Alright, I'll admit it: I'm in a sour mood.
Why?
Payouts.
It's not a good answer. It's not a popular answer. I'm not proud of it. But it's the truth.
I want to make it clear that it's not the amount that's getting to me. Yes, it's always wonderful to get higher payouts. It's when there's a downtrend in payouts over the course of days that I begin to get bothered. In other words, I don't care about the amount so much as that I'm always moving forward in general.
If I was upset over the amount of each payout hell, I'd have quit Steemit long ago. I've been on the platform for about a year and my vote is worth about .29 cents (on a good day) and my average payout is somewhere around 1 SBD. I know that the vast majority of the posts that get high payouts are from a handful of curators who support me for whatever reasons they have for supporting me (and to that I'm incredibly grateful!), but I'm not even sure if these are people or bots (or something in-between, some accounts that really are mostly run by people have auto-voting set up through sites like steemvoter.com).
So there's a feeling whenever there's a string of days with low payouts that I'm doing something wrong. Then I rack my brain trying to figure out what exactly it was. Did I write something that the powers that be found offensive? Did use too much markdown? Not enough? Did the quality of my posts drop without my notice? What in the world did I do?!... Oh my gawd. Is it the tags? Is it the motherfucking tags?!!
Somehow, Steemit makes me, a grown man with the confidence of a minor deity, feel like a prepubescent school girl waiting by the phone for her crush to call. And each payout feels like the end of said phone call, the results of which I turn and turn over in my mind, searching for meanings that the person on the other end probably hasn't even seriously considered and which are, for the most part, totally in my own head.
At least I get votes from some dedicated followers. And let me tell you, while payouts sometimes get me down the trend upwards in upvotes (even not very powerful ones) buoys my soul like a goddamn life preserver in a storm. Comments are the same way. They're like little bits of sustenance. You guys make life on Steemit much better than it would be. This is part of the reason I try to be welcoming to new users. Spotting the ones that are offering value and are interesting is it's own challenge, really. For new users just entering the platform at this point who aren't in one of the winning categories here on Steemit, I sympathize.
And hey, I know this is probably temporary. I know too that there are other things I could be trying if I really want to become a proper figure on this platform. I could be more active on discord and rocket chat. I could definitely comment more. Commenting is an area that I've improved in, but I've still got a long way to go. Sometimes commenting is sort of hard, and I definitely read significantly more blogs than I comment on. But a lot of times I don't know what to say. I absolutely refuse to write a generic "hey great post. resteemed." If I respected the author enough to want to comment, I should respect them enough to leave at least a one-line authentic response.
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