Image by Hans Braxmeier from Pixabay modified by me using GIMP
A few days ago I passed the hallowed REP 70 mark and it got me to thinking; what does the reputation system mean on steem?
Truthfully... very little right now, but that is in the process of changing thanks to #newsteem.
I was told by a few people when I first started on steem that REP 70 was the magic number at which early adopters would/could notice you. According to these folks, certain whales and orcas wouldn't look at anyone's blogs below REP 70.
I observed the steem community very carefully when I first joined this platform, and before the advent of bidbots that rule did indeed seem to hold true. I don't know how many circle jerking steemians I tried to interact with on here who would answer my genuine queries about their posts with one word answers... or not at all.
I don't particularly want to start throwing names about the place, a lot of these people have left now. But it is worth noting that even though the system was stacked against you back then, at least the reputation system had a utility, to delineate hierarchy.
Enter bidbots and the whole thing went to shit! People could buy their reputation (along with payouts) and we had a whole bunch of complete waste-of-space people on here who could barely string a sentence together with REP 72/73 shitposting there way into trending...
What did I do? I continued to write long, well constructed travel articles, posts about art, comedy posts, poetry and fiction (some of which has since been published elsewhere). To cut this story short... content that added value to the network. And I didn't use any type of bought vote until near the beginning of this year when 
See here's the thing. I always maintained that steem's reputation was being flushed down the toilet by allowing bidbots to operate. I wrote long comments on 
From the day I joined steem I maintained this position against vote selling!
So I am truly happy, and feel justified in my decisions to keep my blog honest as I've finally hit REP 70. I feel that I've earned my reputation the hard way, and more importantly, it means something!
Image by Memin Sito from Pixabay modified by me using GIMP
What does it involve to get to reputation 70 in an honest manner by writing quality content? According to steemworld, I've been writing on steem for 2 years, 3 months and 33 days ...
and in that time, I have created 486 posts.
Out of these posts, over 50% were poetry or fiction. And with a little help from the wizard of SQL queries 
The average word count for a paperback novel comes in around 80,000 words... so I have written the equivalent of 7.2 novels. Given that well over 50% of my output has been fiction and poetry, it is safe to assume that I've written at least 3 novels worth of fiction that has been published exclusively to steem.
To my mind this is a great achievement, both for me, and the steem blockchain. I studied imaginative writing at university, and am now pursuing a career as a novelist. If in the future one of my manuscripts is published mainstream, I shall be sure to promote and direct readers to steem to read some of my earlier works.
I did the same calculations for words written in comments and the results were surprising. It turns out that I have written 683,815 words in comments, which just goes to show that the way to true success on steem is through interaction.
Thanks for reading my rant, it has been a long 2.3 years in the making 😉
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