bad person, no?

So yep, there it is, whenever you throw money into any kind of equation, authenticity goes out the window. All gestures of kindness and friendliness begin to be looked upon with suspicion. We all have to start asking what a person’s real agenda is. Ick.

So no I haven’t made any major efforts to kiss up to the witnesses yet. I did follow a couple of their blogs though. Many of them don’t post many articles on here. Perhaps they are too busy writing code or setting up their servers to store the blockchain. Who knows?

What is the best way to interact with a witness/whale without being a gross self-interested greedy little minnow?

Yes, yes, they want us all to help build up this platform and bring more people to Steemit. Ideally I should post stuff about how I’m inviting my friends to the platform, etc etc.

But they also have more power than us. Just like in life, so many people out there have more power than us. We are always just a little less free to be our authentic selves when there is an imbalance of power on any level.

Just think about how the North Korean people are forced to treat Kim Jong Un like their God. Super ick.

So how do we change this?

Perhaps this will be a topic for my next post.

Thanks for reading everyone!