We are nothing without community

It's a sunny Sunday morning here in Vilnius and I have just finished replying to comments that come to my blog over night. I did this with the hope to get an idea what to write about. And surely when I read a comment by @lildebbiecakes under my yesterday's post about our nephew graduating from high school an idea came to me. Here is @lildebbiecakes' comment:

You always give very good sound advice Vidas! I hope as well, that your Nephew turns to look at the opportunities on Steemit. If not for the money for his future, but also for the education, it is very valuable. I’ve become a much better artist with practice on Steemit, and talking to other artists. That to me alone is a priceless experience. Stepping into a pool of other “like minded” artists, is truly fun, I enjoy Steemit very much❣️Blessings

I think this is absolutely true because we are nothing without a true community. We cannot succeed in life alone. We need other like-minded people in our path as well. We need people who are more advanced than us from whom we can learn. We need people who are at the same level, sort of sitting in the same boat. If they succeed, we succeed also and vice versa. And we also need less advanced people in our journey to share our skills, knowledge and experiences. Basically to help elevate them. To teach them. In a way blogging is teaching.

Since 2011 when I started blogging online I have never seen such a supportive community anywhere online. Not on my blog Secrets of Organ Playing, not on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, not on Medium, not on Quora.

This is obviously because the ingenious way Steem is set up. All those supportive actions are incentivized by curation and author rewards. Write a thoughtful comment and you most likely will receive a small upvote from the author or even from other readers. This will be your author reward. Upvote an interesting post, and you most likely will get a small percentage of your upvote back as curation reward.

Sure, right now curation rewards are really small (25 percent divided among the curators) and people who like to maximize their investment at the cost of helping out others better delegate to bots to do it for them. This way genuine engagement although still higher than anywhere else I've seen online can be way more active after Hard Fork 21.

Because HF21 will make 50/50 reward split, meaning that 50 percent will go to the author and 50 percent will be divided among the curators. This way we hopefully will see many more people returning to manual curation and engagement.

This will probably reduce overal reward pool because 10 percent will go to various projects and initiatives that support Steem but because of this we might also see increase in Steem price and market share.

Nothing is set to stone because it's still an experiment but I think our strength and uniqueness lies not only on tokenization potential of the entire Internet but also in people, in our community.

In you and me.

So let's continue doing what we can giving a reason for our community to support each other.

In this process I will grow as well. I will become a better comic artist, a better organist, a better blogger, a better gymnast, a better investor, a better friend and anything else I set my mind to.

I hope you will as well.

I'm glad I read @lildebbiecakes' comment and consequently created this post first thing in the morning for my community to read. Soon I will have breakfast and after that it will be a time for me to go to church to play organ in the service. Stay tuned for more organ videos from me...

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