Steemit Journey - Some thoughts after 9 months...

Hello Steemians! My 9th monthsary was about a week ago, during the day for HF20 to be implemented. I decided to wait till the platform is normalized after the fork before I post this update. As usual, I am going to do a look-back at my progress in terms of reputation and followers. In addition to that, I will like to share my thoughts on Steem and cryptocurrencies in general.

---

Progress Tracking

Last month I had 1014 followers and a reputation of 62. This month I am slightly better with 1074 followers and 64 reputation. I have read about Steemians losing followers after @steem-ua was released. Due to how Steem UA score is calculated, it makes sense to unfollow some Steemians with lower Steem UA score in order to boost your own score. Hence, I am quite fortunate to be not affected by it. Currently my Steem UA score is 2.963 and I am aiming to get a score of 3. When do you think I will be able to achieve that?

---

Running Content Crowdsourcing Events

For those who have been following my blog, you might have noticed that I ran 2 content crowdsourcing events, in the past month, for a cleaning company in Singapore, "Art of Cleaning". The key idea of these events is to get Steemians to write articles on specific topics that can be reused external businesses. Steemians will then be rewarded accordingly for their work. There are a couple of reasons as to why @mrshev and me are running these events.

To Generate Interest for the Steem Platform

The Steem platform has been around for more than 2 years. At the peak, the main interface of Steem, "steemit.com" was ranked among the top 1000 sites by Alexa. However, since March/April 2018, we are on a steady decline. Steemit.com still has a respectable rank of 2101 right now, but if we do not start to get more interest from outside the Steem ecosystem, we will just continue to slide.

Of course, there are now other interfaces and apps that have integrated with the Steem blockchain. Thus, the Alexa rank of "steemit.com" may not be a true representation of the current state. So let's look at actual Steem users instead (statistics courtesy of @arcange).

As you can see, both active users and activities are also on a steady decline. In order to reignite interest for the Steem platform, we believe that it is important to get external money to flow into the Steem ecosystem. By running content crowdsourcing events, external businesses will pay for content using fiat and we will convert these fiat currencies to Steem to reward Steemians. When we have enough businesses crowdsourcing for content, we envision that there will be more content generated on the Steem platform, quality of content will improve and Steem price will appreciate.

To Help Small Businesses Improve their Digital Presence

In this year and age, it is getting increasingly difficult for small businesses to survive and gain popularity. In order to get consumers to start noticing your business, being ranked on the top of searches (e.g. Google searches) is very important. Hence, there is a market for "Search Engine Optimization" (SEO) where businesses pay SEO experts to enhance their Google rankings.

One key element in SEO is content. Google believe that users like to view fresh contents all the time. In addition, good content such as meaningful articles are also commonly shared on social media. That is the reason why we begin to see every business starting to write their corporate blogs.

However, small businesses may not have the bandwidth and expertise to generate fresh contents every week. They also do not have the budget to hire professional writers to create content for them. Therefore, crowdsourcing for content is a budget-friendly way for small businesses to generate content on a regular basis. Steem being a decentralized content creation platform is ideal for crowdsourcing. We believe it is a win-win situation to "marry" external businesses with content creators on Steem.

---

Thoughts on STEEM and Other Cryptocurrencies

I think the future of STEEM price is going to be great. The reason why I believe that will be the case is that HF20 has better aligned Steem as a freemium platform. The concept of resource credits (RC) will allow normal users to interact with the Steem platform without needing to buy STEEM. However, if a user wants to build a bot or an app on Steem platform, there will be a need to buy STEEM and power up in order to get enough RC to run the bot/app. Active users may also find it essential to have some SP on hand to ensure that they can interact with the platform as and when they want. The linkage of SP to usage is going to provide support for STEEM price and most likely, it is going to boost the price moving forward.

As for other cryptocurrencies, the market had been in a bearish state for more than 8 months. A recent study found that there are less speculators of Bitcoin and more long term hodlers. Traditionally, the last quarter of the year is usually good for cryptocurrencies market. This year, I believe the main highlight will be BAKKT which just announced their first product being physical Bitcoin futures.

“... buying one USD/BTC futures contract will result in daily delivery of one Bitcoin into the customer’s account.”

This means that there will certainly be more volume for Bitcoin and these volume are more likely to be generated by institutional investors. Hence, I believe the final quarter of the year is going to be good for the cryptocurrencies market as a whole. I will like to end this section with a video on why it is a good time to buy cryptocurrencies now. The creator of the video provided 17 compelling reasons to tell you why.

---

I touched on several topics in this article so I will like to hear your thoughts on any of them. What is your opinion on HF20 and the future of other cryptocurrencies? Do you think that content crowdsourcing on Steem is a good idea? Let me know and thanks for reading!

Projects/Services I am working on:

• Steem-Oracle Project
• Byteball to Steem conversion service

---

You can find me in these communities: