Why I haven't been posting much lately 🌵 💤

Long story short:

1. I enjoyed real life more than blogging about it.
2. @DLive upvotes are worth more than those of thousands of minnows.

All lazy readers can stop now and just give me my 100% upvote. 😉
Thanks, much appreciated, see you next time. Feel free to engage, comment below, discuss. Have a nice day! 😊

Full transparency

By the way, I'll launch a @bid.bot campaign at https://bidbot.me, so the earlier you vote, the more curation rewards you'll get. 🤖

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For those about to read on (I salute you) 🤘😎👍

Thanks for being interested, I appreciate it. Writing is, in a way, like a psychotherapy. 😉 I'm getting things off my chest, and I also have to actively reflect and think about things even more deeply than I already do.

There are different reasons why I stopped posting every single day.
Like a wise man once said:

When you have nothing important to say, it's definitely not worth writing about it.
@spreadfire1

I sometimes caught myself posting articles on Steemit just for the sake of having content and you could see my overall blog posts' quality suffer from it.
I'm fairly new to this whole blogging thing.
I didn't even write a single word on my own Facebook timeline in years. I rarely use Twitter and didn't have an Instagram account until a few days ago.

So when I joined Steemit this March, I was trying things out (I still am). At first, I was enthusiastic about the platform and its opportunities. I thoughtfully crafted articles, sometimes for hours, writing, refining, proofreading...just to watch them get little to no votes, a few cents at most. Of course, I didn't have any followers, a lower reputation and didn't know anything about self-promoting posts with bid bots. So I felt like my first couple of articles were a waste of time and energy. Written with blood, sweat, and tears, just to see them disappear in the vastness of the Steemit ocean.
Like this article for example:

Freedom, Friends and Love. A 600 km Roadtrip to Italy

At the same time, I saw objectively low to mid quality posts get upvotes worth hundreds of dollars.
I thought to myself:

What's the logic behind that? How is this fair? If these people can get that much money posting shit, I will be rich in no time!

What an ignorant, naive conclusion. There's of course much more to being successful on Steemit than writing (subjectively) good articles.

Then I tried to diversify to reach a bigger audience, gain a larger follower base and also to let my creativity run free.

Different types of articles I posted 📃:

Personal Stories 🌍

I'll turn 34 in August, so I'm relatively young. But even I already have plenty of stories to tell. If I wanted, I could publish an autobiographical story from my past on my Steemit profile every day, while still making new memories and even better stories in the present and future. I seriously thought about it and might even introduce a new column to my blog...something like "a day in the life of", or "between genius and madness". 😅

Depending on the kind of brand one wants to develop, it's more or less important that readers get to know the blogger personally. I felt, in my case, it would be somewhat interesting to share some personal life details. So people get to know me, what I'm about and what makes me tick. So they can relate to me better than to just another anonymous vanilla internet blogger.

Now there's a fine line between giving away too much information, posting too much/too often, and just the right balance. I probably (definitely) already crossed that line occasionally. One should reflect from time to time, readjust the personal compass, to see if the current direction is still the right one.

I felt, what I did was going in the direction of some Instagram models 💁 that take pictures of every shit they take 💩, of every meal they make (or buy) 🌭, of every place they go, with the obligatory selfie 💄 at least once a day.
Don't get me wrong, I don't begrudge them. I wish those so-called Influencers the best success, even if I don't agree with what they do or with the reasons people follow them.
In a time where people vote for Trump, people, in general, should not be accredited too much reason or rational thinking.
The ones who know what the masses want, and who can exploit this, were and always will be on top.

Another aspect of this phenomenon is, that people feel bad about their own lives. What they have is suddenly not enough, because they see famous people on social media seemingly having everything. What we have to take into consideration though: celebrities' lives also suck most of the time. Our perception of their perfect lives is inaccurate. What they share are just momentary snapshots. Like best-of scenes in a movie trailer, where you're disappointed when you see the actual movie because every good scene was already in the trailer.
Maybe my statement is a little exaggerated, but I think the more somebody posts on social media, the less he has actually going on in his real life.

Without going too deep into that topic...

I neither blog to live nor live to blog.
@spreadfire1

My philosophic article, Embrace the Moment fits here quite well and goes deeper into that topic.

In my opinion, the difficulty on Steemit is, to find the right specialization and to specify what your blog is offering to its readers.
Because the platform gives us such a high degree of freedom over what to post: Written articles about any topic, photography, video, audio, (...) or everything combined.
For example, Instagram is pretty straightforward. You can post pictures for your followers to see. Sure, you can decide what kind of pictures...photograph your daily food, your body, nature, holidays, whatever you can think of. But it's still limited to pictures.
When we take Twitter, you're quite limited again. Not so much in the type of content, but in the number of characters per Tweet. The list could go on with YouTube, Facebook, you name it.
Now taking away any limitation is not only a blessing but also a curse. It's harder for readers to find what they're looking for and harder for content creators to get seen among the thousands (or millions) of Steemit posts.

Philosophy 👴📚

You could count this very article to my list of "philosophic" texts.
Be it a whole article or just some sentences in an article about a different topic - I'm always trying to share my wise thoughts or come up with something fresh, new, mindblowing...
Here's one of my older articles as an example, plus you find a quote collection and overview of my best articles at the time.
So in this case, the reasons why I didn't post much lately, were:

• Time - it takes a lot and I didn't prioritize it high enough to take time for it
• Muse - I can't just turn on the switch for "being creative" or writing a philosophic article about something. The circumstances have to be right, and when the muse tickles me, I'll write something that's not complete bullshit.

Photography 📷🌼

In this category, I probably posted the most low-mid quality posts that maybe got me a few followers here or there, but didn't help my brand as a whole. Contrary to what I promised to deliver in my #introduceyourself article, I posted many photos with little text or background story.
In my opinion, only very few pictures of very few professional photographers can afford that. The picture has to be of the highest quality and tell a story or speak for itself.
For that, I need a professional or semi-pro DSLR camera.
At the moment I'm taking pictures with my Samsung Galaxy S5 and my Casio EX-H10. No manual settings possible...I take close up shots with Best Shot scene Flowers (macro mode, high saturation). No real macro photography possible, no long exposure starlight captures or anything advanced like that.
I'm participating in @photocontests nonetheless...without a realistic chance of winning, but it's still fun to take pictures and every once in a while, there's one worth posting.

Gardening 🌱🍅

I do it every day - watching over my plants, watering them, harvesting fruits, cooking delicious meals from them.
I'll definitely continue my gardening series and post updates about my gardening endeavors with lots of pictures, stories, tips, and recipes from time to time. A lot happened since my last article more than two months ago.
As much as I love doing that, I feel it doesn't really help my blog or brand (yet). So, for now, I prioritize other departments higher. Like live streaming on DLive, Twitch and YouTube simultaneously.

Tutorials 🎓💻

As a tech nerd, I like to learn how things work. When that research and learning process is harder or more complicated than I think it has to be, I wanna do something about it. I write down an easy, step-by-step solution. So that way, when people face the same problems as me, they can take the shortcut that I wished to have when I was in their shoes.
That's what I call adding value to the community. Thanks to everybody creating tutorials, you rock!
So there are plenty more topics to write tutorials about, and you can be sure to read something from me that I come across on my Steemit journey.

How To: Live-Stream To Multiple Platforms Simultaneously. OBS to nginx to DLive, Restream, Twitch, YouTube

Gaming Live Streams 🎮 🎬

As of now, this type of content has been the most lucrative for me by far.
Thanks to @dlive for the support. Without an occasional whale's upvote, there wouldn't be that much incentive to create content on Steemit. I'm still motivated to improve my live streams and the viewer experience further.
I recently got myself a green screen, now I also have proper lighting set up. There's still a lot to do, but step-by-step, it's looking better and better. This will probably be the main content of my channel now.

I'm not going to stream every day, but at least once a week (planned is Fridays at UTC 4:00 PM). Of course, there will be exceptions, like when I'm at my girlfriend's place, when I'm on vacation, depending on the weather, and so on. But one thing is for sure...Winter Is Coming! ❄️(and with it less motivation to go outside/more motivation to stay inside playing games).

Live-Streaming Reality vs Expectation. Of Whales, Greed and Altruism

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Thanks for reading! I know I was all over the place in this one, so kudos if you made it to the end. 😇
What do you think about the topic? Do you agree or disagree with my standpoints? Let me know in the comments below, let's discuss!

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