Great Success! With Steem. Perhaps

Initial Perspective

First of all, thanks to @allasyummyfood for cluing me into this platform. I had been a big fan of her cooking videos on YouTube, and as part of the problems YouTube has been having over the last year or more, she posted about Steem.

I've been a fan of cryptocurrencies, and the culture around it for years, and so the idea of a crypto based social media platform was very exciting. I'd been following Synereo for some time, but it seems that Steem was the first out of the gate, and so here I am.

My initial experience was just to treat it like any other social network. Post things that interest me, and see what kind of interest could develop in that way

The First Big Blowup

Like most people, my initial posts were met with little or no attention. This is to be expected, you start out with zero people subscribed, and so have to build an audience like any platform.

However, I was quickly surprised when I posted a review for the new Spider-man Movie. Overnight it had gotten a huge response, with many and influential upvotes. This was quite exciting, and made me realize the power of the platform.

My initial thoughts were, maybe Steem is a good place to post movie reviews? And so, I posted other reviews with lesser success, but still somewhat remarkable. IT and Bladerunner

However, not all of them had such success. Some reviews quite flat, receiving hardly any attention at all.

I suppose this is just the nature of the game, but it seems a large part of the success on Steem is somebody very influential giving your post that initial boost. So, I suppose this is where curation comes into play, and in that way, thanks to all the influential curators out there! :D

Where I'm at Now

When I browse the Hot or Trending sections (what's the difference really?) I can't help but notice that most of the posts are related to Steem, or are analysis of cryptocurrency developments. This seems natural, but it seems that eventually Steem will have to have more generally popular posts rise to the top, if it wants to grow as a platform.

Frankly, part of the genesis of this post was my observation of this fact, and the idea that "well, if they want Steem-focused posts, I'll write a Steem-focused post." This is obviously fine as we all start to cement what the Steemian culture is, but, once again, we'll need to expand the world a bit in order to keep growing.

I don't know of any practical solution to this other than I'll keep writing my life, politics, and entertainment related posts in the hopes of encouraging that type of content. The crypto and steem-focused posts will still exist, but hopefully the platform will host content more rich than that.

Am I missing something here? Seriously, I'm looking for discussion among the already settled members of the community. My hope is that as 2018 progresses, I'll be able to view the Hot and Trending threads, and not see so many of the same damned posts talking about "crypto updates" for the day, or the Alexa score for steemit.com at the moment.