Why do I think the Venezuelan community can be beneficial to Steem?

^{Source: Wikipedia}

Lately I haven't had much time to sit at my computer and write a post, I've been reading content around and leaving comments, but I haven't had time to think about writing something and doing it quickly. I have an important chess tournament on Friday and I'm training from 9 am to 2-3 pm, I just get home after training, have lunch and sleep and then get up at 5 pm to train again until 10 pm and then sleep until tomorrow. But this time I'll sacrifice my sleep to tell you an idea I've had lately that really sounds interesting.

Steem is currently not at its best, that's obvious, but I think that makes inviting people to Steem right now really an opportunity to keep them in the community for a long time. It's obvious that better times will come, not only for Steem, but also for the crypto market in general, the number of people who will go crazy for cryptocurrencies (again) will be really big and I think it's a very good time for people to see how beneficial it can be to invest the time in this blockchain.

Why do I think this is a good time to invite content creators or content consumers who are active in the community?

The short answer would be: Because Steem is not at its best.

By this I mean that people who are able to join the community will not know exactly this, it will not affect them as much as people who have been in the community for a long time and have not given up even though everything has been declining in economic terms. People who can join will only see Steem economically in the same way we did when we created our first account here, a social network where everything is recorded in a blockchain and where you can earn money by actively participating in the community and creating quality content, simple, right? The people we invite right now (at least most of them) won't think something like "Well, there have been better times before, why should I join", it doesn't make any sense.

^{My Steemit.com feed :)}

They will end up seeing the opposite, if we manage to get people's attention in these times, we invite them to create content and to consume the content that people produce here, they will see how more and more actively participating here will become something much better due to the upcoming price increase (hopefully), why not take advantage of this and start taking more seriously this idea of inviting our friends to participate here?

"Obviously Steem isn't just about making money, why would we invite people just for the money?" You might ask

You don't necessarily have to invite people for the money, Steem is infinitely better than any social network in terms of money, I have already described this in previous publications. The chance to earn $1 for writing a simple comment is something that only Steem has, no matter how big Facebook or any other social network is, currently none (or at least not that I know of) gives you the chance to earn money for giving an opinion, if you know of any, please let me know.

But Steem is much more than making money by creating content, it's a giant community that allows the creation of more communities within it, we are all in the same place, with different interests, but we are in the same place, why not take advantage of this definition of community and motivate people to join? Something like a simple "Hey, notice I'm using this social network, you should check it out" can be very helpful in sparking interest.

^{1.25$ just for a comment}

You're important to Steem and you can help achieve this.

Now, why the title of this post?

Throughout my time at Steem I've met a lot of Venezuelans, I've said it before, some were too good content creators and I've seen how they ended up leaving the platform because their content was no longer valued or they just didn't have visibility here. Within the Spanish community I have also seen how many curation projects have existed throughout my time here and, likewise, I have seen how most of them simply ceased to exist. The only project that is active (and the Spanish witness) is @cervantes, actively curating content despite everything, but is this really enough?

The reasons I started creating content in English are

1. I wanted to participate more actively in the community where there were users with a lot of SP
2. Due to the lack of users with enough SP or curation projects in the Spanish community, my content was not curated most of the time. That made my time spent here not profitable in some way.

I know there are also bid-bots that have started curating Spanish content like @upmewhale or @appreciator, it's really amazing, I also know that @ocd started curating Spanish content at some point (I'm not quite sure if they're still doing it), but the point is: We're losing users because of it.

Let me explain: All the attention is currently in the English community and is completely understandable, users with large amounts of SP speak this language and it is normal that the attention is there, but this makes Steem lose users in other languages. I especially emphasize Spanish since it is obviously my mother tongue, but, speaking as a Venezuelan, why do I talk about us while there are countries out there where they also speak Spanish? Due to the activity that Venezuela has had in the crypto market.

Venezuela has been a country that has adopted the cryptocurrencies as a salvation for the hyperinflation that the country is currently experiencing. For years Venezuela has been adopting cryptocurrencies in this way and nowadays it is common to talk about them. Venezuela is a country where cryptocurrencies are of infinite use, many Venezuelans use them for investments, others to pay for services and even others to simply buy fast food.

^{By dash.org - dash.org/graphics, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=70350086}

An example of this is: Dash

Dash has taken advantage of the economic situation in Venezuela, creating a Venezuelan community in charge of promoting Dash within the national territory and with really incredible results. I was looking over the results they had and found this video:

Here the girl shows how she uses her Dash to buy products in one of the best-known supermarkets in the country. And not only this, there is also a great deal of service that can be paid for using Dash, especially in Caracas, the capital of my country: https://discoverdash.com/?select=&lp_s_loc=Caracas&lp_s_tag=&lp_s_cat=&s=home&post_type=listing

What does this have to do with what I was talking about?

Steem has the same potential to achieve this. Obviously it is not easy work, but it is possible to achieve it. Venezuela is a country desperately looking for an option other than its national currency due to hyperinflation. Motivating people to use Steem as a social network and working in the Venezuelan community can end up being something very beneficial for Steem with the proper work and constancy. This is why I was talking about the Venezuelan users who have left the community.

By letting the users go ourselves we are losing opportunities for more users to come, obviously I am not saying that all the Venezuelans coming are simply the best and that they deserve all the attention in the world, NO. What I'm saying is that nowadays the Spanish community in general really is a very good opportunity to make Steem known, especially the Venezuelan one due to the adoption they have given to the cryptocurrencies in their daily life. In the statistics of LocalBitcoins Venezuela is the second country with the highest volume after USA.

This article is also interesting and explains very well the situation in Venezuela and the impact of the cryptos in the country: https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-venezuela-came-to-be-one-of-the-biggest-markets-for-crypto-in-the-world

Creating a community of Venezuelans and motivating them to invite more Venezuelans is very simple, I'm completely sure that it's easy to convince people to join Steem and do hard work here, but what good is this if they don't see results? How could we ask them to invite more people to a place where we don't even pay attention to them? That's why I feel we're missing a possible opportunity to increase Steem's user base even more, and we're missing opportunities to make Steem known in many more places.

^{Venezuela: How Cryptocurrencies Transformed an Economic Crisis, Part 1}

It's a topic that can be talked about much more in depth, but in this post I tried to give a superficial presentation about this idea that can really be worked on over time. But, as long as the market is in these "cold" times, I think that the opportunity to make things work and people stay here would be much greater, I suppose that with the support of the English-speaking communities (mostly curation projects and/or users with large amounts of SP that might be interested) this can be done, but for now I'll just leave this around and wait to hear other opinions. Thank you very much for reading all this. <3

Jean.