A great piece that deserves every little ounce of attention it can get on this platform, which is why I resteemed it.

I have come to the conclusion that the rewards are relatively unimportant in attracting new users on multiple occasions. In 2017, I talked to a number of friends of mine about Steem and started to get them to join it. Smart people who talk to each other daily on Facebook about a variety of topics and most of those people have even blogged back in the day. One of them told me amateurs do stuff for love and they shouldn't do it for rewards.

I brushed that comment off as nonsense. If only Steem had existed since I started using the internet... But clearly, getting the rewards hasn't motivated a whole lot of people to join Steem. But there is another aspect to this. Vast riches and enormous power over information has ended up in the hands of a tiny number of individuals thanks to the success of a few global social media giants. What this means is that mega corporations and their ultra-rich owners are getting rich on the back of billions of people going about talking to each other by eavesdropping on them and manipulating them based on a panoptic view of what is going on and powerful data mining. This is a really perverse situation that would've inspired writers of dystopic scifi in the 20th century.

There are plenty of well-meaning people on Quora, for instance, who want to share their knowledge with those who need it and do it purely out of a desire to help their fellow human being. It's completely fine that these people want to help others without getting paid for it. But the problem is this arrangement is not without pernicious financial consequences. A slice of the value of every great answer given is transferred to the top of a tall and narrow pyramid. It's like a charity organization taking a large cut and getting filthy rich while at it. I totally get it that a lot of the users wouldn't want the money or at least the kind of money accessible to them wouldn't be enough to attract them to any significant degree. But what if that money were donated to a good cause and transferred on the blockchain in a completely transparent manner? What if Musing, the Quora equivalent Steem app, were to allow people to log in using their social media accounts or email to use a guest account whose earnings were given to a good cause like hiring lawyers for poor people who cannot get proper lawyers or something like that instead of going to a bunch of rich people who own Quora? Just asking.