One year of Steemit: random thoughts from a minnow after one year on this platform

It has been a year since I joined Steemit, today is my first steemit-birthday. With its ups and downs, I'm happy to be part of this community!

One year ago today I was spending my time in front of my PC, instead of studying, as always. I can't remember exactly how I discovered about Steemit and the Steem blockchain: maybe a video on YouTube, or maybe an article on a blog.

I was very skeptical

Yes, I was very skeptical, but I decided to give Steemit a try. I was still trying to deal with the end of Tsu, a wonderful social media where I met incredible artists and great content creators. However, the sudden closure of Tsu made me feel quite discouraged and skeptical about this kind of stuff.
Despite this, the idea of a decentralised social network based on a blockchain was very interesting.

So I joined Steemit

So, I decided to join Steemit. At that time, you didn't need a valid phone number in order to sign up: I just had to save my Master Password in a safe place (my super-encrypted and almost inaccessible password manager).

I wrote my introduction post and started exploring the platform.

First posts, creative users and spam

During the first days here, I started posting pictures and looking for artists and creative users in general. I also met some old Tsu users, amazing!

However, where there's money, there's spam: when Steemit became popular, a lot of new users arrived here only to make a profit. The Steem blockchain was soo flooded with follow4follow and upvote me, I'll do the same posts, I couldn't find the desire to spend more time here. To make things more complicated, some so-called whales started downvoting original and creative posts only because they were upvoted by other whales. That's a great way to incentivize the use of this platform, isn't it? (Yes, I can be very sarcastic sometimes).

Despite its ups and downs, I like Steemit

Thanks to Steemit, I met some creative users that were previously on Tsu and other new incredible (and incredibly talented) people. I'm happy to be part of this platforms, despite its ups and downs. I just hope to see even more creativity (since I'm here for this) and less spam.
I think we, as a community, can do great thing thank to something like a decentralised and censorship-resistance social network. We have the tools to change the world as we know it, let's do it!