Sitting in a Ghost Town, Alone, Yet Together, Not Knowing Where We Are, Or Where We're Going

Many of us joined here for money. Despite what all sorts of people push about how we shouldn't be working towards money or some such...that's what many of us are here for. It's why we joined. There are other reasons of course.

Once we got here, many of us became parts of the community. We started to believe in this place. We became invested...both financially and emotionally.

We're here building up our accounts, building up our stakes, building our relationships, enjoying our time.

And here we are, Steem is in the toilet, replies are way down, interaction is way down, upvotes are way down, it feels like we're shouting into the void. The community I enjoy the most, steem.chat, might as well be dead, because so often people just don't reply. I like talking into the chat and hoping for people's replies. But then they just don't. Especially lately. They don't say anything. They're off doing other things. This place is frustrating and dead.

As the Steem price fell more and more, more and more of us started to question it. Those of us actually using the money we made here had less and less incentive to stay. A few dollars a day is technically possible to live on in many places...but a few cents? Is it even worth staying? Well, not unless you believe in the place.

All the while Steem is making a dive to the bottom, users are abusing the system we've been told this place is about. We're supposed to be getting rewarded for good content. We're also supposed to be able to get rewarded for normal social media actions. Yet there are people abusing users all the time for "shitty" posts. We should be able to post what we want...but we shouldn't necessarily expect to be rewarded well for that content... When we do work hard on content though, and others seem to be rewarded for what we view as shit, it can be a bit frustrating.

We're some of the few left. But it feels like a ghost town because so many have abandoned us.

And now is the perfect time to buy in...if we have the FIAT...but you also have to believe in the future of Steem. And that's questionable...but there is something here.

You can make a social network pretty easily. I've built a few myself. It pays pretty well to write them for others in fact. But Steem is different.

Here, you have a social network built on a blockchain, that through it's technology, pays the users in crypto, based on people's investment in the coin that is the basis of the network. It's quite ingenious in fact.

There are of course annoyances and problems. The 7 day payout particularly annoys me, since I have in fact spent time creating timeless content on here that's been mostly forgotten to the test of time. There are workarounds now though. There's also the annoyance of bidbots. And then there's trending.

Something that particularly annoys me, and makes me lose a bit of hope, is Steemit's lack of development. And now, today, Steemit announced they are laying off 70% of their employees and restructuring. That is particularly worrying for me, since it's seemed like development has been lax for quite some time now.

The changes to Steemit to improve the situation are not necessarily difficult. Perhaps Steemit will end up becoming a minor interface though, and it won't necessarily matter that much. I myself have decided to give SteemPeak a try. I find the posts from curation trails interesting, as well as the grid view, and larger vote slider.

I wish I had a few thousand to invest in Steem. Or a few thousand Steem to play with in trading to make more. But at the same time, I question. Would it be a wise investment? Probably...but maybe...maybe there's a chance it wouldn't be. What if Steemit does have too many financial issues due to Steem's low price? We will lose the primary developers in our open source venture. What if another blockchain social network pops up that does things slightly different and ends up far more popular. Thankfully they've been mostly shit so far.

So here we are. All of us that are left, in a ghost town, waiting for Steem to go back up, hoping beyond hope, maybe investing a bit, maybe scared to, maybe wishing we could invest more.

Frustrating, isn't it?

_{Faux Pas Ghost Town outside a Trading Post in Utah, USA
by Mike LoCascio 5 August 1999 CC BY-SA 3.0 (source)}