A view from the sea bed, Part 1: A newbie guide by a newbie

A view from the sea bed, Part 1: A newbie guide by a newbie

A tiny and intrepid amoeba dived through the waves and slowly floated along with the current, it closed it's eyes and sank gently to the bottom of the ocean. When it opened them again it gazed out on a strange new world filled with exotic creatures and strange structures. The amoeba wondered what to do, what were these exotic creatures and who built these strange structure? It ventured forth, unafraid, and began it's journey of discovery...

It's been a few weeks since I dived into the deep and beguiling sea that is Steemit, and in that time what have I done?

Well, I have thrown out a few posts and commented on a few, but mainly I have read.
I have read posts about people, posts about Steemit, posts about other peoples passions, strange posts, interesting posts, short posts, long posts, posts that go over my head, posts that made me smile, posts that made me sad, re-posts of stuff from the internet, clickbait posts, cut and paste posts, posts about other posts and some posts that are truly woeful.

How many posts have I read in the last few weeks? I have no idea, but I do know that I have spent an inordinate amount of my spare time here, just reading.

So after the last few weeks of giving myself screen headaches I would like to share some of my newbie discoveries/investigations/information.

Hopefully my confusion and subsequent journey of discovery will help other newbies swimming around in these deep dark waters.

I'll start with what is probably the single most important part of Steemit, in fact it's main selling point, posting.

Posting

This will not be a post about how to write the perfect post, there are plenty of those out there written by people with more experience than I.
Also this will not be a post about formatting your posts, again there are many of those out there written by some very clever posters.
This post will explore my observations on the types of posts out there and the relative success, or lack thereof, of those posts.
Hopefully, this will give newbies like me more direction in what they are doing here.

There are a number of ways to define success here on Steemit

The most obvious is monetary reward,

Steemit users use their Steem Power to vote on posts that they like, each post has a monetary amount attached to it and after a set period of time a portion of this monetary amount will be awarded to the original poster.

Another way is to measure by views, there is a view counter on the right hand side of the post and this shows how many people have visited the post.

Comments would show a level of engagement, a particularly engaging post could have hundreds of comments, some of which could have gained their own level of monetary rewards.

Obviously if you are serious about your art or passionate about your contents then you may not consider any of these as indicators of your success. Just producing something that conveys your thoughts and ideas in a coherent manner could be considered a success.

So, after defining success, what would be considered the best content for a successful post on Steemit.

Naturally some of the most successful posts, judged by any criteria are those that sre about Steemit itself or derivatives of it, Steem, Steem power, Steem posting, Steem how-to's etc. (you get the idea).
This is, of course, very obvious and should be expected.
Steemit is still a relatively new and unique platform and much discussion is around it's potential, it's successes and it's opportunities.

Leading on from Steem and Steemit, almost organically, are posts about cryptocurrency. Many early uptakers of Steem and Steemit are heavily invested/interested in cryptocurrency, so a lot of cryptocurrency post have a high level of success.

Steemit is a very creative place, over a quarter of a million content creators, so naturally, creative posts score quite highly, photography does well on visits because they provide an almost instant visual gratification for the visitor. And writing posts do well if the creators have a following.

Travel blogs do well, Steemians (that's us) are very worldly interested, even if we can't travel ourselves, it seems.

And quite interestingly, I think, posts that are dual language are quite successful. Especially English /Korean. This could be due to the fact that South Korea is considered one of the top three technologically advanced societies in the world and boasts the highest average internet speeds in the world.

So, for a moment, let's be fully cynical and think about the most successful post that we could possibly make. What would the formula be?

So, it would be in English and Korean, written from an exotic location, with beautiful pictures, talking about how the amazing community of Steemit have enabled you to achieve your dreams and advising them on how they too can replicate your success.

Unfortunately if we all tried to do this the whole purpose of this platform and the cryptocurrency behind it would fail. What would there be to engage new members if they were not in the limited minority? Not much.

Self perpetuation, while good for some in the short term, has no real longevity.

If you have no real passion for the mechanics behind Steemit, don't let this dishearten you. As the community grows so will the diversity of interests and the current hot topics will cease to dominate.

And that is where our original content has value, a repository of information, ideas and opinions that engage the mind and drive forward the desire to be part of something more.

Now we number in the hundreds of thousands, but imagine a time when we number in the hundreds of millions. How many people then will engage in your passions? How many then will contribute to your growth and development? How much wider can your consciousness grow?
So, for long term success of the platform, and in turn everyone on it, post about your passions and your interests and over time success will come.

Steemit has the potential to free us all from the archaic debt based system of monetary governance that rewards the consolidation of economic power. Ideally it is a truly democratic meritocratic financially backed system.

I will be posting more newbie observations from the sea bed, so please upvote, resteem, comment and follow if you're interested.

All pictures courtesy of pixabay.com