It's a very complex thing @mudcat36.
Steemit reminds me most of sites that date back to the origins of blogging; the first "social blogging" venues back around 1999-2000.
It was the birth of the "interactive" web; the idea of commenting was born, and people kept stories online and shared their lives and there was dialogue and interaction. Xanga, Diary-X, LiveJournal, others...
MySpace (first) and then Facebook were the game changers. The "social" part was distilled down to tiny "blips" instead of full-blown conversations. Social blogs didn't work so well for teenagers... too much work to get your dopamine fix. Hence the success of MySpace.
There are a lot of people on Steemit who miss those social blogging days... the sitting down and telling a story or sharing a well-crafted opinion piece, and then having an ongoing dialogue with your "subscribers." That's a large part of why I am here.
The "old" social blogging format and the new "short" format of MySpace and Facebook was — as much as anything — a generational split. Let us remember that MySpace came along at a time (2005) where it was just becoming (financially) viable for kids to access the web "in bulk." In earlier times, not only was "owning a computer" a $3000 proposition, but monthly Internet charges were HIGH.
Something was "lost" around 2006-07 when social blogging started its death spiral. Xanga — at its peak around 2005 — hosted around 32 million bloggers. They were left without a "home." I hated MySpace and FB... it was just "meaningless fluff" and a giant contest of who could accumulate the most "friends."
Meanwhile... these things are deliberately addictive. They have an entire FLOOR of developers at Facebook who go by the title "retention specialists." Their job it to make very single interaction as "addictive" as possible.
Steemit isn't that sophisticated, but they have the gamification of social media down, by luring people with "a few cents trickling in." It may not make much logical sense but it works on the same psychology as tossing a handful of coins into a crowd: People scramble madly to "get their hands on some," even though a few pennies and nickels have NO material impact on their lives.
It's what we do, as humans. Is it "dark?" I don't know... but it makes for interesting discussion!
=^..^=
Wow. What a beautifully written and thoughtful commentary on the post. Thank you for taking the time to create it. It brings back memories of shouting at people to get off the phone so the internet would work and a walk into the era of constantly being asked if one was on Face Book and listening to the pissing contest I used to hear those around me getting into on there friends numbers. I remember when these platforms really exploded in growth and I couldn't help but see them as an inconvenience. Later in life I saw how much of a persons time they held the potential to devour and the more negative impacts and I went from seeing social media as an unnecessary inconvenience to developing a dislike for it. The analogy of tossing coins into a crowd is incredibly apt. I must admit that monetary gain didn't lure me to Steemit but rather curiosity that snagged me. I've invested in cryptocurrency for over the past 6 years so seeing a content sharing site built on a block chain really caught my eye. I do wonder though how monetary incentive for content will play out in the long run in social media though. The drive for acceptance is a primal instinctual urge and logic doesn't always play a roll. The same with greed as pointed out in the analogy of tossing coins into the crowd. Logic takes a back seat as you said. Gustave Le Bon once said that in a crowd the individual disappears and that the surgeon, cobbler, and brick layer posses the same amount of intelligence. Group think gone frenzy because of a shared stimulus. Crowds when focused on a single shared point of outrage or positive stimulus like a sports team winning for instance behave erratically and chaotically. With social media sites strictly based on personal approval of ones self and ones acceptance of ones own person reinforced by the crowd the sharing is limited though it's sharing that provides the reinforcement. ... Well it can look that way and there's certainly a lot of lonely people with a lot of followers on Face Book. But the drive to gain wealth or a better word.. greed. That's a shared single focal point for most of us as human beings that can move us to frantic in many ways. Adding that to the mix could produce some very interesting results in the future in regards to how people interact through these platforms and in society. This isn't me saying monetary incentive in social media is going to cause mayhem on the streets or anything extreme, but it's certainly going to have interesting results if/when it grows to mass adoption. Hammers build hammers break. I suppose it depends on how we use them. I'm heading over to your blog to check out your content. Thank you so much for reading my post btw, as well as the wonderful commentary. :)