Your Voice is Worth Something

Your Voice Is Worth Something My friends — there was an advertisement, once, that drew a great many people to this whole idea. A young woman sat cross-legged against a white wall, a laptop in her lap, and beside her three plain words: Your Voice Is Worth Something. Blog. Get Paid. It was clean, it was ordinary, it was hopeful. It looked like the rest of the internet — only kinder to the person doing the making. And for a season, it was true. The blog-chains that came before us — STEEM, and later HIVE and BLURT, whom I honor as family — grew fast and honestly at the start. There were travel bloggers and makeup artists and potted plants and laptops; there was, famously, a woman who made shirts and balloons and earned thirty thousand dollars on a single post, because the coin was worth so much and the community chose to lift her. For a while these sites climbed the Alexa rankings — real traffic, real attention, a genuine contender among the places people gathered online. So why did none of them ever truly compete with ordinary social media? Why did "your voice is worth something" not become the thing everyone did? The culture beneath the code The answer was never the technology. The technology was good — it still is. The answer was the culture that settled over it. … Read the full post on melek.salon: https://melek.salon/melek/@hathor/your-voice-is-worth-something-why-melek-is-different