Why Blog?

In the last 5 days I have written close to 6 blogs but all my efforts have ended up as one of my notes. There are many reasons for why that happened, some might say that it was just a form of quitting, but I assure you that was not one of them. It was more the result of all of the things that took place, mostly in my head.
I will try to explain. As I am writing this I am not sure as to post it or not. I do not have many active followers and the ones that I do haven’t noticed my absence from the blogging scene. And that is ok in my book, as I have come to understand that the moments you make plans, they end up trapping you. As far as my blog is concerned I have been the one to make promises, as to keep a daily blog or a weekly update. That has become in the end to be my trap. Why trap? Well it is simple. I know I can write a daily blog or a weekly update but as far as I am concerned, I could be writing pure bull shit just to ‘’keep my word’’. Regardless of if I have real active followers or not, I consider the content of my blog to be far more important than the promise of a daily crap.
I love blogging and this platform because it keeps me in check. Yes the first thing I came to realize was that I was writing for myself. Yes, I am that selfish! But in order for that to happen I had to set myself up for disappointment first. If you are one of my three active followers, you will probably know already what I am about to explain. If not I suggest you stay with me, because this might concern you as well, as I am sure many of you have been where I have been.

How many followers do I have? Well as of today ( surprisingly me being absent from the blogging scene has somehow helped with the growth in the numbers), I have 122 followers. Ok. Seems pretty decent, since I am here only from November and just starting out. Out of those 122 followers I know for a fact that only 3 of them are actual active followers. I know that, not because I get an upvote, but because they more than often leave a comment behind regarding the subject that I just tried to tackle. The comments are usually substantial and you really get the sensation that somebody has taken the time to read your post. You already know who you are & thank you for your interest. Ok so getting back. 122 followers and out of those 3 active followers. Cool. Who are the rest? Well, I think some of them might be bots, some are just inactive users or people that have stopped using Steemit on a daily basis and some might be people that simply don’t like what I write. That is fine. Problem is, that I see a lot of users proudly announcing that they have reached 500, 1000, 1500 users! My question is this. How reaching a certain target is a great thing, if most of them are not active ? I understand if you are a dolphin or a whale, you are probably followed by a lot of active users and then, I suppose, it is helpful. But if you are a regular blogger, why do you need hundreds or even thousands if nobody actually reads your stuff!? That being said I know why I am here. I want real people, people that comment and get involved. I am not here for the SBD, I do not see myself earning a living out of Steemit, at least not in the near future. My main idea is that the blockchain has a very interesting design and Steemit is a place where you are technically embraced by talented people. And there are many. I have seen and read some very talented steemian posts here. But I have seen some very untalented steemians, that put absolutely no work into whatever they are doing and get rewarded for their incompetence. That, in my book, is not only unacceptable, but it creates a sense of disgust. It might be a strong word for you, but I usually go all in when I get into something and to see that happening here, as well, I can easily get discouraged. So regardless of the rest, cheers to all you steemians that put an effort, do research, write, paint, create or whatever it is you talented bunch do! I applaud your effort!

When I first started on Steemit I posted some of my poetry. It became a challenge, as I did not believe that I could write anything worth reading anymore. Later I came to realize that was a way of pushing myself past my comfort zone. The poetry was ok, as it came from the heart, well at least from my point of view . Needless to say the reviews didn’t came pouring in, as I much expected, it was more like an awkward silence that did nothing more than to back my insecurities. And as far as insecurities, I have plenty. I started writing back when I was a teenager and became a journalist in Romania. After leaving my home country, so much was the disappointment of the situation back there, that I decided to leave everything behind and start fresh. And so I did. In my prior post I have talked about all this, but just for the sake of the ones that did’t read that, I will repeat myself. As they say you can take the girl out of writing, but you can never take the writing out of the girl..did that make sense? Nevertheless you get the point that I missed my old writing habits. But as soon as I started trying to get back to the writing it came back and started biting me in the ass, as hard as it could and as a result I was left with a writers block. Any who Steemit gave me that safe heaven to, not only write but also post again. And so I did. After posting some poetry, I decided that the time has come to finally introduce myself and start a regular blog. I felt I was ready and ready I was. I received some feedback on the introduce myself section, but that was not the crowd that I was looking for. I was and still am looking for a crowd of steemians that are active and truly believe in this community. As I said before, the main reason for writing blogs was pure selfishness, as I have learned a great deal about myself when I actually sit down and try to put in words my personal fights. I must admit that most of my blogs started as a way to deal with my own fears and have grown into self realization of conscience and sub-conscience. Some have crossed that mind boundary and became my full on frustrations with a certain subject, like climate change and some utter stupid human behavior, much like my last post about Butthead. Some might say that I just described the whole idea of a blog, but I can honestly say that I do not consider this as a real full on description of what a blog might look like.
Nevertheless now you have somewhat understood my reason for writing, but to that I must add one important point. As I am selfish in my motives for writing blogs, I do not consider myself greedy. In the past I have found myself looking at other much simple post and comparing the revenue between a real full on blog and a meme, but I have stopped doing that, since I have learned that not everything is created equal. It might not be fair, that a person dedicated hours into researching, writing and posting a blog, and gets the revenue equal to almost zero and some other person simply posts an image of him/her self or his/her lunch and gets rewarded considerably. As I said it might not be fair, but life is not fair and for what its worth nothing truly good has come, at least in my case, easy. That being said I stopped looking at Steemit as a way of income, (it never was actually), but for what it’s worth I believe in the concept of blockchain as a way to truly deferentiate the many discrepancies in our society. Simply put, even though I see many discrepancies here also, I am here for the ride, the many talented people and for the writing. The best reward you could ever get from this kind of platform is your personal growth, learning new things every day and meeting new interesting talented people.
Having that in mind I realized pretty early on that I needed to get real followers. As I am not that tech savvy I had no idea where to start. Simply by commenting or following someone didn’t get me the attention that I was looking for. As I am new here my upvote means close to zero so that does not help. I found myself looking at a post and trying to figure out why, besides my 3 active readers, nobody is actually interested in reading it. I wondered if maybe the blogs that I write are so horrible that I got a reputation for writing poor stuff. I still wonder if that is the case, but since I have close to zero feedback, I will be left wondering for quite a while..hehe

My posts became so invisible that one of my active followers suggested I join SteemitBloggers community on Discord. He pointed out that it is a place where you can get to meet new talented people. And he was right. I had an idea of what Discord was and how to get started, so I gave it a shot and took a look at SteemitBloggers. They have a different kind of concept in mind. It works like this. As long as you upvote and comment on, at least, a post a day from the sections they have there you get to post your blog in 2 of their sections and get a shot at getting a comment and an upvote. It’s pretty fair. There is also a contest involved and 3 lucky bloggers get rewarded daily for their post with 15 SBD! As good as this sounds they also have some rules. If you, for some reason, do not do your homework and don’t show support to at least one member, you get the boot. Also if for some reason you cannot be there you can just announce your absence and you are allowed to remain in the group. The idea is interesting and the effort is minimal and in return you get a shot at meeting some real cool talented active people. I gave it a shot and I’m glad I did! That is how Steemit was supposed to be a community of people that believe in this platform and support each other! I will keep you updated on how things work for me there..in the mean time I am looking forward for your comments..and steem on my steemians!

Keep in touch,
@lidac

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