Record Scratch Freeze Frame You might be wondering how I ended up here.

After purchasing a home and having very little capital, I gathered up what I could from my piggy bank, my laundry lint filter and those narrow spaces in between the couch cushions and put it into Steem to see what would happen.

Little did I know about the true nature of the journey for which I was embarking.

          I went through a few stages on Steem. First, was the “fly on the wall” stage, a time that I was not very involved but was rather learning to test the water.

          My original intention for joining this platform was religious in nature as I belong to a very niche group who believe a very particular set of things about a particular person in history.

          If you haven’t been living under a rock or on the Sentinel Islands (RIP missionary dude), you’ve probably heard of the person. Regardless of the nomenclature you use to identify this person, the important thing is the propositions that describe this person which drastically differ from community to community.

And the religious tangent starts in 3, 2, 1...

          When you have a friend that you know very well, it goes without saying that you should be apt to describe that person and, yes, that means WITH WORDS! Like I know my buddy Carlos. I know he has has black hair and is kind of short. If someone else says they know Carlos too but describe him as a bald headed guy that is average height. I'd reckon we are not talking about the same Carlos.

No, that's the wrong Carlos

          I know some may be well aware of the pastorism of “Preach the gospel and, if necessary, use words.” which I have mentioned previously. That sentiment may look good on paper but it nevertheless presents a falsehood suggesting the gospel is not something apprehended with mere intellectual assent. Often, this sort of flawed theology is coupled with a flawed philosophical anthropology. Here's an article written by my brother and friend, David Bishop that dismantles the faulty reasoning of the mere intellectual assent fallacy. He's much more experienced at explaining these sort of things but, be warned, it can be kind of heady material.

Philosophical anthropology, sometimes called anthropological philosophy,[1][2] is a discipline dealing with questions of metaphysics and phenomenology of the human person, and interpersonal relationships.
Source Wikipedia

          They often purport we possess a dichotomous nature existing of head and heart. The rise of this concept was been suggested to be correlated with the rise of gnosticism. Here is a short tidbit on that as well.

These systems believed that the material world is created by an emanation of the highest God, trapping the divine spark within the human body. This divine spark could be liberated by gnosis. Some of the core teachings include the following:
All matter is evil, and the non-material, spirit-realm is good.
There is an unknowable God, who gave rise to many lesser spirit beings called Aeons.
The creator of the (material) universe is not the supreme god, but an inferior spirit
Gnosticism does not deal with "sin", only ignorance.
To achieve salvation, one needs to get in touch with secret knowledge.

Source Wikipedia

          As can be ascertained from the above about gnostics, knowledge is the key to their salvation. This fits the template of any works righteousness system. You do x,y, z things and earn yourself a GOLDEN TICKET into those pearly gates.

Sound too good to be true? It's because it is.

So, if you go out of your way to acquire the correct set of knowledge, you're good, right?

         No. There is a decided difference between knowing of a gospel and believing upon it. It's like knowing that there are claims that a certain chair can hold your weight and actually putting the chair to the test.

Now that's a sturdy chair!

          You can't hedge your bets with the blood of the Son. You're either all in or you're out. You trust in the provision or you do not. There is no in-between and I would like to make that abundantly clear especially to the religious crowd still running on the never-ending treadmill of works. If your perceived assurance is based on your deeds in any sense, I contend that you have no assurance in His death and it alone.

          So, don't think that walking 100 ladies across the street is going to get you above the threshold. Sorry, doesn't matter if it's 100 or 1000. . No amount of ladies you can help or kittens you can save from burning buildings or anything that is going to make you righteous in God's eyes.

          That's because everything we do is already tainted with self-righteousness. What happened in the garden of Eden was no accident. Don't you know everything has been set to glorify the Son in the redemption of a fallen world.

          If you are one of His, He will impart the necessary knowledge and also import the disposition to believe upon it... and that is with your mind, your intellect.

         Contrary to popular belief, our hearts do not possess a distinct type of knowledge. Yes, I know that stands at odd with the lines you hear in entertainment about believing things in your heart. Your heart is an organ. It pumps blood. It doesn't think. Heart in the biblical context means more of less the center of your being and, guess what, that includes the ol' noggin.

Ok, so now you may have an idea of why I came to Steem and the message I hoped to proclaim every now and again.

_{TL;DR: Salvation is in Christ ALONE achieved by His perfect death}

Now, back to your regularly scheduled programming about my thoughts on Steem

          I've spent 2 years here and I have learned much about this network and the incentives. I know... I'm about to do it.

The Misalignment of Incentives Discourage Good Work Ethic

Yes, we're talking about incentives for the eleventieth time but why not? It's not fixed.

Why would users not be demoralized in this scenario?

          Let's say a user works diligently to build the platform via quality content creation or other activities such as development of tools to enrich the ecosystem. They later find out that there is a mechanism through which less meaningful activity is rewarded similarly. Imagine how that shit feels? It's not a good feel.

          Despite sparring with these feelings, I still manage to put in the effort despite it. Many of us put so much time and effort and it's disheartening to see the kind of bullshit that gets a pass 'round these parts.

Yes, I'm talking about the trash voting bid bots

_{but let's not forget about the bullshit circlejerkers that gave rise to them..}

          If you create a pathway for low quality contributions (I use that term loosely) to get voted, what are you going to get? (Don't think too hard)

... More low effort contributions!

          If something can be gamed, it will be gamed. Is Steem a mere free-for-all money grab or ought we to be working to build something better? If the latter, how long are we going to endure the dead weight free-for-all people riding on the coat-tails of the builders?

          Both the circle jerkers and vote sellers are a problem. To not use so many words, their effect is essentially to lower the bar of the type of effort that is rewarded and give new users false expectations. If you're not in the in crowd or buying votes, good luck because you'll need it. (Or learn to kiss ass I guess.)

And we wonder why high user attrition is a thing?

          I can rant all day about the distribution and sketchy voting practices but let me sum it up in a list of the more serious problems of this platform and / or the culture of the user base.

• Users that opt out of bid bot use and focus on growing organic support are at a significant disadvantage.

          Anybody that has any shred of integrity know that bid bots are problematic for a number of reasons. Foremost, is the ease of getting rewards and positive ROI on low quality user contributions which undermines the entire reward mechanism. Again, why should any of us bust our ass to produce exceptional content when bots enable non-exceptional content to receive exceptional rewards???

• Rise of Narcissistic Personalities

          Let's face it. If you want to find a narcissist, all you need to do is check out trending. It's full of people that think their opinions are more important than the rest of us. The pretentiousness of some of the higher rep accounts is surely a turn off to many on the platform. This is compounded by the fact that the bid bots usually offer some sort of ROI, these type of users also get to grow faster than the more genuine users seeking organic support are generally going to struggle to keep up. If I am intent on not paying someone to vote on my work, should I even continue on this platform or am I playing a fool's game? I know what some of you may be thinking.

Why so negative???

Fun Fact: I'm actually O-Neg. Universal Donor. If you need some red juice, I got you fam.

It's difficult for me to be optimistic about this platform after hearing @ned's latest live stream.

          As many of you know, I put in a shit ton of time developing off-chain anti-abuse projects such as @steemflagrewards which is dependent on Steemit Incs API nodes. One of the things that was discussed was decommissioning those nodes and requiring dApp / bot owners to pay for RPC node access. For one, I've never taken profit from the bot. The compensation I receive are upvotes from you fine folks. You are the good people that keep me around this place. I'm not powering down just yet but the loss of public RPC nodes is really a big deal to me.

Being able to serve and entertain others with good botting is a big part of what I do and losing that would be a big hit to my confidence in the platform. I hear the argument of dApps needed to get off the tit so to speak especially those that make a profit but the future is uncertain for those of us whose bots are not designed for profit but for fun. I would be disappointed to see !popcorn or !rabbit to be no longer sustainable to operate.

With all this being said, it seems like dark clouds around the horizon.

What does it mean to me if Steem were to zero out and become a derelict blockchain?

• About half my Steem had been purchased so obviously that would be taking a big 'L'
• Countless hours contributing will be another big fat 'L'.

But there is ALWAYS a silver lining! What would I have gained from this experience?

• Countless skills that I have picked up in the last couple years. Python, GitHub, Ubuntu and DIscord to name a few. Guess, if nothing else, I have a few more resume bullets.

• I have made a lot of friends whose friendships I value deeply. Wouldn't trade that for some coin!

• Hard lessons learned about investing. Been caught on the wrong side of a few too many dumps and I'm a hard learner...

It's not all doom and gloom but it is a situation in which I feel greatly humbled...

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          Think it's important for folks to hear a critical voice in contrast to the almost cultist optimism that others seem to present. Often, these folks aren't really at a loss monetarily or otherwise have a business agenda biasing their presentation. I am not guided by any such agenda but rather trying to be realistic and honest with people. Take it for what you will.

For the record, I don't shill. I keep it real.