I'm arguing with myself if I should even comment on this, truthfully because there might be no upside to my two cents, but alas, I can't help but to opine.

I remember...

Since I've been here for a long time, you could say I lived the most prosperous time on this blockchain (so far) and it's worse. I was here when making thousands of dollars for post was a thing, when thinking that quitting a day job to blog was not as stupid as it sounds right now.

But, like all good things, that came to an abrupt end, and quite quickly too.

As the price of Hive (then Steem) plummeted, the people started pointing fingers at each other, fighting and lastly leaving.

Exodus

As more users went dormant, more and more projects began shutting down operations. We would see new ideas come up, new proposals be put forth (before DHF, I should say), but nothing was quite working to grow the userbase at all.

Witnessing those power downs, those dumps, as we call them, irritated most of us, including myself. It was almost as if the valuation of this blockchain was being attacked by people who out of spite (so I thought) would sell at any green candle that dared to show it's face.

I became bitter, began resenting users who dumped into the market all their stake, more so when they would show up asking for support, once their stack had dried out.

But, I was wrong

We have no way of knowing what is going on in people's life, and thus making any sort of judgment regarding their financial decisions is all for all intents and purposes unfair.

I particularly remember a lady, I won't tag her out of respect for her memory (she passed a few years back), who lived off her blogging an as you might imagine, would constantly sell everything she made. She was living in Thailand, making ends meet the best way she could, but struggling to do so. She, like many other in her position, was attacked a few times by people who believed people like her (dumpers and beggars) were the reason why the token had dropped in valuation as much as it had.

Embarrassingly, I bought into the idea that weak hands were the problem, and probably echoed those sentiments in one way or another. I don't think I ever "attacked" someone directly, but there are plenty of blog entries of me voicing my frustrations.

Nothing worked

We cant sit here and say with a straight face that the people defending this tokens valuation helped in any significant way. The same way that I can't truly say that a project like Hivewatchers or Spamminators are a net positive for our ecosystem.

Why would I say this? Well, because I'm being objective. We can observe the results of these efforts. These attempts to keep the blockchain pure, to demand loyalty from it's users, have not yielded results.

Frustrated people have left, that's fair, that's fine. They saw a hill not worth climbing and I can respect that. But, we also saw prominent figures, people who contributed to the ecosystem in a big way, leave.

Or should I say; made to leave.

Not pure enough

There are too many examples of people who once proudly called themselves Steemians/Hiveans. People who would attends the Fests every year, who would preach to anyone that would listen about how wonderful this blockchain can be, that found themselves pushed out for "fucking up".

They either tried to navigate the difficult drama with Tron and "picked the wrong side" like Exyle, or had the audacity of working on other projects outside this ecosystem like Luke Stokes.

My point is that the white blood cells among us have correctly or incorrectly (my position) Identified too many foreign objects among us that must be expelled from the ecosystem. And, through this immune system type behavior left our chain barren of life, a couple of times.

When we entered ICU

The tensions with our feudal lord Ned, the later sell to Tron, should have been the thing that killed us, but as you can see we are still here.

I'm of the idea that the only reason why the ecosystem survived is because it was attacked so aggressively by Justin Sun. For a minute there, we forgot about shitting on each other, policing people for dumping their tokens into the market, for spamming, etc.

Everyone knew that if they didn't come together, the story would come to an end. Funnily enough; some of the key players that allowed Hive to successfully launch, to survive such a terrible fate, are no longer here. They too became impure and had to be weeded out. (I do hope people get this sarcasm).

But, have we learnt anything?

Sadly, yes and no. There are some people these days on here who know better than to get involved with the drama. The politics on Hive are as complex as ever, and as such they are not meant for everyone.

The smarter people on here, dedicate themselves to building their stake or a project and participate as little as possible of the fights that still happen on the chain.

That being said, it's close to impossible to not get involved in the politics of this chain when you are building on here, and we even saw the most successful project on here ever, Splinterlands, almost leave the chain, with what would have been the most bitter of situations.

Why? Why all this shit?

I wish I knew exactly how to explain it in a way that would make people reconsider their approach to life on the blockchain. In my opinion the purity tests are a detriment to us, but I also know that my opinion is probably in the minority.

We are, after all, humans. People who are full of insecurities (because we all are). People who wonder if they 8 years they've invested on here, writing, interacting with others, opining on issues, will be worth anything at all.

Feeling fear is normal, quite normal. I too feel at times there's a good chance I fucked up long ago and I'm yet to find out. But, I keep on jolting myself back into reality to carry about my day.

Even if this experiment of ours ended tomorrow. If the efforts to keep it clean, keep it pure; NO AI, NO SPAM, NO IMAGES WITHOUT SOURCES, NO COMMIE OPINIONS, NO WHATERVER. Even if those kill the blockchain. I, we, us, we already won.

I try to remind myself how much I've learnt by being here, how much I've learnt by writing on this blog of mine for so many years so many posts. I will never go as far as to say I'm a writer of any kind, but I'm quite comfortable communicating this way and it's all thanks to our collective experience.

But, is there hope?

Do I think we have a chance? Of course I do. But not because we are going to up the purity tests, the loyalty tests, no.

If we make it, it will be despite of them. These human elements have become part of the ecosystem by now. A reflection of the aspects of our mind we all have, that we all need to navigate successfully.

As far as I'm concerned, I won't bother attempting to castigate someone who is developing a tool I don't like, or someone who is "dumping" their tokens or someone who is upvoting his own comments (sacrilege, I know).

In this aspect I think Dan had the right idea. It's impossible to win the fight against negative behavior. Impossible to have a clean blockchain without spam or bots. What is possible, or what should be our aim, is to build tools on this ecosystem that thrive despite all the impurities it has.

Twitter, now X, is today's most important and successful social media platform in the world. And this is not the case because they successfully got rid of all of the abuse, the bots and the "impure" users who are not loyal to twitter.

At any rate

I'm already too many pages in, and it feels like I could go on for many more, but I'll kill it here.

Maybe I'll share more some other day, or maybe I'll just post more guitar stuff.

MenO