Steemit Basics for Newbies

Steemit Basics for Newbies - Part 1

Hi Steemians,

I'm a new user on Steemit, joined like 10 days ago. Out of these 10 days, the first 2-3 days I was like I need to post as many times as possible, without giving any attention to the content I was posting. It was to do with the mentality that more posts means more people will read it and more potential payout. I didn't know much about how curation worked. I was trying to rush into upvoting, commenting and posting.

I think many of the new users tend to do this. Only when they realise that their posts aren't getting any attention that they slow down a bit. Some of them get upset and depressed and many just leave, never to come back. But the ones who're resilient, they try to dig deep , to find ways to make themselves productive on the platform. And as I've experienced myself, this platform has the ability to change you in many ways that you can't even imagine. That's exactly what happened to me on my 4th day on Steemit, I sort of got hooked to it, started researching all aspects of it so as to find why things were the way they are on this platform.

The first thing I learnt was to slow down. As they say on an advertisement here in Perth on the telly, "Slow down and enjoy the ride". I'll add the link to that ad a bit further down below, so that you can see what I was talking about.

I have spent quite a bit of my time on Steemit in the last few days. And I know that most of us don't have too much time on our hands because of our busy life , so I'm starting a new mini-series as I don't want to bombard you all with a lot of things in one lengthy post. If this series saves newbies even a tiny bit of time then I'll consider it a success. In this series I'll try and explain a few hidden things about this platform to new users. These are the things that aren't very obvious but you need to spend some time on the platform to know about them. These are really basic things, so I'm naming this series as " Steemit Basics " and this is the 1st part which will deal with Curation.

Curation: Upvotes & Commenting

1. Try and upvote a post that's worthy of it.

Some of you already know that HF19 pre-release version has recently been published. Once it's completed, to get the maximum benefit of the curation rewards, people need to vote on exactly 10 posts per 24 hours. Anything more than that will reduce the power of their vote and thereby the potential earnings. It's because the power of your votes decline after each vote. Presently it's 40 votes per 24 hours. So keep an eye out for when this HF19 is implemented.

2. What's the best time to upvote-Straightaway when it's posted or wait for some time?

The answer is yes and no - You can maximize your potential rewards by voting on posts that are new but have the potential to be a big hit with other users. So that means voting before others jump on it. But another thing to remember here is that within the first 30 minutes that a blog post is published, your curation rewards are shared with the author. so if you upvote immediately after publication, 99.94% of your curation reward goes to the blog post author, not you. This percentage declines with time, 15 minutes after publication you get 50% and at/after 30 minutes you get 100%. So if you haven't noticed there's a dilemma on whether you should jump on a post and upvote before others or wait 30 mins to get the maximum rewards. I think you'll need to observer what works best for you in order to regularly profit from curation. This system is in place to prevent curation bots from gaining an unfair advantage.

If somebody thinks that the above 2 points aren't how things work here or if it needs modification please let me know and I'll edit it.

So that's all for this post. I'll talk about some other hidden features in the next post of this mini-series. But before I let you guys go, I want you to meet my precious little fur baby "Maggie". She's a real showstopper:

This is the link to the Video I was talking about earlier : "Slow Down and Enjoy the Ride!"

I've used a few resources on Steemit for my findings above, so I want to give them the due credit as below. If I've missed soembody, my sincere apologies.