I joined in 2016. My goal was and is to share my thoughts and feelings with someone. Not those related to everyday survival like ‘damp cable company jacked up their monthly charges again!’ or ‘where did I put a receipt for this chair? – I can write it off as an office expense’. But more general thoughts about life, people, relationship, war, philosophy – you’ve got my point. My immediate surrounding is very fluent in exchanging the thoughts of the first type and not very receptive about sharing the thoughts of the second type treating them generally as nonsense and a waste of time.
Back then it was easier to earn crypto and Steemit had no what it seem it has now - artificially set filters. Not sure if I’m right, but, for instance, I have over 700 followers and yet for a long time in 2018 and 2019 my posts were seen only by 10 people at max only from a specific region of the world.
Something else I’d like to say about illustrations. I read all the materials about plagiary and stuff. The presumptions here is that if you make money off someone else’s work you have to pay him or her for their work. That’s fair if you make money off it. Not everybody has drawing skills. I have a different set of skills – I am a programmer. To illustrate my stories, sometimes I grab two or three pictures from the net and merge them in Photoshop to illustrate a particular scene. If I would make $50 on my story, surely I would have paid for these photos. The way it is though, I make 10 cents, how could I pay for them?
So if I stick to the strict policies of using pictures all my efforts (and writing a decent story sometimes could take a couple of weeks of hard efforts) will end up being negative or I’d be confined not using any pictures at all. Thus, below one can take a look at all the “legal” emojis that I used on Steemit.