_{I have posted this image before on Steem. Am I a spammer now?}

Imagine an art gallery that hung art in their windows, with the hope that it will draw people in, that they will have a positive experience, and hopefully purchase a piece of artwork, and better yet, return one day to repeat the process all over again.

Now imagine that same gallery, full of work that artists have put countless hours into, taking that artwork and putting it into a warehouse room in the back, where it was all no longer eligible for sale after seven days.

How many artists do you think would want their work hung in this gallery?

Now this isn't a 1 to 1 analogy because Steem isn't a gallery, and we aren't selling anything, but let's just look at some well known anecdotal realities. Tons of amazing content creators have tried Steem, but we retain almost none of them. I don't have concrete data to backup my suspicion, but I'd wager it has something to do with the situation we've all seen countless times.

New awesome content creator comes to Steem, is overwhelmingly warmly welcomed and showered with votes on their first post. Next post get's pennies. More pennies, more pennies, then suddenly a post that does REALLY well, more pennies.

This comes from the fact that Steem hasn't hit a critical mass of users yet for the curation system to function in a natural and organic way. The stake is still in too few hands. Curation groups and trails are a band-aid to this problem. People dedicate themselves to finding great content and rewarding it with stake that has been entrusted to them by stakeholders.

The problem with all this(IMO) is that it creates a bad user experience for the best content creators. Let's just be real about something...all content is not created equal. It's my opinion that it makes more sense to continuously incentivise the creators with the highest value content than it does to "spread it around to everyone". If we use our collective stake to keep the best creators here, we'll get "the rest" because they will come here to CONSUME content.

_{This one too}

Coming to Steem to consume content in the past has been relatively pointless because there's not much in the way of actual curation.(Great stuff up, not as great stuff down in a decentralized consensus). There's a lot of other variables at play when it comes to what gets votes and what doesn't. That's fine, that's Steem, but now to the matter at hand...

I've been advocating for cross posting and reposting since before it was a thing because I don't believe we all as individuals should be the ones ultimately deciding what something is worth in the macro sense.

To put it more plainly, if you like it, vote for it, if you don't like it, don't vote for it, if you really don't like it, downvote it. That's curation working, but in order for people to be able to make that decision, they have to actually SEE and be exposed to the content as well as being given the opportunity to ascribe some value to that content whether positive or negative.

This is why crossposting and reposting, IMO is an absolute must for Steem to become a viable platform for people to want to share their content.

Steem is as far as I know, the ONLY content sharing platform that has this notion of content "expiring" from being able to receive rewards. Can anyone actually make a logical and reasonable argument why this makes any sense because I haven't ever heard one. The only justification I've ever heard is from a technical standpoint, which definitely makes sense, but crossposts and reposts negate the technical issue.

So now where is the logical stance against this? People will use it to spam? Umm...people have been spamming since the inception of Steem. If we let the spammers dictate what features we will have and what features we won't we're doomed. Attack the spammers, but an artist reposting work from months or maybe even years ago is not a "spammer". Please look at the trending page for OnChainArt. Does it look like a cesspool of spam and abuse? There is a mix of new, crossposted and reposted content there. Can you tell? Do you care?

If some artist made $5 a year ago and made another $5 today from different or the same users, is this harmful to Steem?

I seriously don't understand how this bad idea has been allowed to proliferate this long.

Quoting myself from a Discord chat

No matter what, crossposting and reposting or not, there will always be people trying to abuse this system. There is money involved so it is and will always be part of the system here. I can guarantee you that the people tasked with fighting abuse have always had plenty of work to do. I don't particularly value uniqueness in and of itself. I also don't think blockchain as in the technology, has any sort of preference on whether content is unique or not. In regards to the usefulness of content on Steem to the overall macro system, in my mind it comes from it's potential to bring new users to Steem, to bring traffic to Steem, to promote Steem, etc. The content being unique or not has no correlation to any of that. It's only the quality that matters in regard to the contents value to Steem.

This is my stance and belief on this and would greatly appreciate counter opinions or people voicing their agreement if you agree. I think we need cultural shifts here on Steem. Our failure to gain traction is not all about the lack of features.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments and let's start the conversation(or fight depending on your temperament 😁 )

See you all in the next post.