There is a lot to be positive about at the moment.

Where am I going?

Do you ever have a thousand ideas swimming around in your head but no idea where you want to go with it? I’ve been on Steemit for 18 months now and have done a bit of this and a bit of that to varying degrees of success. I don’t mind. My reason to be here is because I want to be. Forget the numbers in the market for the moment and look at the blockchain itself. People complain about the unfairness and how many problems there are on this site but I don’t see that. I know there are problems the same as any site or any business but people are working on them.

Some people come to the site expecting to make money for nothing so it's not a surprise that they don't stick with it once they find out that there is real effort involved. I made the comparison to other established sites and i think that we compare, just in a different way.

If I join Instagram companies won't pay me millions to showcase their products because I'm a nobody with no followers. They pay stars with millions of followers and famous followers the big money to do it. Its the same here, people with lots of followers and powerful friends will make more money on their posts and people need to realize this coming in. If your good at what you do then people will follow you and eventually you will make some money but you have to build a profile first.

People are pushing for better standards on Steemit and I think that it’s helping. I’m looking towards the future and what I see bodes well for the blockchain. With the developer announcements that have come out recently it’s relieving to see that the work is getting done behind the scenes and I think that we are all looking forward to what SMT’s can bring to the blockchain. The new user authority system of ranking looks really interesting and shows that we can base our work off better content and participation. Click here to see how you rank under the alternative ratings system. https://steem-ua.com

Partiko.

My favorite new discovery is the Partiko app. It’s a new front end app for Steemit and it’s what we’ve being crying out for. While the app is still young and needs to add some features it is still really easy to use and has a proper notification system to keep you up to date with what is happening with your profile. I find myself spending so much more time commenting and replying to people as I can do it in real time now as opposed to just checking on the website from time to time. Its design is simple and effective making it very smooth to run.

It still has a lot to be done on it such as refining the notification system down to what each user wants to know. You can’t vote on a comment without going into the main post unnecessarily and you can’t access all of your profile from it at the moment. With that said I am more than happy with it for now as it’s the best app that I’ve come across. All of the rest should come with time as the developers seem to be nicely active.

Future steem idea?

I’ve never been a prolific blogger at the best of times as I’m all ideas with little follow through. One I would like to chase a bit more is the idea for external revenue. This is a question that I have asked in response to another post and it has stuck in my mind a little.

I think that we have a great project here with a lot of developments coming down the line. However, the real value of any company is its earning power. For me SP is each of our stakes in the company. We are all investors in what we have here but to see real value for our stakes I believe we need an external source of revenue. What I would love to see when SMT's go live is an some sort of ad token. A token linked directly to ad revenue earned and distributed on a regular basis depending on your SP.
Who wouldn't want to hold massive amounts of STEEM if you were getting payed regular dividends from revenue generated by all the different functions of the blockchain?

Engagement and curation league.

For now I have switched my focus. While I will still be very active on the site my blogging is going to be sporadic. At the moment my focus is on commenting and interacting with the other users on here who are putting up such interesting content. I’ve been following the @curie account anyway as they do such a good job but have started commenting a lot more to talk to the people who put in so much effort as well as a few votes. Mostly this is down to the curation league by @abh12345 which has really put me in the mindset of interacting with others. It really helps to put it into perspective what you are doing when you can see it on a graph right in front of you.

After joining last week I managed to place in 44th position out of the registered users, which I am very happy with considering how long some of these people have been involved and the amount of work that they put in. I can already see the benefits in just one week from new followers, votes and participation on my writing so I would advise anybody who is an active user to take a look and see if you would be interested. There are some great people involved and it has added a lot to my view of Steemit.

I will leave it on that note for now but I will surely find a few more reasons to be positive before I write again. That and STEEM price hitting $1 again. It’s nice to see a bit of green in the market over the past couple of days. Hopefully it’s a sign of a good September.