Meta-Steemit Part 1

The Great Steemit.com Bandwidth Issue

I haven't been on Steemit for that long, and I am starting to get a feel for some of the platform's nuances and foibles as wel as its benefits and powers. One of the more puzzling things that I have seen people talking about though is 'Steemit bandwidth', and in particular talking about how they have run out of it.

I was not previously aware that I even had a bandwidth limitation, having just assumed that I could post and comment as much a I liked. So the moment I heard about the issue of bandwidth I was off to try to find out as much as I could about it.

Among all of the advice I came across, the following thing eluded me right up until I came across it - steemd.com/@yourusername is a great and very easy way to find out about how your work is coming along.

And you can see quite clearly from this screenshot that as I am writing this my Bandwidth Remaining is hovering at 99.76% having used 49kb out of 20mb bandwidth.

I will need to do some extensive testing using this site and a series of posts, comments, resteems etc. to see which use up the most and least bandwidth and just how much is being used each time. But at least now I can check how my Bandwidth is doing and modify my actions to suit what I have left.

In upcoming posts about this, I am going to look into why Steemians each have an allocation of bandwidth; how much each gets allocated and why; and what steps can be taken to boost bandwidth / avoid using it all up.

For example:

• Does having more Steem power grant more bandwidth?
• Can I use up a lot of my bandwidth just by making minor edits to my posts and comments?
• If I upload lots of pictures in my posts will that use up more bandwidth than normal?
• Does Upvoting use up my Steem Power and limit my bandwidth faster?

I'm off on a mission to find out!