WHY IT IS IMPORTANT TO UPVOTE NON-META POSTS - and why STEEM's biggest value lies in how friendly it is towards crypto-beginners.

Steemit and it's newcomer-friendly interface

Hello there. I would like to start off by saying that I do not have any prior experience with cryptocurrencies before Steem, unless you count 5$ worth of BTC given to me by @heimindanger that I kept and it slowly turned into 20$.

After many discussions with the user mentioned above and after using Steemit for around two weeks I have came to conclusion that one of the greatest things about Steemit and one of its biggest assets is the fact that it has an incredible potential to spread among people that are very sceptical towards any kind of cryptocurrency. An easy way to explain Steemit to your friend would be to say: "Imagine Reddit, where votes of different users are worth a different amount of karma, and the karma that you get for contributing to the community has it's market value".

What does it mean to the content creators and content curators of Steemit?

In my humble opinion it means that in the interest of Steem's society lies curating content, all of it, even the content that seemingly doesn't have anything to do with what they care about - the value of their crypto money. By curating content that is not META-talk about Steem and other cryptos, but instead more of a life-blog or stories, you're rewarding people that could possibly be at the biggest numbers here. Since they are such a big part of the community, you can be sure that they can be a big factor which can potentially make Steemit much more successful. First of all, they can make casual internet users genuinely interested in the articles, most of them won't be bothered by graphs, charts, statistics, tech-talk and meta-articles. They will be happier seeing how you saved a dog from a shelter, your article on how to make a great steak or how Gordon Ramsay saved your life. If they can actively contribute, be supported and profit from Steem, they will bring in their friends - and that's where you profit from the platform's growth.

In other words, content curators that would like to see Steem grow in value should care not only about introducing new users, but also about making new users feel at home, even those that are absolutely clueless about the crypto world and those that don't even want to learn.

The trap that we can fall into

One could think that so far I have described a bit of a perfect world, where each one of the posts is worth upvoting or commenting - unfortunately, this is not how it works. In general, we should try to change our way of thinking, and agree that posts that aren't about crypto are still worth checking out, but we should still be strict in curating content and only get the worthy ones to the Hot or Trending categories. When users stop thinking "What will net me money? What will Steemit LIKE to hear [circlejerk]? What worked on reddit? " but instead start asking themselves "what makes me curious? How can I make others curious about it?" the quality of posts on Steem will improve, both for crypto-veterans and casual internet users.

Epilogue and a small-talk about recruiting others to Steem

When trying to explain Steem and Steemit to my polish friend, ( @Kiosk - a highschool studend that loves IT) I was very happy that he turned out to be quite curious about it as an active Reddit user beforehand. Say hello to Kiosk and hopefully he will strike with some good post soon. :)

When I tried to convert him to Steem, there were no promises, no bags of gold. I just said: "look - this is my profile, those are profiles of other people that are more successful than me, take a look on what's cool about their posts, how the community appreciates it and rewards it. Why won't you give it a try?". So I am glad that I managed to get him to join us - even though he's a crypto-newbie like me. :)

Yours,
dailydogger

What made me post it // posłowie

I have posted it before in polish language and it became the post of the day among the polish speaking Steem community. I have come to conclusion that it could be worth translating for the international Steem community. // Przepraszam, jeśli kogoś tag #polish tutaj razi, jednak zdecydowałam, że jeśli post został postem dnia wśród polskiego community, to może polskie community nie będzie miało nic przeciwko by popchnąć omawianą w nim ideę w świat. Dziękuję :)