somewhere you heard steemit.com is going to be the next big thing.

You heard it will be bigger than reddit and Facebook combined. You heard something about "blockchain technology", decentralization, and getting paid for blogging and voting. Maybe you even heard already the story about that gal that made a make-up tutorial and got rich, or the one about the guy who quit his job to earn his money blogging now.

If you encountered a particularly enthusiastic missionary, he assuredly spoke of a "new paradigm", more sober minds will have painted for you, with the most vibrant colors, a vivid picture of a dawn of a new age, of humankinds ascension to a higher plane of consciousness, of the beginning of an era of enlightenment, freedom of thought, and collaborative mutuality, of the end of scarcity, true world peace and prosperity for all nations.

You don't know and you don't care what that cryptostuff is about, all you know is there are $$$ signs under each post, that a huge pie is being baked and that you want a slice of it. You plan on grabbing the "first adopter" bonus and bragging rights for holding one of the older accounts. Most of all, you want to give reddits censorship the finger and you don't like the idea of Mark Zuckerberg getting richer with every photo upload of your breakfast. You have a huge friends list, you are scouting on their behalf and if you [like] what you see, you'll invite them all over. You are going to send them to this post because a proper introduction is of greatest importance for a great Steemit.com experience. Marketers will love you, you are an "influencer". They know if they excite you, you will resonate and translate these good vibes to a lot of nodes within the global network.

What, you have a... "spiritual" objection? You're, like, a public figure of sorts and built your whole identity around "speaking the truth" and being "respectable", you have preached "intellectual honesty" on every occasion, for years built a reputation of upholding the values of humility and modesty? You... have "moral" scruples to lure those who trust you into this inferno of a Ponzi pyramid system scheme, because they regard you as a modern-day Jesusbuddhaosho figure?

Then send your friends and fans to read this integration crash course for social network migrants to steemit.com.

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here is how it works

Skip what you think you'll find boring judging by the headline. Bookmark and come back later, you will be asking questions.

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crypto

Upon registration, you had a suspicion you are on crypto territory when asked for such a unreasonably long password...

Bitcoin enthusiasts and traders were the first to hear about Steem, hence the first to adapt and their density will remain quite high for a while before other demographics (such as yourself) follow and dilute the pool, so expect many crypto folks and crypto talk on main channels for the time being. Remember when your grandma sent you a Facebook friend request, alerting you to the fact that Facebook is not "cool" anymore? This will happen here too, and maybe sooner than you like.

All you have to know for now is that "Steem" is a database distributed to many computers all over the world. Similar to Bitcoin, it runs on a so-called blockchain. Unlike centralized systems, such a database cannot be switched off or censored. Steem is also open source. Consequently, the whole system is completely transparent (and everyone is looking forward to the security audit).

The single most important implication nobody is going to rub under your nose (since it is so self-evident) is this: all you do and say will always be visible to everyone (even your PM metadata - the PM itself not, of course).

There are already many webinterfaces that visualize the blockchain data. There will be more. And they will be way more advanced. And there will be those you'll ever see, operated by entities with very particular interests.

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interface

The first thing you'll notice about steemit.com is that is says "beta" in the upper left corner. In this case that means almost none of the functions you are used to (PMs, friends lists, ignore buttons, subforums, tag filters, bookmarks) are working - yet. The developers are working hard at it (and announced relief for next week).

Think of it this way: welcome to the party! Grab a drink, the DJ is still having trouble setting his turntables up, so people brought their own ghetto blasters.

So here is what you do and tell your family, friends and fans to do: you notify each other - on the network you're from - your usernames, then goto steemit.com/@username and click "follow". Then you go to steemstats.com, enter your own username, type [enter] and voilà: you have an improvised newsfeed of everyone you are following.

Steemit.com will have a new interface one day. Some devs are coding their own already. Quite a market will develop for Steem interfaces. The most successful will be those that empower users to customize their newsfeed after their pleasure.

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$$$

You have already read the Steem Whitepaper and are even more confused than before? Worry not, it caused wiser people to argue over whether it is compound interest when your money doubles in regular intervals.

Here is the theory in broad terms: you upvote content that is popular, you get a reward. You create content that is popular, you get a reward. The poorer you are and the sooner you vote and the more rich users upvote that content after you upvoted, the greater your reward. That system got played by bots, and there was a patch, so you actually don't want to vote too early, or you get only 100(t/30minutes)% of the "curation reward". Payout will be 12 hours after the post date. A second payout will occur one month after the post date. A portion of the reward goes to the curator, the rest is split into Steem POWER and Steem DOLLARS.

In your wallet, three figures will show up. STEEM is your measure of shares of the whole project. If in its pure STEEM form, it evaporates pretty quickly, so sell it ASAP or lock it as "Steem POWER" by "powering up". Your Steem POWER determines your might when you upvote. Finally, "Steem Dollars" seem to act as an economic valve and are supposed to correspond 1:1 with the US Dollar most of the time. If you have some, sell them or convert them to STEEM so you can "power up". This conversion takes one week. If you "power down", your Steem Power will be converted into STEEM in 104 weekly rates (two years), which you can then sell.

There is a huge inflation of Steem, so you receive compound interest on your Steem Power. Once a certain amount of Steem is in the system, a "reverse split" divides all Steem by 10.

How that all works is understood by few and explained by less, so don't worry about it all yet. You probably don't even have a Bitcoin wallet yet, so just power up when you can.

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bots

Steemit.com is a playground for bots. There are good bots and bad bots, nice bots and evil bots. Your first post in #introduceyourself will be greeted by @wang with a bunch of ageing howto links. @cheetah will try to detect plagiarized content and comment about it to alert others not to upvote your lazy plagiarizing ass. Others will spam "Keep up the good work" or wildly up- or downvote stuff. Get used to it.

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your content

Come here, stand where I'm standing, right next to me. Now look into the direction I am looking at.

Do you see the same anthill of half-naked humans crawling over each other, screaming frantically, waving their arms, kicking those below, tearing at those above them? Well, that is #introduceyourself. They try to get the attention and an upvote from one of the "power"ful users, because such an upvote can be worth hundreds of dollars, some collect up to $2000 or even $8000 apiece.

If you absolutely must, go try your luck. Strip naked, tattoo the Steem logo on your forehead, compose a song about it, tell a heartwrenching story of all the hardships, humilation, rape, torture, loss, grief, pain, despair and injustice you have suffered in life, boast with all your financial successes and sexual achievements, if you are boring, make something up; sketch your deepest hopes and optimistic projections for the wonderful future Steemit will bring, show them what you are about to eat, introduce your cat - or just go and dump hundreds of plastic balloons into the ocean. Whatever you do, remember to convincingly express your excitement about the awesomeness of Steemit and unwavering loyalty to the cause.

Don't look at me like that.

Make no mistake, you will not be swimming against this swarm. But you don't need to be a follower either. Be the swarm. You are an influencer, so stake your claim and create the content the world needs to see.

And since you told your people to join, and you have agreed on a category to meet in, and since they have your username and you have theirs and know how to follow each other because you used this guide, you can now proclaim your own little tribe in a huge cryptographic game of anarchy, free markets and alternative currencies. Set the tone and culture for those who will follow your path. What is your interest, what do you have to offer, what are you looking for, what have you learned, taught and done today? Write about it in #beer, #dragonball, #c64, #engineering, #l-system, #desirepath, #reinvestigate911. You see, it is easy, just use reddit's sub names. You can submit your post to up to 5 categories.

Make a name known in comments to posts related to your interests. Create your own market. Find peaceful solutions when you collide with earlier claimants, who may have a bot in place to redirect errant posts to the appropriate tag. You're too late for the #photography and #travel market for example, so go occupy #geocentrism now!

Meet new people, extend your network. There will be no moderation whatsoever. You can insult everybody's mother and her cactus and nobody can delete it from the blockchain - it just may not show up on steemit. So be polite and helpful, be excellent, the eye of a million eyes is being had on you. It also pays off sometimes monetarily. Feeling incentivized yet?

Then make sure to beautify your posts. Steemit uses a somewhat strong-willed markdown syntax for font formatting. Don't expect your reddit markdown wizardry to be 100% compatible. Here's what mostly does work:

Heading
=======

Sub-heading
-----------

# Heading size 1 (biggest)

## Heading size 2

### Heading size 3

#### Heading size 4

##### Heading size 5

###### Heading size 6 (smallest)


Paragraphs are separated

by a blank line.


Two spaces at the end of a line leave a  
line break.

_italic text_
*italic text*
__bold text__
**bold text**
`monospace text`

Horizontal rule:

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Bullet list:

  * apples
  * oranges
  * pears

Numbered list:

  1. apples
  2. oranges
  3. pears

> To quote something

A [link](http://example.com).

http://www.urltopicture.tld/automatically_embedded.png

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=automatically_embedded

| A table | might |
|---------|-------|
| come in | handy |
|  maybe  |  too  |

Use HTML 

<center>tags to center stuff.</center> 

Use HTML <sup>tags to make small fonts or big exponents.</sup> 

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sea life

When anyone raises his voice for a sermon about the cetacea or other ocean dwellers of Steemit, stick a finger into each ear, sing "Ode to Joy" as loud as you can, turn around and slowly, but firmly walk away. When out of sight, run as fast as you can. And keep singing.

Here is the deal.

The power of a user is measured as "big fish" or "small fish". So the trending channels are full of all sorts of snake oil peddlers who will try to sell you 23 Fishing Tips & Tricks (No. 5 WILL BLOW YOUR MIND!) how to become the next Captain Ahab. Fvck 7hat 5hit. This is the wealth distribution of Steem right now. This is the Top 5000 richlist and you aren't going to be on it.

Right from the start, cure yourself from any delusions about ever being more than krill in this vast ecosystem once saturation has been reached (full adoption and migration from other platforms) by posting photos of your bae in a swimsuit: a thousand bots will be more powerful than you can ever dream of. And that's fine, no shark will ever show interest in you.

Maybe, every once in a while, if you are really lucky, you might notice one of those fabled names of legend in the list of upvoters of your post when you wonder about a suspiciously big number next to your $ sign. Maybe not. Don't expect it to happen. When it does, rejoice and pay it forward.

In any case, the guy you ran away from a few paragraphs ago? A lunatic (from lat. luna = moon, someone who keeps insisting on getting Steem "to the moon"). A cultist of the worst kind. "Have faith, have trust, all will be well" is their mantra, and they will try to pull you into their warped religion, wash your brain, turn you into a mindless zombie, teach you the prayers of trickle-down economics, the exegesis of their idol's deeds and divination of their will and in the end make you believe a Gini coefficient of 0.988 is an indicator for a healthy economy.

Likewise, steer clear from the countermovement of those who yell about the unfairness of the system, who demand an equal distribution of power and make grandiose speeches about "the power of the many".

♭♫ There is no strength in numbers, have no such misconception... ♪

Do. The. Math.

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your strategy

You have invited your friends. You are now all following each other, and have an eye on the "active", "trending" and "new (created)" tabs of the categories you will cultivate. Make 4 posts a day at most, the 5th one will be "punished" by the system. Upvote ~20 posts or comments, not much more (watch your voting power on steemstats.com - if it is too low, don't vote for a while until it recuperates). Upvote whatever you like, but if you want to go about strictly economically, refrain from upvoting a post that already has a substantial amount of money behind it. Invite debate and comments in your posts for visibility on the "active" feed and additional "rewards". Interact a lot in the comments.

For all those who care after their ecosystems like a gardener waters his flowers will receive their "reward" indirectly: by creating value for Steem, the value of your own share is raised. Long story short:

T H R I V E .

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be prepared

If this experiment succeeds, you will soon find that services and commodities are being offered, and price tags in Steem or SD attached to them. Apps, album downloads, translations, skins, accounts, upvotes, rent-a-bot offers, analytics, visualizers, tools, games, sidechains (blockchains that run ON the blockchain).

Steem will develop its own economy.

One day you'll repair someone's computer and find you'll prefer a generous payment in Steem Dollars when given the choice between that and the usual $10.

And if all goes according to plan, one day you'll visit your kiosk and see a sticker on the counter saying you can pay your chocolate bar in Steem Dollars too.

What happened in the meantime, you were just blogging!?

You have been using a cryptographic system the whole time and never really noticed, Steemit.com was just another social network platform for you. But you were not the only one: your family, friends and fans and everyone else has adapted to Steemit as well, got used to a much freer "Facebook" alternative and its digital "play money" and is now accepting its currency as a legitimate, valuable, "real" token of transaction, as a medium for barter: as money.

Don't look so surprised. Did you think "new paradigm" was hyperbole? Then read again: Steemit.com is only a trojan horse and the beginning of the cryptomoney revolution. Its mission is to cause widespread acceptance of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology in your everyday life.

Are you now glad you adopted so early? Do you now curse me for not advising you to convert all your savings into Steem Power, sell your house, car and grandmother and buy more STEEM asap in the first sentence?

Relax, this is just the beginning. Other, similar projects are in the making, with different approaches, but the same goal: augmenting, and successively replacing traditional central bank fiat money systems with alternative currencies. There will be kinds of money perfect for saving and hoarding. There will be other kinds of money better suited for buying your daily groceries.

After all, money is just paper or numbers on a computer. It receives its value only through our agreement that it is "worth" something, that it is a "symbol", a "token", a "receipt", a "proof-of-work". Only this widespread agreement imbues it with the magical, metaphysical power it has on people. Whether you shape little chips out of precious metal, print fine ornaments on strips of paper, paint sea shells, make knots in a piece of rope or blink bits on a database in and out of existence - its value is just a matter of mutual agreement. That is why a 10,000 Reichsmark bill does not make you a rich man, and why people will begin to accept Steem as payment.

♭♫ If you believe in the power of magic, I can change your mind... ♪

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philosophy

Several things spring to the mind trying to describe the economic philosophy of steemit.com. Some will recognize the blatant anarcho-capitalistic mindset. Others will find the system quite meritocratic. At the same time, the elements of plutocracy cannot be denied. Critics of usury will be not so happy about the whole inflation and compound interest thing, but glad to find some aspects of demurrage currencies implemented. The STEEM/STEEM Power/Steem DOLLAR system is not so different from the Swiss system. You thought gold, banks, chocolate and cuckoo clocks make Switzerland such a rich country? They'll never tell you they have a complementary currency affording them stability of purchasing power.

The founders have made abundantly clear that the content's value will be extremely volatile:

In the case of Steem, there is a constant need for new content because old content decays in value very quickly
~@dan

"Moby Dick", Homer's "Iliad" and all the other timeless works that have proven their value over the centuries would not have survived on Steemit - you could not even upvote them more than a month after they were published. You may want to be aware of that before you consider publishing anything supposed to have lasting value exclusively on Steemit.com.

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This integration course is addressed at all those who are looking for a censorship-free alternative to reddit, Facebook etc. If you want to know more about the following topics, other users' posts and categories (#trading, #bitcoin, #steem, #cryptonews, #investment etc) will be way more helpful, informed and accurate.

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password security

This is the new doctrine: if you remember your password, you are doing it wrong. Instead, get a password manager. The first 10 pages of Google consist of "the best (5|13|23) password managers" entries, so check out KeePassX because it is in the Lubuntu repos and is said to work under M$ Windoze too. It's easy to use and can generate strong passwords for you. You can, of course, insist on storing your passwords in the cloud.

From your OWNER private key (the long one you had to think of), which is the most valuable of all of them and which you should print out and then always keep under lock and key and NOT store in your browser's autocomplete, three other keys are derived (https://steemit.com/@{USERNAME}/permissions), so when you change your OWNER private key, the others will change too. With the POSTING private key, you can post and vote and change your posting key. This is the one you can keep in your browser's autocomplete. With the ACTIVE private key, you can do money transactions and all you can do with a posting key. You might want to consider keeping it in the password manager. With the MEMO private key, you can only do PMs (except you can't yet). With the OWNER private key, you can do everything, including lock yourself out forever.

On the bright side, there's a new protocol in town in case you get hacked.

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politics

The blockchain database is maintained by 19 witnesses to guarantee that everything keeps running on the technical side, people with lots of computing power and knowhow. You can vote for them on steemit.com/~witnesses. According to the whitepaper, these should have a natural interest to make Steem great.

The very same whitepaper which states:

Steem is committed to enabling free speech and building a free society.

Let this be your measure.

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mining

If you have a powerful CPU and a stable internet connection and you normally burn your kAh with 4000-generation runs of boxcar2d.com, you can turn electricity into thermal discharge and money instead: mine steem. And search for "bitcoin mining farm" on YouTube to get an idea of how the big guys do it.

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trading

There are exchanges ("Bittrex" is mentioned often) for cryptocurrencies where you can buy and sell U$, Steem, Bitcoin, Ethereum and a few dozen other coins. So if a rich uncle dies and you inherit a few millions...

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This integration course should give you a good start into the Steem universe and save you the trouble of trying to wrap your head around the many mutually exclusive opinions on Steemit, what it is and will become, and help you decide whether to risk your credibility and authority among peers by recommending what potentially could well be an elaborate long con Ponzi pyramid scheme scam or turn out to be the steam engine of the 21st century.

By decidedly NOT shoving the greed-induced excitement, enthusiasm and euphoria many others experienced down your throat (and then leaving you alone with reality's bitter hangover), it gives you the tools and a realistic, skeptical perspective on what to expect when you decide to be among the first to turn Facebook and reddit into the same tumbleweed cricket desert MySpace has become to spite their manipulation, mod abuse and admin censorship.

And now have fun. I am looking forward to your reports, questions, comments, objections, corrections, projections and experiences!

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^{#steemit #steemigration #newbies #howto}

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//edit: thanks to @pfunk for the corrections, @repholder for the exposure and of course a big thank you to all you crazy uptuckers!