Three years ago, on this day, October 3rd, I joined Steemit. In all honesty, I wouldn't remember - nor find it special in any way - if it wasn't for @steemitboard's comment on one of my posts (so, thank you :) ).

It's been an incredible journey. Sometimes I feel like all this started just last week, sometimes I have the impression that this Steem thing is going on for at least ten years. It was a bit of a roller-coaster, at times and, even if I don't post as often as I did in the beginning, I'm still here, supporting the blockchain as a witness and watching the technical developments with curiosity.

The most beneficial part of this whole journey was obviously the financial one, but not in terms of quantity, as some of you may be quick to infer - I'm extremely far from being a millionaire after 3 years, and I have a hunch that I will never be - but in terms of the process.

I wrote it many times before, I will write it once more: the main breakthrough of Steemit is a fantastic shortening of the money path, for authors. This platform eliminated a large amount of friction between publishers and their potential revenue.

Before Steemit, as a blogger, the best you could hope was to make a good AdSense-ready website, which you would build for at least 6 months, and then hope the indexing algorithms updates won't be too frequent or disruptive, so you can have a bit of predictability. Or, as an alternative, you could pick a very narrow niche, write for two years and then make a living off of affiliate marketing.

With Steem, you can access some rewards in as little as seven days.

Of course, this money path shortening didn't come without some disruption. This whole voting / rewards pool / whale hunting ecosystem is far from perfect, but it's a functional one. There are pieces of information that you put out here that will receive way too much money than you would expect, and there are posts that you consider so "good", but they won't get anything. And oh, there is only a 7 days window in which you can get paid, after that, your post will generate revenue, via advertising, only for the ones who operate the publishing platform (like Steemit INC for steemit.com). Of course, you could move your content under your own domain, but at this moment this is still not trivial, you need to have quite a few technical skills, and obviously this will generate a lot of duplicate content issues that will have to be mitigated somehow.

But still, as somebody who has a blog since 2006 (a year that some researchers are assimilating with the Pleistocene of blogging) I consider this platform to be a huge leap forward.

And, in all honesty, the last year was way calmer than the first two, almost no flag wars and, except for some spikes during the last hardfork, no drama queens either.

So, Steem on!

I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.