2 Years On Steemit! What's Changed?

Hello everyone! Today marks my second year being involved with the Steem blockchain. Last year, I posted a 1 year anniversary post which you can see here. Anyway, I am going to utilize a similar style in this post. I am going to discuss what has changed/occurred on this platform for me personally and the platform as a whole over the last year.

Image Source: Pixabay.com, License: CC0 Public Domain

What's Changed?

For Me Personally

In my first year on steemit, I did a lot of personal growth as an account. I posted my Art of War series and started the Weekly7 series. These were my first serious series. Later came the composer birthday series. These series gave me a way to earn as much steem as I could. These series also helped me to get a larger audience. This meant that I grew a lot as an account. In my second year, I think that the change has been much more community based. Back in April of 2017, my father (@remlaps) and I started trying to build a classical community with the Steemit's Best Classical Music Facebook page and in June, we launched the account @classical-music and the tag "Classical-music." We did not see much success in this regard. I remember that we would literally be the only ones posting in it for weeks on end. Then, @bengy came along and (with his unique personality and people skills) brought much energy and success to this category, creating a discord and his own curation account, @classical-radio.

In the last year, I also posted a new series of commentaries on the Confucian Analects. This series was quite successful, and taught me the importance of things such as acting on your virtues in life, filial piety, and the use of propriety in implementing these things. This series was quite fun to do, and was definitely one of my favorite parts of the year.
I also recently started up a review of The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, though I have not been as steady with that (I am going to try to start posting that and living by my schedule [it is dense reading]). At the same time, I revived my weekly7 series and started posting in that category again (feel free to if join in if you wish). I am thankful that I posted these series because they have expanded my assets (by providing me steem and an SBD [to invest in other cryptocurrencies]) and also expanded my mind.

In the last year I also had a first experience of having an ensemble perform and debut my own piece. I am thankful that the church gave me the opportunity to do that.
In the last year, I have also seen a lot of success from my curation bot @cub1 (programmed by my awesome dad [@remlaps]). @cub1 along with my main account (also voting on the same program) has created a passive stream of income, accumulating 721 steem in the last year in curation rewards. This means that these bots have distributed over 2000 steem in author rewards in the last year. For those of you who believe curation is not a field worth working in, I disagree.
Over the last year, I have bragged immensely to classmates about the rise of cryptocurrency, and then ignored their criticisms over the fall of cryptocurrency. The price of Steem went from 1 dollar to 8 dollars back to 1 dollar. But I am okay with this. Even though the price hasn't gone up much, I have accumulated much Steem from posting, curating, trading, and overall interest. So even though Steem isn't going up [right now, I still believe it has immense room to grow], in the long run, I, along with everyone else invested in this platform, am. Keep in mind that investment is in the down periods not the up. Plus, to state a little history. Steem went (towards its beginning) from $3.50 to $4.21 down to $.07 then up to a dollar (before going to 8 and back to 1). So, in the long run, we are still growing. Anyway, that is my brief description of the change in the last year for me personally. Now let's get into the platform.

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The Platform

I seem to remember a year ago when gigantic whales ruled the platform. Big names like @abit and @berniesanders who everyone knew and sought votes from. Now, these same whales still run the platform, just from behind closed doors. In the last year, we have seen the rise of bidbots. If you look at the trending page, nine articles out of ten probably used bidbots to get there. I am not going to state my opinion on these bidbots' effect on the platform. I will state that I have decided not to use them because I do not feel like gambling is a necessary idea. I feel like even a 16 cent reward is still larger than what I will get from Facebook or YouTube, so why should I bother paying to possibly make my money back or to possibly lose it.
A change that I can say hasn't occurred in the last year is a hardfork. The last hardfork was in June of 2017, so that is something I found interesting. However, the Steemit platform has changed a lot in the last year. The first change I will note is the introduction of a new logo. They also introduced night time mode and changed the interface up a little. I have also seen tremendous growth in platforms such as busy.org who I have been mainly using to view content (because of the nicer interface) and post (because they will upvote if you use the "busy" tag and post through them). In the last year we have also seen the emergence of new platforms like DTube, DLive, and DSound. These are all platforms which I have not made myself too familiar with because they are still budding. And as we know, budding flowers have the most bugs (at least metaphorically). But, I might become familiar with these platforms in the coming year.

One of the things that I was kind of bummed about was that @retrogames like Steem Pacman have been seemingly abandoned. The introduction of Steem Pacman was one of the highlights of this year for me (and a form of "productive" entertainment for me in study hall). So, I was mildly bummed when it stopped sending rewards (based on High score). We have also had our bots winning SBD to trade by participating in @drawacard. Which I think is a fun and creative idea. So hopefully in the coming year we will see an emergence of new ideas for "gaming the system."

Anyway, I think one of the biggest changes to the Steem platform this year has been the overwhelming amount of new users that found Steem. At its high, our transactions in a day exceeded (and continue to exceed) two and a half million. New users are what keep this platform alive by bringing creative content (and in turn value) to the platform. So, that has definitely been one of the highlights this year for this platform. Anyway, that about wraps up what has changed in the last year. If you wish to read what Steem was like at the very beginning, I talked about in my one year anniversary article. Thanks for reading this! Cheers to two years on Steemit, and many more to come!

Also remember to check for: My weekly 7 post, As well as my composer birthday posts (Note) In order to encourage meaningful feedback on the platform, I will check comment trails of users who leave superficial comments (ie "Awesome post," or "Upvoted.") and will mute any users who exhibit a pattern of leaving "spammy" comments.