![blessingcurse.jpg](https://steemitimages.com/DQmVky1hxaYmyrA98NrJ1CSvUMxQ9mbJVCgv8sMZqWLPWoa/blessingcurse.jpg)

One thing that I have noticed in the brief time I have been interacting with people in the Steem Community is this: How wonderfully polite and friendly everybody is.  Now that I understand the incentive system, I can see why that is the case. In every other part of the internet, being a jerk costs you nothing. Trolling is done because it rewards bad behavior with attention, even if the attention is negative. Social Psychologists know this about human beings... that if a human being (particularly children) don't get any or enough positive attention, they will act out to get attention that is horrible... because any attention is better than no attention at all.

The one thing Steemit proves about the new economy we are all going to be living with soon is that attention and time are the biggest commodities.  When you look at the way Steemit works, you can see that some people can spend inordinate amounts of time upvoting and commenting and replying... and all of that work can be wiped out with just one flag or downvote by somebody who has a higher reputation/more steem i.e. a whale or witness.  The whales and witnesses got to where they are by either investing time and attention and/or money into the steemit community/platform. 

In other parts of the internet there is absolutely no downside to pissing people off just to get a reaction i.e. TROLLING... Now while I see a LOT of spam from new users desperate to get some upvotes and attention, I don't see a lot of trolling. This makes Steemit a remarkable place.

Today I reached 45 on the reputation scale. I did that by paying attention to people who I see were delivering content that I personally found very interesting. I fear I may never be a whale because my interests are kind of a niche market. Nonetheless, I'm doing something correctly on here because I've attracted 360+ followers in the past 3 weeks. At first I was just following everybody who posted anything even remotely interesting... but then I saw what that was doing to my feed. It was filling it with spam and junk posts. So now my strategy has been to weed out the junk and spam. 

Steemit is fascinating to me because it is actually monetizing the human connection. It's making it profitable for people to try and understand one another and connect with each other. That makes it rare, unique and beautiful in my book. 

Anyways, thosee are just my thoughts on the subject... I was prompted to make this post after thinking about what @techwriter said about it earlier this evening.