One year on Steemit

Back in 25th of February last year I created my Steemit account after deleting my 6 year old Facebook profile. After abandoning it for two months or so, I started using it almost daily since early May. Fast forward to today and I've gathered a little over 1100 posts and I'm closing in to the 1500 followers mark. Since I started using the internet this was the platform I accumulated the most followers which doesn't really mean much.

This is not a celebratory post. I saw many users like to write such posts to mark the moment when they accumulate a certain number of followers, like 100, 500 and so on. I don't really care for that because I find this metric a pretty useless one.

If I check this metric in a bit more detail on steemtracked.com (which I encourage you to also do) I can see that about 30% to 40% of my followers are users that employ a 'follow-for-follow' strategy which I find silly. I use the word 'silly' although a "stronger" wword might be more appropriate. I mention this because if a user uses such a tactic that tells me two things about him. One: you don't care about my content. Two: you don't care about your feed page. You can't possibly care about your feed page when you follow 10k or 100k people because it's impossible to sift through thousands of new posts per day, the vast majority of those posts having content that you are not interested in.

That's one point about the followers number. The other point is that many of the accounts are abandoned. And this is a broader discussion that can be had about the total number of registered users on Steemit. I know many people on here pay close attention to this number and like to say things like "hey, look how many users this platform has! MOON soon!". Personally, I find that number pretty irrelevant. What counts in my view is the number of daily active users because that's a metric of activity, which matters. I might be wrong but I think Steemit has less that 50k daily active users. After two years of existence, this is a relative failure in my opinion.

All that being said, I'm going to go through the blogs of all my followers in the coming weeks. Please do not feel the need to leave a comment in order to draw my attention to your blog. It's not necessary. As I said, I'm going to check all the blogs and decide to smash that follow button if I like the stuff you're writing and sharing.

And while I'll be doing all of that, I'm going to also readjust my auto-voting parameters. Although it will be a bit of pain in the ass, I have to do this if I still want to earn from curation. After 3 months of buying STEEM delegation from @blocktrades, I've decided to stop doing it because @blocktrades decided to jack up the prices and it became too expensive for me. While I had the delegation I earned about 2-3 STEEM per week. That has gone down 10x since I stopped renting delegation.

So, that's that. Because I now have way less STEEM power, I have to be more picky on what I upvote and the upvote percentages. The more STEEM power you have the more people you can upvote and earn curation rewards and vice-versa.

All this doesn't mean much to any of those that I have on my auto-voter because my vote is basically worthless. A 100% upvote I think it's 3 cents or so. And it will be less and less because I'm powering down. I've been powering down since December and I'll continue to do so until I have only the minimum STEEM power required to have an account (I think it's 5 STEEM).

On a medium term, I'll continue to use Steemit at least until EOS launches it's announced social media platform. Once that happens I intend to switch to that and most probably phase out this account.

Cheers.