( TL;DR may directly jump to the conclusion section at the end )

Hello Steemit friends,

The world nowadays changes rapidly, every day at an even faster pace. At the time you heard about something, it may already outdated. I got to know about steemit mainly due to the hype of cryptocurrency widely spread in the past few months. As of now, it seems to me that Steem is the one at least with some solid substance (a social media platform) among the nearly-a-thousand of cryptos. It is therefore easier to get started understanding more about it.

By a simple search, you may find quite a lot of tutorial articles. It is not only about the basic operation steps, but some authors actually did a very good job of providing some useful insights of the platform as well. The more you read, the more you become interested in steemit.

Here are my initial thoughts about steemit. If you were a beginner, it can be a starting point for your further reading. If you were the product designer, it could also be a kind of think-aloud user experience testing result for reference. Anyway, lets get started...

1 Why steemit?

As being hardly reported by mainstream media in late 2017, many people were enticed to get on the bitcoin bandwagon. Someone could brave enough to buy at nearly USD20,000 a coin at that moment. But if you did not have that much money, a logical alternative to make you feel on board is to consider other alt coins.

ETH, EOS, TRX, ABC, BCD, EFG...etc. It could take a day or two only to figure out which is which and how to buy, not to mention which one to pick. For those who do not have any trading experience like me, it is too difficult to make any real deal, instead of just saying "FORGET IT!".

Until I found Steem! It has been communicated as "A social media platform that content author and curator get paid!". Well, a simple forumula then comes to my mind: Author + Curator = Everyone. i.e. everyone get paid! Together with the simple UI of steemit.com, most users of existing social media giants must be familiar with what it is at the first glance. Especially the killer element, $amount besides every post or comment, give a strong impression that make you say "DO IT NOW!"

2 How to participate?

Browsing around steemit.com, you will see categories like travel, life style, food...etc and the content of these kinds do not make any difference from other existing platforms. It can easily be seen that many posts of these kinds get few hundreds dollar reward too. Would my sign up and a hello world post get few dollars... at least? Wait a second... how about a hello world comment instead? Its even easier!

Then I started reading the posts in more details. Particularly, I picked some posts talking about how to use steemit. Unexpectedly, the quality of the first few articles I read far exceed my expectation. It was not only a series of article nicely organized, but also provided with insights and feelings. I strongly believed it took quite some time for the author to produce such a good piece of work.

Ok, back to my planned task: Click reply to give a comment. Well, be respectful to such good author, I tried not to say "keep on the good work, bro!" kind of empty words. I think this does not add any value for anyone at all. After my digestion and thinking through, I asked a question, if not a good question at all, at least I think its sensible as a comment. After about two hours of reading, I made my "may-be valuable" comment on articles of 5 to 6 authors.

Eager to see any reply from any author (and $reward!?)... A whole day later, there was only one reply out of six. I assume no response from the other five, I have already got a reward of $0.01. Lets celebrate!

3 How long can I keep on participating?

As I found in other tutorial content, this starting period called "grind" may last for a few months time. i.e. no one read your hardwork, no reply, no response, just like speaking to the air yourself.

At first, many people may keep on posting daily for a week or so, then with fewer post, and eventually give up. Will I just be the same? That gets to my few key points in the conclusion below.

Conclusion

• steemit is no lacking of good quality content
• it is an environment not yet polluted
• it is still ad-free

i.e. steemit is worth to read, worth your time

• learn more on your interested topic
• blogging only on the topic you really enjoy
• be yourself
• no rush for quantity

i.e. its not a job at all. So, do not expect any financial reward.

zero cost (except time) to get on board of cryptocurrency, why not?

Thanks for reading, if any reader at all :)