When I started using Steem way back in February the #1 piece of advice I recieved was to engage, engage engage! Although engagment is still an important part of becoming successful on Steem (and having a good time!), I think that there has become a shift towards dapps, and spreading our time across different dapps on the Steem blockchain. I know that since I started using dapps more regularly about 6 weeks ago I have seen my account skyrocket in value (not in terms of FIAT at the moment unfortunatley, but that will come!).

Spreading your time

When I started on Steem, I would spend 95% of my time on Steemit, and most of that was making new connections through commenting and engaging with others. Although this has bought me many new followers, the problem is that it is hard to sustain this - people often lose interest, and its hard to keep people engaged in your content.

ENTER DAPPS. Since I have started using the dapps on Steem, I have found that I am spreading my time on Steem across alot more services, and thus as a result tend to have less time for engaging and meeting new people! The main dapps I tend to use are @dlike, @steemhunt, @actifit and @musing. Musing is probably where I spend the most time (probably more than 50% of my Steem time) - it is a question and answer platform similar to Quora. Although there is not a lot of back and forth engagement, I do see the same names come up alot (and I hope they see my name come up alot too...), and in a way leads to a completly different user experience than Steemit offers.

@dlike recently started to offer users Dlike tokens just for users commenting on Dlike posts. Since then I have seen a huge increase in user interactions, which is good, but I feel alot of it isnt genuine, and just chasing those tokens. What I have also noticed is that people on Dlike are now often leaving a comment, but not upvoting content (well mine anyway...) as the incentive is for commenting and not upvoting. I think Dlike is moving in the right direction, but needs to re think how they distrubute their tokens so that the system isn't getting manipulated.

@steemhunt has taken a different approach, offering users daily HUNT tokens for contributing to the dapp through upvoting other users. Additionally, Steemhunt has a fair bit of SP, and often upvote comments which they think add value to the society - I really like this balanced approach, and feel it is something that Dlike could learn from.

Each dapp has its own community

Each dapp comes with its own sub community of different users, and allows us to meet a wider variety of users. In a way we are engaging and interacting just by joining in with new dapps - each will generally have their own Discord, which is always a good place to start, meet new people and learn the basics of how the dapp operates.

Again lets take Steemhunt for example. There are a wide range of Steemians using Steemhunt, and I think the variety of them are interested in wacky, cool and interesting new gadgets. I will sometimes comment on technology that I find interesting or want to share my opinion on, but often I am just happy haring my hunts, and upvoting hunts that I enjoyed. I tend to think that there are many others on Steemhunt who are similar to me.

The great thing about dapps is that they open up a whole new avenue of readers for you, and readers that are likely to be interested in the topics that your are sharing.

Conclusion

Although interactions and being social on Steem is still very important, I feel that with the many different dapps coming out their are many ways to spend our time and grow our account. With many dapps available, we are able to spread our time across many different communities, and develop a wider scope.

What do you think - do you still think that interacting with other is the most important way to grow your Steem account?