I'm just reading through some of the steemit posts this morning and it seems a lot of people are a bit down about the price of steem. It's sort of funny to watch as some of the newer people here - even people that have been here about 8 months - seem to think this is a low price.

It's not; and it's not that bad.

I just recently hit a few milestones I didn't really get a chance to mention since I was on vacation the last few weeks.

First, I recently hit my 2 year mark on Steemit.

I first joined Steemit on July 23rd, 2016. I still remember discovering this place and being completely blown out of the water at what it was offering. Steemit.com was also even more basic than it is now, which might be hard for some of the newer members to even comprehend, considering steemit still appears like a website from the 90's.

Back then there was no vote slider. You got you're ten votes and that was it before you started to lose voting power. Back then you had no reputation, not that it means a whole lot these days anyway. Also back then, it seemed to be more about quality content and not so much who the poster is: although that still existed. On any given post you could earn $100+ or $0. It all depended on the quality and who saw it. Now it seems to be about who posted the content and it doesn't so much matter what it's about - with some exceptions, of course.

And back then, they payouts were given at 24 hours and 30 days. In my opinion, there should be no limit on when a post pays out, but 30 days was much better than the 7 days we have now. If a post could have the potential to earn money indefinitely, the quality of each post would surely increase. Having payouts capped at 7 days just makes people spit out quantity and not quality.

I joined right after Steem hit the $4 mark. Then, pretty much the same thing happened as it is now. The price ever so slowly dropped, and dropped, and dropped.

It went all the way down to 6 cents.

6 cents!!

Imagine that! Nobody was making any money from their posts, with some exceptions. People started jumping ship back then, too. It was very common for every post, at least for me, to make between $0 and $0.1. There were a number of people that stuck through it then as well. I remember how excited I was when steem made it back to 50 cents - then it kept going.

Was there anything happening on steemit driving the price up? Not really. Somewhere along the way the features such as reputation and the vote slider were implemented but I don't remember them really making the price move that much - maybe a little. It only followed the price of bitcoin, from what I can see and it still is.

If you look at the price from last year at this time ($1.21 on Aug 10, 2017) we're still down but not much. Steem actually went down as low as 85 cents around November last year.

Despite being down, the point I'm trying to make is the same thing keeps happening over and over. Steem gets these pumps in value really fast and then just slowly falls back down to a much lower value. People start flipping out and jumping ship each time it drags out and then they come flooding back as it pumps. It's been happening since I started on Steemit 2 years ago.

So don't worry about the price right now. The hard fork that's coming might pump the price up a bit or it might not. The price might pump on it's own like it seems to have been doing or it might not. Since the price is way up over 8 cents, I'm still happy. In fact, Steem is worth more than the Canadian dollar right now so it's doing pretty good after only 2 years. I just wish I could go to the store and buy groceries with my steem without the hassle of cashing it out to bitcoin then CAD then to the bank with a number of waiting periods and fees in between. That will come eventually, though.

Just keep posting because you like to and not because your vote is worth a few cents less right now. Even earning 1 cent from your post is better than making a post somewhere else, too. I was so happy when my 100% vote gave out 1 cent to people some of the time.

The second milestone is that I just passed 2500 followers.

This is a big achievement for me as I'm certainly not the most extroverted person out there - far from it. I'm sure a bunch of those follows aren't real or have jumped ship over the last 2 years but thanks so much to all the people following me and commenting on my posts.

On my way to 5000.