For the longest time I've been telling newcomers that the best way to get started within the community and platform is to get involved. One of the best ways to directly dive into it is to get onto steemit.chat and/or the different discord servers (MSP is a great one) and grab some attention from others there through the chats, there are many people just waiting to welcome newcomers and guide them or reply to the questions they might have. Of course this doesn't mean that they will be spending all their free time getting you up to speed on the Steem platform, some due diligence by the newcomers to take towards reading the FAQ or googling some stuff that won't require a lot of someone else's time is of course preferred.

There are a few curators of @ocd who spend a lot of time on chats and check out the newcomers that get there, make sure they are "real" and have a steem account and then take time out of their day to welcome them and support their first posts and introduce them to other groups in chats, etc. I witness this daily and it feels really awesome to be able to kickstart their Steem experience.

In this post I wanted to talk a little bit about how things work on Steem with followers and how I believe they should be working instead.

It's not a mystery that if you post pretty actively you will get a lot of followers - this is due to many users following people in the Hot & Trending list. This means that the longer and more often you end up in those lists the more followers you will receive. This of course also depends on the amount of new accounts being created that day.

I am not sure if minnows do this because they want to curate on these "popular" authors in time for curation rewards, which with their stake they shouldn't really focus on, or if they just do it randomly in hopes to get a follow back.
What they should be doing instead though and something that I've stressed a lot about in the past is that they should follow authors that share the same interests and write posts that interest the newcomers. If you want to be proactive here and comment to gain more followers and over time hopefully some bigger users that will follow your posts and support you, you have to follow your skills and knowledge.

Authors are not going to care about your comment if you are replying to a post about Space when you have no knowledge about it and have nothing of value to add to that post in a comment. This doesn't mean that you can't comment on those posts, nothing stops you from reading them and writing your thoughts or questions down hoping the author will have time to reply - but what I mean is that if it's stuff you are interested in yourself it will give you a massive advantage to add something of your own to the post in a comment and connect with the author and drive discussion. This is of way more value than the usual "nice post, I liked it" and "keep going, this is great", those get old really, really fast and most people at this point in time will think you are either a bot or someone who doesn't speak english and are just copy-pasting comments for a chance at some votes.

Connecting people - like Nokia's old slogan, this is what the Steem blockchain is also about and in the long run once you find your community and people you enjoy reading and commenting on, the rewards will come on their own - don't worry about that in the beginning.

---

About views, I've noticed lately that a lot of people care a lot about views and there have also been whales judging posts by views if they are going to flag them or not. I think we have to take the view count with a grain of salt for now as it is very gameable, you only need to hit refresh on your own post to get a viewcount nowadays - until that is fixed I hope curators won't focus too much on it and judge posts more about the content and other things.

If posts have a lot of views though and the author has managed to share them on other platforms which has some sort of proof that they really have gotten a lot of views from there, for instance: this video I posted on my alt account yesterday has more views than some of my other posts just because I shared it on Reddit and even though it only got 3 votes there it received over 250 views because there are a lot of users on that subreddit.

I urge authors to let people know at the end of posts if they have shared it somewhere and if that has increased their views and sharing it in general should be a nice incentive to get users to join Steem, I'm sure many will give you a follow because it was your post that made them aware of your platform anyway. :)

---

Image from Pixabay.