When I signed up in June, earlier this year. I had great expectation of this platform as I waited for my account to get approved. A social platform that returns part of the revenue made by the post you have written? That sounded a lot TPO, a other media platform started by Wikipedia founder, which never really took off.
I was very skeptical at first, because I've signed up for a lot of new social media. Which all turned into a huge failure. And I initially didn't know much what to expect.
learning the platform.
When I first logged in it appeared to me that a lot of writer were on Steemit for over a year. This got me thinking that at first I was quite late to the party. Because their were all these top writers who already had thousands of posts written and had a huge following. I quickly figured out that in other to make anything on this platform you really needed great content. And most of all get the right people to read it.
up-voting everything
Because I didn't had much of a following myself. I thought It would be a good idea to start doing a lot of curating. And start building up my account with the curation awards. Unknowingly of the fact that your voting power quickly runs out, after a few up votes. And that recharching your voting power takes a lot of time. Or that curating doesn't really matter as a minnow.
plankton / minnow struggles
At the time most newbies started a post at #introduce , to introduce themselves. So naturally I did the same thing. But while this resulted in some friends. It didn't really did much for my account. Most comments and viewers were other newbies who were also trying to find out how the platform works.
While browsing through these introduction posts. I saw a very odd thing. A lot of these posts are mostly the the same thing. Over and over again.
- A new user introduces himself with a small article.
- Some other users say something very generic like : "welcome to the platform".
- The new user replies with some sort of generic 'thank you' message.
- The new user writes a short article.
- New user log out, never to come online again.
This isn't going anywhere I thought. After writing a few blog posts, and not really getting any response back. I forgot about Steemit for a while. It isn't very motivating when you try to write an article and you maybe get about 5 views.
Bitcoin crash
A few weeks ago, the value of BTC reached it's highest point in history with almost $5000. Only to crash to $3500 after China announced a ban on Bitcoin. This renewed my interest in crypto en therefore my interest in Steemit. I decided login again and check in on my account. The overall value of my account dropped from $15 to $11. So lost a bit of value their, but not too much.
Since then i'm pretty hooked to the platform. And now I've more then 300 posts noted on my account. In the last week I earned about 70 cents. Which is quite neat.
Now I'm putting al of my Steem Dollars and converting it to Steem. I plan to use this Steem to power up my account. My next goal is to earn enough Steem power to make my up-vote worth a penny. How much Steem power I need to reach this goal, I don't know. But I'm currently at 16 SP to I have a long way to go.