The beginning

I was a crypto enthusiast from 2012 onwards. Did some LTC mining and purchased few ETH but never anything serious. I was very interested in the technology but never did an attempt to seriously work with it. It all changed in the begining of 2017 when I crypto in general start getting traction. I stumbled upon steemit and was very interested in the graphene block chain technology and a different take on the subject by steem folks.

The bloggers platform

I realized soon that steemit was designed more as a blogger platform and I stayed with it, but had hard time really networking and getting folks to upvote. I think this would be the case for most users. I stay here for the technology rather than the hope of my blog making any serious money

Issues

I setup everything to become a witness and even went online, but took it offline since i realized there was no mechanism to block unwanted data from the server I am responsible and legally I am responsible if any illegal content is posted to the block chain. There was discussion at the time regarding how this will be solved but at the end of the data , the witness was on the hook for it.I couldnt agree to it and decided not to become a witness

I started playing with SMT/STEEM APIs and developed a product that would reward using steem. I couldn't see a wider adoption for the same. I still believe there is a demand for a steem tool to reward existing bloggers on other platform

Scaling issues, at one point new user on boarding took weeks

STEEM Ecosystem

Very happy to learn about APPICS,DTUBE and DLIVE , they sure seems to be something more attractive to regular folks and hopefully get more traction

The 99%

I think about 1% steem users make decent money and the 99% are regular folks , who just use the platform casually. There are bots and other services to help them, but doesnt seems to move the needle. On top of it, I think when money is involved the user behavior is different .There could be more user drop outs in steemit platform than reddit, twitter or facebook just for this reason. To me this is still a social experiment and I am learning . Few years from now, block chain based social media would be very different