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Rewards

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A year ago today, I made an account on Steemit.

At that time, I just assumed that I’d be working every day for the rest of my life, grinding things out, trying to get ahead. I didn’t think that I would ever have more than a couple thousand dollars worth of savings or the freedom to take a chance and change careers, maybe try making a living doing something that I am passionate about.

These days, however, thanks in large part to Steemit and the rewards I have received from it (both the people I have met and the Steem I have received), I have begun think about the possibility of having a different future, one in which I don’t HAVE to work until the day that I die; one in which, if I am still working well into my senior years, it is because I have chosen to do so, not because I must.

This is what writing for Steemit and interacting with other Steemians over the past year has done for me. It has motivated me, inspired me, and given me a new vision of what my future may hold, and those are some incredible gifts.

So, thank you, to everyone who was involved in making this platform and to everyone who is involved in perpetuating it.

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Here are some of my thoughts, reflections, and confessions about the past year.

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The Luck of Finding Steemit Early On

While it was exciting to see the value of Steem rise to over $2.50 this past June, and while that value increase certainly helped me diversify and begin investing in crypto, I secretly miss the days when Steem was only worth ten cents and a post valued at $15.00 would reward you with 150 Steem. I also miss the earlier days of Steemit when the inflation rate was so high that you could literally watch the Steem Power in your wallet increase by the hour.

At the time, I had no idea how lucky I was to be able to witness these aspects of Steemit and reap the rewards of them a year later. Maybe in five years, if a $15.00 post only brings in a reward of 1 Steem, we’ll all be saying the same thing about Steemit now.

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Cheap Thrills

Using the picture upload feature on Steemit for the first time and then never having to resort to the uncertainty of free image hosting sites again was unbelievably satisfying. Outside of getting my first $100 post, finding my work shared in another Steemians curation list for the first time, and being asked to be a judge for a Steemit contest, this very well might be my most memorable moment of the year. That’s how exciting it was!

Similarly, seeing the red notification flags for the first time was pretty exhilirating too. That was when it was really easy to feel like I was witnessing something really huge being built from the ground up.

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Silver Linings

Being flagged by a whale for the first time during The Experiment was a real shock, and continuing to be flagged again and again for the next three or four weeks was really demoralizing. That said, seeing my vote raise the value of another’s post by even one cent once the reward pool began to get redistributed was absolutely thrilling. And that thrill only continued to grow as the value of my vote steadily rose up to over a dollar.

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A Low Point, Followed by a High One

Watching my curation and author rewards drop all the way down to zero after the reward system changed from a 24 hour window to a one week window while still catching the occasional whale flag during the ongoing Experiment was most definitely the low point of this past year on Steemit for me.

As they say, though, the good follows the bad, and as depressing as it was to see my rewards go down to zero after that particular hardfork, it was just as satisfying to see the value of a week’s worth of posts shoot up to over a hundred dollars after the most recent hardfork.

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This Week’s Discovery

We can now upload banner pictures to the header of our blogs with ease. I can’t tell you how happy I am about this and to see that progress with the UI of this platform continues.

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Here’s to another year of writing, reading, commenting, voting, and who knows what else.

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If you’re a new user on this platform, this is my message to you.

Just do what you do, do it for yourself, and regardless of what comes your way, don’t stop doing it. There are bound to be ups and downs along the way, but if you keep putting yourself out there and interacting with the other members of this community, rewards that you can easily see and those that you can’t will definitely follow.

Cheers!

Image Credit: Image One on Pixabay, Image Two on Pixabay