I spend less and less time outside my home feed and when I do I mostly mute. A lot of that stuff I have no reason to see.////////////

I have kept up doing the best I can on here and some of the same problems prevail.

I keep helping people and putting up the #Steemit101 type posts regularly and everything is just down man.

You wrote about how a lot of people feel.

I came for the writers. The fiction writers. And I stay for them and for a lot of the good photography.  But still see too many people not willing to work to improve and that is sad. That's what I like about the fiction-workshop on PALNet. A group of people working hard to bring out the best in each other. It isn't "I'm better than you" it's "how can I help you be better?"

And the spams, I see dozens of people spamming comments here and there to get followers and upvotes. 

What do you think, how can we improve it as an individual or as a community member?

I honestly think it was inevitable. But I haven't lost heart because there are still extraordinary people from all over the globe here. And  I believe more will come.  steemit is a mirror of life, we were just blessed to be in its early development before money was the motivation of the majority, and therefore had a slice of time when the best of humanity got to shine here without the riff raff.  
I think of it like this: In the beginning it was a mailbox before the advertisers and bill collectors discovered it. Now that they have you unfortunately have to scroll through the junk mail. I know it's not ideal, I wish it could have continued to only attract the best of us too, a beautiful Utopia. But If you ignore the spammers the same way you would toss junk mail aside, you can still find a slice of it  :)

good post

I spend less and less time outside my _home feed_ and when I do I mostly _mute_.  A lot of that stuff I have no reason to see.

Well, I haven't checked out the success porn reference.  However, I gotta tell ya, there is so much talent and amazement here on steemit.  It's no big surprise to me that so many come here expecting to get paid for facebook like activities.  You know, facebook was a lot of good things for me, but its an easy place to be a shit head too.  Gratefully I had already cut myself loose from that community, and was looking for somewhere to actually write when I found steemit.

It's not so sad to me about all of the fallen soldiers so to speak.  The reason is that there are so many amazing people here who give their all for next to nothing, just on the hope that they will find the magick formula, or get the whalevote that drags them from obscurity.  Mostly, we all need mentors.  I don't have tons of time to wander around the dimly lit hall ways of the steemiverse.  Lately I been keeping myself busy in the Brightly lit Corridors.

I'm gonna go check out that success porn blog, and see what's up.  Maybe you'd like to check out something I wrote today.

[Why I didn't publish a blog for 10 days](https://steemit.com/minnowsupport/@inquiringtimes/why-i-didn-t-publish-a-blog-for-10-days-and-what-s-been-going-on-lately)

most welcome man!!

Hi welcome back. I never knew that the vote buying for blogs before was nothing as I am new here and I'm sorry it is a sad song for you. What I've noticed, sometimes I found out here, that it is not about quality but quantity versus quality.

I find it difficult to be "heard" in all the chatter.  Same kind of posts always get the attention.  I'll just keep plugging along....following

I can tell you that I can here for one reason only, to spread the meassage and my knowledge about an important topic I incountered through my study to become an engineer. I tried for a year on facebook, but I only got likes from my doughter:-( no feedback what so ever. Here in one month I get a lot of feedback from interested people in the topic of my knowledge and interest. So from my point of view it is a success until now. If it will be that in the long run, I don't know. How the platform has changed during 2017 I don't know as I started here 1. August
Great post and discusion

I expect this is the reality of any growing community.  You probably need to consider that the majority of new people are here for other reasons other than primarily a geeky love of cryptocurrency and blockchains.  I'm fairly geeky, but before stumbling across this place I'd never heard of a blockchain, and the only thing I knew about cryptocurrency was Bitcoin and mostly that was from nearly a decade ago when it popped up on the popular culture scene.  I'm quite fascinated by the whole thing now, so that's why I've stuck around.

Worth considering too is that this model of distributed authentication with its reduced authority in general and specifically reduced State influence, and free market capitalistic principles, is going to draw a lot of particularly individualistic people (i.e. possibly more selfish).  I'm no fan of anarcho-capitalism or right-libertarianism, so it's an aspect of these communities that I dislike.  But there's enough left-libertarians/anarchists around that it's not a total anarcho-capitalist hangout.

For me, at this point, I stick around because of my geeky new fascination with blockchain and cryptocurrency concepts.  I don't find the content here to be particularly high quality.  There's certainly some gems in amongst the rough, but there's a hell of a lot of rough.  And to be clear, that's not particularly that different to most places on the web.  Photography sites are particularly like that, but somehow they manage to surface the better stuff above the crud.  Maybe when this place gets curated communities we will see more of the good stuff rising to the top above the general low quality noise.

A positive aspect of Steemit is that, in my opinion, the tone in here is rather polite and respectful relative to other platforms.

We did not import the typical hateful arguing and trolling seen in most forums and social platforms.

I am not afraid to share my personal opinions here because I do not anticipate hateful replies.

Do you share this experience?

I go with the wonderful @dreemit here: probably it's inevitable. "Steem City" - like Ned called it once - is a mirror of society. It's a big think tank, full of different people with different interests. 

Now one might believe that we somehow lost our way towards "that big vision" the founders designed once. But actually I don't even think that we've gone astray. The early adopters who built this platform and pushed it into the right direction are still here - and they are pretty active. There are a lot of projects running, new applications built on the Steem blockchain, cooperations, show cases (like the great Steem park in Brooklyn), events (uncountable meet-ups all over the world). 

I believe that the people who join Steemit in order to make some quick money, the ones who don't have any vision and aren't interested in having one, will come and go - they won't affect the route this ship is following...

Thanks for the thought-provoking read!

There are many here who are working to make it better and not everyone is here to strike it rich, I see less of those here for the money because their dreams burst within a very short time and they leave. Don't give up hope...