What Kind Of Steemian Are YOU?

The Steemit landscape is constantly shifting and people are using Steemit in a wide variety of ways. This is a long needed update to my "Steemit Society" article.

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Steemit is a society, made up of communities. Every individual has their own strengths, weaknesses and objectives. Over time, many Steemians have settled into niche roles, doing what they're best at, what they love, or what reaps them the most rewards. If you're new to Steemit, you might want to experiment with different activities before deciding what works best for you.

Here is a list of some of the most common types of Steemians...

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Coders, Devs, Data-Nerds

Steemit is a young, innovative platform so it has attracted a lot of interest from the techie community. The STEEM blockchain is "Open Source", so anyone with enough ingenuity can build applications relating to it, or analyse the data from it. Over time, more and more third party apps are being built around STEEM. When not watching episodes of Star Wars, these nerds work hard and create real value. They deserve every Upvote they get.
Techies worth checking out: @mauricemikkers, @heimindanger, @anyx

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Creatives

Artists, photographers, and other creatives bring value to Steemit by sharing their creations, often giving some insight into the creative process. Photography is hugely popular here, thanks in part to @jamtaylor's very successful Steemit Photo Challenge.

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Noobs (AKA "Minnows")

Nawww! De lil nooob! Just kidding. Everyone was a noob once and newbies are as important to Steemit as anyone else. Some lucky noobs will get a nice STEEM injection with a legit, sincere and entertaining introduction post. After trying their hand at posting, commenting, and voting, most noobs will eventually progress into some of the roles outlined in this post.

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Good bloggers

The meat of Steemit. Bloggers might write about food, travel, technology, or anything really. The best bloggers provide real value to their posts, by being entertaining or informative. They know how to grab peoples attention, and they conduct the appropriate research to make their content genuine. It takes skill and experience to craft great blog posts, and newcomers might be disappointed that their blog posts fail to gain traction. The risks are considerate - You could spend hours on a post only for it to fall flat on its face. The rewards however will appeal to many. It’s not unusual for the popular bloggers to make upwards of 500 dollars in a single blog post. Popular bloggers on Steemit include @heiditravels, @sweetsssj, @sirwinchester, and many more..

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Bad bloggers

Not everyone is cut out to be a blogger. Lazy writing or mundane subjects will not go very far. If you’ve written ten posts about your goldfish and nobody is responding, it might be time to try a different approach. What’s interesting to you may not have very broad appeal or it may be obvious that you are not an authority on the subject you’re trying to write about. Don't be jelly of the successful bloggers on Steemit. Learn from them.

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Lurkers

There are far more Steemians than it might initially appear. Lurking in the shadows are many, with myriad intentions. Some profiles exist only to earn rewards from curation, and many accounts remain inactive for periods, only to spring back to life when the price of STEEM goes above a certain threshold.

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Musicians

This is currently the fastest growing creative group on Steemit. After living in the shadow of photography for long enough, musicians are now finally stepping forward to sing or play, and Steemit is a richer place for it.

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한국어

우리는 당신을 사랑해. 한국.
우리에게 투표 해주세요

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Philanthropists

Increasingly, there are people using Steemit to change the world for the better. From raising cash for the sick or homeless, to feeding stray cats, or simply raising awareness of certain issues. Be vigilant, however. Make sure to weigh up the authenticity of any post before giving your Upvote. Ideally everyone should have a photo in their intro post, as a bare minimum.

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Good Content Curators

Steemit loves good content. Good curators search out and highlight the best content on Steemit, News stories, articles, videos, photographs, jokes, music, artwork.. anything that adds value to Steemit. The content is then resteemed or summarized and listed in a new post. They're not all doing it out of the goodness of their hearts either. There is real money to be made in curation, especially if you hold a lot of STEEM POWER and have a lot of followers, or others follow your curation trail. Just keep an eye on your voting power!

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Spammers, Plagiarists... “Copypasta”

Some people will copy and paste whole articles or creative works and pass it off as their own work. This is spammy, plagiarism, and super uncool, y’hear? Thankfully, the Steemit community are becoming more vigilant, and copypasta is usually ignored or flagged. Remember, you only have one reputation.

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Good commentors

You don’t have to make any new posts to enjoy Steemit or earn STEEM. Comments can get a share of a posts earnings by engaging with the subject matter in a meaningful, insightful or entertaining way. It would be easy to dismiss this role if one payed too much attention to the high earning posts on the front page, but dig deeper and you’ll see top comments often get richly rewarded. The best commentors engage with subjects they understand and care about. Find your tribe, build relationships, earn STEEM. You'll also gain a lot of followers, should you decide to do some writing.

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Lazy commentors

“That’s cool”, “Great post”, “Thanks for sharing”, “Welcome”, “I like this”, “Good Article” …blah blah blah. Unlike good commentors, lazy commentors take no time to read posts, and will paste generic comments in the hope of some occasional Upvotes or followers. It’s takes no skill or effort to be a lazy commentor and most people won’t Upvote a lazy comment. The risks are low. The rewards are low. Lazy commenting is quite harmless, but quite pointless.

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Sycophants

Sycohphants are like Lazy Commenters on Viagra. They will try to get Upvotes by sucking up to other Steemians, lavishing them with praise and questions.

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Memers

Some say they live on nothing but Doritos and Mountain Dew. Memers sprinkle the community with graphical injokes and nerdy references. They didn’t chose the meme life. The meme life chose them. Check out the #meme hashtag for more.

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Interactors

Wait what? There’s people on Steemit with no financial investment or medium term agenda? Interactors are the unsung heroes of Steemit. All they want to do is make new friends and engage with some cool content. Ideally there would be a greater percentage of these types, but the financial potential of Steemit activity means a high percentage of Steemians are entirely focussed on financial gain. Be nice to these people. We need them. Hopefully the platform will evolve to be more useful and fun regardless of any crypto-financial incentives.

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Oddballs

Some people are just, different. There are a number of Steemit users that are impossible to pigeon-hole, and they wouldn’t have it any other way. They're oddballs, but they're our oddballs.
Check out Steemits latest oddball @ionlysaymeep

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Good bots

Not all users on Steemit are human. The blockchain is crawling with automated intelligence, programmed by geniuses, both evil and good. Crazy shit, amirite? Some bots such as @cheetah endeavour to flag content that they consider a copyright violation or other form of spam. Other bots serve to expose and flag down "bad bots". That's right - Bot wars!
Some bots are open about their synthetic inception, while others don’t mention it.

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Bad bots

There are bots on Steemit designed to spam, scam, disrupt, steal, hack, imitate, destroy. Increasingly, they are being considered a spammy nuisance.

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Trolls

Trolls live to be disruptive, to play Devils Advocate or to wind people up, usually for fun, but sometimes to point out censorship, groupthink, hypocrisy or cynicism. Being abrupt and provocative, they get a bad wrap, and usually deserve it. Trolls do however remind us that not everything is all fluffy and rosy in life, and that nothing online should be taken at face value. If they get under your skin, hit the Mute button on their profile page. It’s that easy.

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Babes

Here’s an uncomfortable truth: There are real benefits to being attractive. This is as true online as it is in the real world. Beautiful people can earn money with photos, videos, and interactions. Love it or hate it, babes are here to stay, online and offline. As they say, “Don’t hate the player. Hate the game”.

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Spam Fighters & Abuse Fighters

In 2016, as Steemit grew in popularity, the potential gains from blog posts exploded into the thousands (of Dollars!). Fake stories became more common, and harder to vet. One such fake story was a plagiarised article about a young womans long term heroin use. Until the whistle was blown, the post was due to make thousands of Dollars. When it was discovered the post had been plagiarized from an article that had previously appeared in Refinery29.com, the post was heavily flagged before “Payout Time” and the imposter earned nothing. BUSTED!

The users who blew the lid off the story were heavily rewarded with copious Upvotes in the comment section. Thus, the war on spam began. Later, @steemcleaners formed, to flag spam and advise when a post risks being flagged. Steemcleaners are a collective of humans who manually cross check posts for duplicate content, plagiarism, etc.

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Dolphins & Influencers

Some Steemians have worked their way up the ladder into a position of influence by exhibiting sheer talent in their field. Others are simply great at bringing people together in their niche communities. When they speak, people listen.

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Whales

Numerically the rarest of breeds on Steemit, but influentially, godlike. Whales are those handful of users who have a huge investment in Steem Power. Such investment makes their votes far more meaningful so a Whale can make or break a blog post with one swipe of a finger, so you better not get on the wrong side of one. If you are very lucky, a Whale will Upvote one of your posts or comments. Want to be a Whale? Buy a LOT of STEEM Power.

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So, who are you in the Steemit Economy?

Do any of the roles above describe you? Or perhaps you're still finding your feet.
NB- This article, while just a bit of fun, is still incomplete and subject to change, of course. As Steemit continues to expand, more roles will emerge. If you have any technical corrections or suggestions, please let me know in the comments.

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Images via http://www.sp-studio.de/