There are many kinds of internet you hear about these days. For instance, the internet of things, ioT or the internet of value ioV, the smart internet (AI - artificial intelligence) - or is this last a subset of one of the previous ones? We know that AI will enable a lot of ioT - so it must be a subset. Half the time we don't quite know the correct order of the alphabets - is it IOT or IoT. IOV? Are the acronyms capitalised? And what is the significance of Google's invention of the first truly 'quantum' computer?
My point is that it is getting hard to 'keep up'. Steemit was supposed to be a simple way of writing your blog while keeping it yoked to blockchain technology. But the simple (?) art of logging thoughts periodically on a webpage has somehow become irrepressibly bogged down with pursuit of rewards. Someone I know complained once that Steemit was supposed to attract the best writing talent and to keep it - that writing or the 'talent' - on display - permanently - to the envy of places like Facebook and maybe Medium, but that simple idealism of yesteryear has given way to something alien; it is as if very few strive to add true value to their web blogs here on Steemit.
Long before the days of 'alphabet soup' and rumours of incredible profits to be had on these internets(sic), blogging simply was it. You went on Word Press or some place similar and you made it beautiful and you strove hard and put your heart's content into it ... and was genuinely proud in the candour of creation. Here. was your carefully laid out text or picture or whatever ... staring back at you from the tamed white canvas of the web page and sometimes after an end-user had viewed the results they were actually moved.
But now, we are all too smart for our own boots, but not even that half-smart and all we do is pounce on the games and the rewards and the upvotes and such ... Would that be art or science? And where is the joy of creation?
I once bought a book ___ 'HTML Artistry' - books 1&2, in my yesteryears and through its pages you would be pleasantly surprised by the sheer creativity that went into the development of some of the pages created' for the blogosphere. Hang on, is there still a blogosphere?
Now evolution has given us 'markdown' but we don't care too much.
Around the time the books were written - there had been some kind of talk about the emergence of the 'Design Web' ... and then puff! It all disappeared.
I know this will be read as criticism, but it is not ... maybe it is a kind of nostalgia. That, and a plea to save a certain something in danger of being lost.