Why I've been absent from Steem lately
I was just cleaning up the kitchen, listening to some loud and energizing music, when I realized I wanted to write a post on Steem again. I haven't felt that for a while, only sharing a picture here and there. For a long while I blamed it on the distraction my felting practice provided - and although partially true, it's definitely not a 24/7 job, so why didn't I use the time 'in between' for some proper Steeming?
Looking back at how I've always experienced anything I do I recognize some patterns which made me realize there are a few things 'to blame' for my absence in the last weeks/month.
First of all, Steem, especially the feed, became a place of repetition. The people who are producing the most repetitive content on Steem earn the most 'recognition', they are the safest to place your auto votes on, which means my feed is getting pretty boring as I already 'know' what I'm going to read or see most of the time. The ones who are less repetitive and always struggling to be seen as they don't get the autovotes as they alternate 'quality' content with shitposting/fun a bit more, have already left. I've honestly had a hard time spreading my 10*100% votes a day, upping my percentage per post week after week. I used to ignore resteems, and now I'm relieved as that's basically someone I already trust and follow saying: put your vote here! Which I've done more and more in the last month.
Second, and this is probably the biggest, is that *I've never held a job for longer than one and a half year - being on Steem for 2 years uninterrupted is basically the longest I've ever committed to anything. My normal excitement curve looks like this: half year learning, half year perfecting, half year looking for a new challenge while feeling bored on the job. Out of habit and because there was no official 'quitting' I had to do I made it to two years, but I guess after that milestone, which I made last December, it was time for a break anyway.
Lastly, as I'm a person who lives through satisfying intrinsic motivation and who is severely unmotivated by extrinsic motivators like money or power, at least 'power' as we're used to defining it, growing the account to some sort of virtual (SP) number is not enough to keep me going. I need something else to stay motivated: fun, inspiration, surprises, intellectual growth, a way to 'play', basically.
When the big 'clean-up' happened at Steemit, Inc., and we were all panicking as the ship seemed to be going down, I ironically had a lot more fun. There were very interesting forums and discussions happening, people trying to organize brain power and skills, and I felt like we were actively building on Steem. This lasted for a while, until Steemit, Inc. seemed to have their affairs pretty much in order again, and now I feel like that surge of motivation has pretty much 'gone'. We're now just passively waiting until we see SMTs and Hives/Communities launched.
I'm glad we're feeling relaxed and confident(ish) again, but in some way, I miss the work ethics I felt we gained during the 'bad' period about a year ago.
For the last few weeks I've found something back on Facebook, a platform I ignored for a long long time, but after getting obsessed with felting I went back to it, finding new groups to share in and people to engage with. At least people who are sharing there are mostly doing it for their art, and for inspiring and getting inspired, which makes engaging there basically stress-free and casual.
I don't get the more meaningful engagements I get on Steem though - although most of us are here for some sort of financial gain, it's also surprising how deep people are able to engage, how they sometimes suddenly show deep empathy or refer to posts I've written a year ago, showing they care and know about my life.
I appreciate that, a lot. I've seen a few people leave Steem lately, some disappeared, others are building a name on Twitter and the more general crypto community, and I understand. I've been searching for a bit 'more' outside of Steem as well. But as I look through the Twitter feeds I also recognize that specific communication style that I've seen getting shaped on that place, a very pointy - and in my eyes aggressive/polarizing - format in which everyone tries to communicate and get likes and retweets and engagements. It's a style that, to me, after being active there from the beginning (2007) gets very annoying, repetitive, and, therefore, boring to me after a while. I can't shake the feeling that on Steem, at least, we see more of a person, more personalities, more originality, and a deeper understanding of some peoples thinking.
And yes, that totally contradicts with my earlier point that I got bored on Steem by its repetitiveness. My wish for Steem is a hybrid social media platform: people writing about their lives and thoughts freely, given many tools to express in many ways, and without the strict formatting that Twitter, Instagram, and all the other short-format platforms force on their users.
Well, that's it, I started this post by telling I wanted to write something again, I didn't promise that I was going to spend hours thinking about a good beginning and a sharp conclusion.
<3 I missed you guys.
The end.
Good to hear from you again. I must swim in a different ocean as you. I see o difference. Not if it comes to the content, commenting or anything else.
Happy day !trdo. 💕
Posted using Partiko Android
Congratulations @wakeupkitty, you successfuly trended the post shared by @soyrosa!
@soyrosa will receive 0.37014975 TRDO & @wakeupkitty will get 0.24676650 TRDO curation in 3 Days from Post Created Date!
"Call TRDO, Your Comment Worth Something!"
To view or trade TRDO go to steem-engine.com
Join TRDO Discord Channel or Join TRDO Web Site
Thank you for letting me know @trendotoken
Glad you're still feeling at home in your part of the ocean :-)
@soyrosa I am if not I leave. Thanks for your respond I hope whatever you do it fulfills you. Enjoy your day ❤️
i don't use twitter much but i don't remember when i got from twitter "happy". maybe i just follow the wrong bunch but it is always something irritating or negative.
Right? There's a lot of 'fighting', and I blame Twitter for a lot of the polarizing opinions people seem to have nowadays - Twitter is lovely in many ways, but it's not place to have a nuanced discussion whatsoever, and it shows in how people are argueing/defending themselves today.
When I started there in 2007 it was a lot of fun though - I even got some great IRL connections out of it and help on my thesis. That was 13 years ago though :D
i got late to the twitter game, maybe i felt i have nothing smart to say :D so i missed that part of it. now i feel half of it is politics and everyone is shouting that he is right.
And the organisation of bots that comment in hope to move the opinion in someone's way is creepy.
Yes :-( When I started there certainly were no bots. They look very 'real' too, I can see how many people fall for it. And the shouting is only getting worse unfortunately, it used to be more fun and friendly for sure :-)
Well i've been testing out communities on our test environment on steempeak and i have to say it's made the experience very different for me... that being said there is very little posts happening on communities that i'm interested in so far ... BUT... it's still nice.
Yes, communities are pretty damn cool - and I hope they also will change our levels of engagement. For me it all hangs on if we'll ever have a mobile app for communities though. If not it will remain a matter of 'making time for Steem on Desktop', which is not sustainable. Leaving a comment or two while waiting for the bus to come is the way we'll keep/make this place lively. Curious about the Steempeak/Communities experience though :-)
I'll send you a link to our communities interface over on discord later today.
Lovely! Thanks @jarvie :-)
It's pretty dang good... we're still putting some final ADMIN touches on things like the ability to edit community details on steempeak.
It's interesting what you say about not getting the engagement within communities on Facebook, I always thought there'd be a lot of engagement within such communities, I hardly use Facebook so I wouldn't know!
I know what you mean about repetition on Steem... it's an odd one for sure.
It's also very quiet around here!
I think I find the numbers a lot more motivating than you do, I like numbers!
Well, on Facebook you get engagement, in terms of likes and comments, I get heaps of them! But it's sooo much more superficial. If I post some of my work I get 'Love it!', or 'So pretty!', and I get dozens of comments, but they don't go deeper than that :-)
It's just a different platform and I like the 'deeper' engagement we've achieved to get on Steem - although the amount of comments is much lower in general and specifically the last few months.
Anyway, I'm glad you like the numbers, and I'm also happy they keep you motivated! I do like reaching a round number now and then, but don't work/Excel on them too hard.
Good to see you drop by :-) Cheers!
I'm sure there are some groups on FB that better engagement than that, I've used the messenger function on it recently, but that's entirely different.
As to Excel and numbers - that's the basis for making lots of pretty graphs and things, beautiful!
Hehe - I have an Excel happy boyfriend, so it's a classic 'tease' between us, I will 'just know' my decision, he will have to put some numbers in Excel first :D Often we draw the same conclusions though, so it's mostly our process that's different :-)
Definitely with you on this...
It does seem to have gone to passive mode again.
Yes, quite a bit, not saying nothing is happening, but I feel less involved for sure :-) It's normal for people to work harder 'under pressure', but I kind of wish we felt the pressure more often than just when a big emergency happens ;-)
We need to find the buzz again...
Most of it for me is I go through times snd topics of things I want to write about and then other times I dont have anything of value to contribute.
Another issue I run into is time vs return. Im not saying I do Steem for the money, but if the money was better I could spend more time researching abd writing vs doing things like mowing the lawn or cleaning the house.
Glad to see people come back and am eagerly awaiting what will come in the next bear market. I think growing a presence for Steem on Twitter and other social media sites isnt nothing, but I get what youre saying.
Yes, I feel you, it's up and down regarding inspiration for Steem as well - it's normal. Time vd Return is a reasonable factor as well - although the 'return' in STEEM is actually super high now. But I know what you mean, FIAT bills need to be paid as well :-)
PS: I saw your name on twitter recently and now I understand that @gniksivart isn't some Viking sounding username, but just a 'read it backwards' type of situation :D Had to laugh when I realized.
Missed you too :)
<3
Things seem to have two speeds on steem, slow and then fast. It is like an erratic pendulum. I think right now we are moving back to a little bit more content being added, and people trying to engage a little bit more. That part I like, the engagement increasing, and not going back to the early days of "nice Post" style engagement, but more and more real comments.
Me too, it's actually pretty special to have that over here <3 I'm glad we're seeing more engagement again, I might have missed some of it, but I'll certainly try to get back to that part of Steeming as well :-)
In my experience, having just one person whom you interact deeply with on Steem every day is enough to get connected to the platform. I used to look more for engagement with strangers but now I'm happy to talk to a very few people I trust. I know life goes in circles and right now is this phase for me. In a month or two my thoughts might be a bit different. Or not.
By the way, I feel that the new economic system is to blame a bit for decreased engagement. Because small dust on comments gets back to the reward pool. Because of that people are hardly rewarding comments anymore.
You're right @organduo, I used to reward my comments with 10-30%, depending on the STEEM price, but it's hardly worth it anymore :-) It certainly doesn't help, especially users who didn't feel like creating content but would be able to earn some STEEM through being active and comment on posts now feel lost and probably moved on.
And yes, I still have a 'core group' of people who comment on my posts, even though I've let them down by not engaging a lot lately, I'm grateful for that, and I can't imagine 'disappearing' from the platform because of them :-)
I have two followers whom I miss a lot... It's @lildebbiecakes and her husband @singmanjestah.
Hi Rosa.
Well it's nice to read your thoughts about steem and the lack of motivation. It's not only you, I've felt it the last 3 months also... mainly because I'm completely the opposite in what excites me to be honest.
The whole 'steem knowledgeable' comment conversations, and circle jerks that revolve around them, bore me to distraction. I came here to write creative works and the fact is, as you pointed out, that a lot of the talented writers have left steem.
Ha ha, I'm still here 😉... but in all seriousness it's not far off the mark.
I personally came very close to leaving for good last week, and it was all to do with what I see as the closed loop going on here. Don't get me wrong, that loop does encompass more than just small groups of vote traders. The curation guilds for example do their best to make sure that quality, and variety, is rewarded. But I've noticed that the vast majority of the bidbots turned curation tend to reward steem-centric content or the same authors who're gonna return high curtation rewards.
What it comes down to for me is that I'm not prepared to write on here for less than minimum wage, as if I put my focus and energy on traditional freelance writing I can make a lot more.
I also miss the early days on steem when their were massive amounts of pretty interesting and talented poets and short story writers.
Having said all that, I'll probably keep dropping the odd post.
It's good to hear that the felting is going well. And a clean kitchen is always good 😂
Lots of changes for me in the new year as well. I've started the ketogenic diet to try and address my health problems, and have found some new clients so money isn't as dire as it was last year.
Ha ha, also been doing OK trading BTC... I've learned the dark arts of technical analysis!
Hehe - thanks for your reply and life update @raj808! :D Glad you're still here and dropping the odd post. Maybe it's not a bad thing to not feel the pressure to write daily, and maybe an 'odd post' here and there is even more healthy in the long run :-)
Ketogenic diet! I love it! It helped me quite a bit when I tried it, the first 2-3 weeks are a bit hard and your body goes into fat burning mode instead of sugar burning mode, which makes you feel quite slow, but after that... It only brought me good things :-)
Good luck, and stay cautious with that precious BTC!
This is an important point about social media and media in general. The reason I became interested in bloggers around the turn of the century was that they wrote about themselves so you could get to know them as a person, even when they focused on one topic. And in a more natural way than columnists used to do. I hope we haven't lost that spirit yet.
I agree with your opinion about Twitter, although I'm active there. Someday I'll write a blog about 'cancel culture' on Crypto Twitter after watching a 100 minute video analyzing an online witch hunt in the transgender community.
Ouf, not sure if I'm going to watch those 100 minutes, but I have to say I've seen so much that I might have an idea what your post will be about - curious to read it for sure, there's an interesting and often not productive way of engaging going on on Twitter, and I hope we'll stay far away from that here on Steem.
And yes @edb, bloggers are fascinating, I first started blogging 17 years ago (!) when the word blog wasn't even in the dictionary yet. Always loved the engaging, the 'looks into someone else's life', and the authenticity that came with it, way different from all the other content that's often following a very narrow format.
Thanks for commenting :-)
Been on a bit of a Steem holiday myself too, though I'm thinking of breaking the absence after reaching the 30 day mark from the latest post.
I missed you on my feed <3 Come back when you want to, I think the energy and motivation has to come from within, and not be forced. Hope you've done something nice with your break :-)
HEUJJJJJ there she is again. Well, Im sharing some of the feelings in this post with ya. Getting my ass back in the flatland and getting used to a rhythm of living together with someone and how that works also is really taking a lot of my steeming time. And frankly when I am scrolling my feed finding myself on 100% VP (again) Im having trouble finding stuff that really is worth my interest. But uhhhhh....yeah..I did notice that there was a lot less content coming from your end, that is for sure
We should do that beer soon madame!
YESSS! Let's do that beer soon. I want to hear all about your move back to the Flatlands and your special someone :D Hahaha! Let's connect on Discord <3
A very sincere reflection. It is probably not completely spontaneous because you thought of every word you wanted to write and it is good that it was so.
Steem can be repetitive and if one does not have voting power it is simply a filler is a fast platform. Regards, I'm sure you'll come back and have fun
Welcome back ... en ik herken het helemaal wat je schrijft. Ook ik ben een hele tijd niet of nauwelijks aanwezig geweest.
Congratulations @soyrosa, your post successfully recieved 0.37014975 TRDO from below listed TRENDO callers:
To view or trade TRDO go to steem-engine.com
Join TRDO Discord Channel or Join TRDO Web Site
Nice to see you're back @soyrosa! I've been in and out the last year cause I had too many things going on and little spare time. Funny thing, I realized how much I missed writing in here only when I got back and started to post more often. I never managed to get to a deeper conversation with someone on any other platform.