Hello Steemians!

I discovered Steemit in August of 2017 through a stray reddit post and immediately signed up for an account to start blogging about my travels in hope of making some extra money. I was drawn in by all the posts on the trending page and the hundreds of dollars they were all making and got set to start sharing my stories and getting in on the action. I worked hard on my first few post, writing, editing, re-reading and picking the perfect photos for my posts only to make $0.02, I was disappointed but I powered on and kept writing. I had a few big posts about some of my travels that broke the $50 dollar mark and I was so excited to be a part of the community and to have people reading my posts! I took a month break from all social media to go traveling with my girlfriend and when I came back I got right back into the community and this time I am spending a lot more time curating and trying to write meaningful comments as opposed to the standard "Great post!", which takes time but I am getting there. I want to spend a minute to talk about my general feelings about Steemit as a whole.

A little verification I forgot on my introduceyourself post!

Powering Up And Why You Should Too

After my 5 months on Steemit I had accumulated about 175SBD from curating and posting and I decided to take half of that (I know it's not much) and convert it to Steem and then to SP so I can have a little more influence in the curation side. I kept half my SBD to test out post promotion and perhaps if SBD rises back up to previous heights to maybe make a withdrawal, but we shall see. I powered up because I truly believe in Steem as a platform and that given a bit more time it will see mass adoption and perhaps dTube will eventually topple the already failing Youtube.

Powering up is pretty important in this platform because it allows you to have more influence on other peoples posts. Even if you only have a relatively small amount of SBD like me or lots of it, I think everyone should at least power up their accounts a little bit just to help keep the community alive. By making complete withdrawals of your SBD you are showing that you don't believe the community will survive in the long run and if that's the case then why are you here?

The Best Parts Of Steemit

The Community

Steemit has a fantastically supportive community that has less of the toxic elements that other sites like Reddit have, this may be because the user base is smaller though. I love the huge variety of posts made from around the world and reading about all the unique points of view and not just being bombarded by memes and spam. This community allows for people from any part of the world to write meaningful posts and show off their individual photography, it really captures the different sides of the world in a positive way. I really enjoy reading all the stories from travel to homesteading to cryptocurrency and everything in between, this site has so much well written content.

The Other Uses for the Blockchain

One of my favorite ideas to spring from the Steemit blockchain is Utopian.io, it is a full featured site dedicated to continuing and completing open source projects, it is a truly inspired idea. I am also a big fan of Busy.org, which is another site that takes all of Steemits content and displays it in a more classic social media way, like Facebook or Twitter, and it has a few extra features that make it a little more comfortable to use. Another favorite of mine is Dtube, which most people know about now, that is a Youtube alternative in which all posts are on the Steemit blockchain and available for curation, it takes the power to make money away from the advertisers. There are a few other uses as well but I haven't tried them out personally so if any stand out to you let me know in the comments.

The Content

As I mentioned above, one of the most interesting parts of this platform is the content itself. I love how Steemit is more of a blogging platform that prefers long in depth posts over memes and jokes, it forces people to really create something special to reap the rewards. There are so many interesting tags to search through and so many little glimpses into different cultures around the world and a lot of the content is written with real passion for the subjects, it is very inspiring for me. If you have a look around, there are a lot of writers and photographers who put everything they have into their posts and it really shows!

My Least Favorite Parts of Steemit

The Spam

There are so many spambots! But that is to be expected from a site that offers monetary value for content and curation I suppose but it can definitely get annoying when some of your comments make no sense and the authors have a negative reputation score. I also include the beggars in this section because that gets old quick for me, all the comments saying "please upvote my post, I upvote yours!" and so on, we have all seen them and they just feel desperate.

Haejin/Bernie Sanders Beef/Various Other Power Grabs

I honestly take no sides on these little battles because I can empathize with both sides, they both make fair arguments about one another but it is quite frustrating to watch all the trash talk from the sidelines. I followed some of the posts in the beginning but it just became too much negativity for me and now I try to distance myself from it. I don't like flame wars so I choose to take no part but it is sometimes hard to ignore.

"Can we all just get along?"

_{-Rodney King, 1992}

Conclusion

I have never been a big fan of social media as a whole because of the endless feedback loops that arise from constantly spewing your thoughts in exchange for likes. It creates an never ending need for approval and results in less quality and more ridiculous posts. Steemit is the first community I have ever seen that truly values high quality content in any form that doesn't have to push a lifestyle like IG or Facebook and rewards the author for hard work and dedication to their craft. I am confident that Steemit is here to stay and I can't wait to get to know more of the content creators on this site.

Thank you for reading and please tell me your your thoughts on Steemit in the comments!

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