I felt I was contributing, but apparently the community felt otherwise.

Background Info

About a year ago I was introduced to Steemit while reviewing new and upcoming cyrptocurrencies. I signed up for an account, wrote a few posts, and one even paid me over a hundred dollars! I mined a bit, but become disheartened when my computer was not capable enough to generate any type of payout for me. Soon after, life came by with a large present of issues and my Steemit days sort of faded away.

Recently, I have become more involved with Steemit in terms of finding a plethora of content regarding Gridcoin posted here. While digesting this content, my curiosity became aroused in regards to how Steemit is doing these days. Has it seen an increase in User Base? Is their blockchain handling all of this sufficiently? So on and so forth.

Satisfied with the answers I found and the increasing success and improvements which the Steemit community and developers have put forth over the past year, I sort of made the conscious decision to really get back into Steemit, to make an effort and contribute and become a valuable member of the community.

The Original Post

I had browsed a few different topics, left a couple upvotes here and there for both posts and comments which I found helpful and valuable to me. However, I then stumbled upon this post: [The Dawn of EOS.IO](https://steemit.com/eos/@eosio/the-dawn-of-eos-io "The Dawn of EOS.IO"). It is a hefty read, and if one is not familiar with EOS.IO in the slightest, it may seem a bit confusing. Similarly, if one has never heard of Steemit at all and the very first thing they read about it is the internal mechanisms for curation awards, well, you could imagine how that may be a bit daunting to understand.

As I fully believe that blockchain technologies will soon play an instrumental role in almost all facets of our lives in the near the future, I am heavily vested in supporting new worth-while projects. Additionally, I was talked out of purchasing bitcoin in 2011, and well, I very much would like to be on the ground floor of the next big thing.

Reading through this EOS.IO post, I finished feeling that this seemed legit, but I honestly wasn't sure **what exactly this was all about**. They are ahead of schedule, they operate via Proof of Performance, they have a minimally viable product, they have free storage and they have high performance transactions. OK, sounds good, **but WHAT is it?**

Research

At this point, I decided to head to EOS.IO, Steemit, Reddit, and a few other forums to conduct further research and my own due diligence. I poured over comments and topics and statements and videos for over an hour. A clearer picture was starting to come into focus and I was becoming more and more excited regarding this endeavor. The clincher for me, the item which lent the most legitimacy and credibility to this new technology and cryptocurrency, was this video here: [EOS Consensus Presentation May 2017](https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=MUZWZj1pu94).

Legitimacy and Credibility

This 35 minute information powerhouse of a video was predominately given by our very own: Steemit Co-Founder Daniel Larimer - @dan . He has assisted in taking Bitshares and Steem to a combined market cap of over $720 million dollars and with products which serve a purpose, are still viable, and still growing. When a person like this is behind the next big technology as the visionary and driving force of it, well, that means a lot to me. That means I know this is not a group of 3 people in some random country running a ponzi scheme just trying to pump and dump an ICO. This video and it's contents are what convinced me to move forward with EOS and believe in it.

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The Comment

As mentioned previously, I had made the conscious decision to start to become a more valuable member of the Steemit community. I understand that my content won't be attracting thousands of upvotes or anything like that, but the simple fact is I could have seen the EOS video and told no one about it..... or I could share it.

I chose to take the 2 minutes and post the video that EOS created, at an EOS sponsered event, onto a post covering EOS written by EOS.

So I wrote the quick comment, included the video which made such a positive impact to me so others too could see and share and understand as I had and went to bed. I must admit, I was a little excited to see to wake up in the morning and see if others thought the same, that I had made just a tiny itty-bitty impact in the Steemit community in a beneficial way. I felt good.

WARNING OFFENSIVE CONTENT BELOW

Unfortunately, I did not wake up feeling good once I saw roughly 50 downvotes for my comment. Stunned... yes? However, shouldn't have I expected it though? I mean how dare I write a comment like that? The spam! The un-relatedness! The begging! The off-topicness! The insulting and atrocious demeanor in which I conducted myself here while again, posting an EOS created video, at an EOS sponsered event, on an EOS post, written by EOS!

I'm Not Alone

@johnsmith (62) · 15 hours ago Congrats to Dan, Brendan and the whole EOS team! Releasing an MVP ahead of schedule is a strong indication that EOS is the real deal and is going to deliver the goods. If anyone has been on the fence about whether or not to purchase EOS tokens... now would be a be good time reconsider whatever is holding you back. Things are going to be getting very exciting, very soon. Crypto life! $0.00 66 votes Reply

@fav (58) · 9 hours ago storage is a huge upgrade, can't wait to use email 2.0! $0.00 55 votes Reply

Should I have done one of these posts? Would one of these been more helpful and would have made a better contribution than mine?

So what gives? Am I just misunderstanding what Steemit is about?

Those posts above are all acceptable, and some have upvotes. While I do believe in positive reinforcement and motivation, it seems to me that if I wanted to make a 'meaningful contribution' to this post, then I should have not shared the video, not explained why I thought the video was relevant, not had one of the longest continued threads on my comment on that post, and I should have simply said: 'YAY!!!!!!'.

What are your thoughts?

Thank you for reading this, I really do appreciate it.

Cheers!
"Chicago" Mike

_{Title Photo Credits: Photograph by Fuse/Thinkstock Images, photo illustration by Natalie Matthews-Ramo}