RE: Predictions For The Future Of Steemit
Well, unless the Steemit platform experiences some kind of radical overhaul in the next six months, or one of the other spinoff services manages to catch viral fire, I imagine that you can expect the same handful of people to regularly create content and the same handful of people to regularly take home big payouts, and everyone else to sit around wondering why they're maintaining a blogging platform with a deep retro aesthetic and a quietly toxic community of crypto cultists warring with each other just offscreen.
As such, the commodity itself will make a good parking spot for people trading other cryptocoin, which will lead to greater volatility, but otherwise I don't expect to see any incredible growth – at least in the near future, unless some other portion of blockchain-facing applications offers somebody something that they didn't have before.
A little bit doom and gloom, but that's what I've got.
Well that's pretty depressing, no way to get into the small minority taking big payouts?
It seems like the best way to do that is to already have a big pile of STEEM in your pocket, convert it to SP, delegate it to a swarm of bots, and have that swarm of bots upvote your own content in order to both earn regular infusions of cash from the rewards pool and have the upvotes put your posts in front of more people's eyes.
Or, if you're me – and I'm nowhere near getting a big payout – split your writing time between things that please and amuse you and which are underserved as a community on the platform (in my case, tabletop role-playing games, game design, and game theory), and writing things/designing things which half-pander to the things that people want to drop a lot of money on – articles and constructs which relate directly to STEEM and Steemit.
I'm from the American South so it doesn't bother me to indulge in a little bit of incest. It's only mildly distasteful.
It can occasionally be profitable.
Overall, though – I just advise that you use it like you would any other blogging platform, link to your articles from other social media networks to bring more eyes in to see your stuff, occasionally tell people about the platform and never, ever refer to them creating content "to get paid," just tell them about the "funny fake money system that they use to keep score" and go with that.
There are a few small communities of people who are rather cool, and whom you probably would never have met another way – so that's a total win.
But whatever you do, for the love of God, do not look under the hood. Do not examine how the sausage is made. You are going to be rapidly disillusioned and unhappy with the platform if you get caught up in thinking about how it works – or fails to. Don't do it.
Use the platform. Share your stuff on the platform. But do not become a platform cultist.
If in a year STEEM from your fun-time writing has turned into millions of dollars of value – awesome. But don't expect it. It won't. Put your focus on creating content and sharing it and I don't think you can go wrong like that.