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It seems as though lately everyone has been bitching about how low Steemit posts payouts have been and how shitty that is (and I agree) but let me ask you this:

When was the last time you made ANY money posting on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or whatever social media you are part of??

Answer: NEVER

So stop bitching about the "little money" you are making here and realize two things:

• It's better than nothing (which is what you get with every other social media platform).

• The power of Supply and Demand.

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The biggest thing you have to understand about Steem is the supply and demand aspect. The amount of Steem available is decreasing everyday while the amount of applications that ride on the platform are increasing, making Steem less available hence more valuable. I know it doesn't look that way right now when you look at the price but that's because all cryptos are taking a beating in this bear market. Just trust me when I tell you that it will eventually turn around, even though it sometimes doesn't feel that way.

I think I last read that there are now over 350 apps on the Steem platform! That is amazing considering most of them have popped up in the last year or so. I have no idea what all of these apps are but you have undoubtedly heard of some of the bigger ones like Dtube, Dlive, Esteem and Steem Monsters (just to name a few).

Everytime one of these apps joins the Steem platform they need Steem Power (SP) in order to have enough bandwidth to run said application on the Steem blockchain. So not only do they have to gobble up a bunch of steem to get the app working properly, they then also get users to use their upvotes on that app (rather than steemit) so the amount of Steem that use to be available on Steemit (alone) is so much lower than it use to be. Rules of supply and demand are already taking place on Steemit and people have definitely noticed that the amount of upvotes are dwindling and that's because of all these extra apps.

I read an article the other day which did a breakdown of all the Steem in existence vs how much more will come out in the future (total steem issued is already over 53%) and then somehow figured that if you have more than 500 SP you are already in the top 1%. That is INSANE! Especially since SMT's (Smart Media Tokens) haven't even come out yet. When SMT protocol comes out we will have so many more tokens riding on the Steem blockchain and all of them will need to be powered with Steem Power, making Steem even less available and so much more valuable.

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So yes, we are in some dark times with cryptos being destroyed by the bear market of 2018, BUT this isn't a time to walk away from Steemit, it is quite the opposite really. It is a time to double down on posts and save all that precious Steem you earn because one day Steem could definitely be worth $100 apiece!

This whole ordeal with steemit and cryptos actually reminds me of a delayed gratification experiment I once read about:

The Stanford marshmallow experiment was a series of studies on delayed gratification in the late 1960s and early 1970s led by psychologist Walter Mischel, then a professor at Stanford University.[1] In these studies, a child was offered a choice between one small reward provided immediately or two small rewards if they waited for a short period, approximately 15 minutes, during which the tester left the room and then returned. (The reward was sometimes a marshmallow, but often a cookie or a pretzel.) In follow-up studies, the researchers found that children who were able to wait longer for the preferred rewards tended to have better life outcomes, as measured by SAT scores,[2] educational attainment,[3] body mass index (BMI),[4] and other life measures.[5]

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Bottom line is that the technology behind the Steem platform is growing at an exponential rate, regardless of how people feel about Steemit itself. Your Steem will be worth more in the future if you just hold on to it. You honestly don't have to even keep posting on Steemit to see your investment grow, just delegate and wait. However, collecting SP will only get harder from this point forward because of simple supply and demand, so is now really the time to walk away from Steemit? I think not. We will get through this bear market like all the others before, it is only a matter of time.

So even though the price is low at the moment, the technology is better than ever before and it just keeps improving everyday.

Forget about steemit for one minute, it's time to decided if you believe in the Steem Platform.

Stay strong my fellow steemians, I know we will make it to the top 10 eventually!

"Peace, Love and all that hippie shit"