Great! Just by coincidentally looking at my steemd profile yesterday I realized that today is my first Steemiversary. It's been a ride...but let's start with the very beginnings.

How I got here

First time I read the Steem whitepaper and bluepaper was around end of 2016 / beginning of 2017. Back then I thought that it's all way too complex for ordinary people to understand, so I thought that hardly anybody would use it. Was I right? I don't think so, but I'll get to that.

In any case, I dropped Steem like a hot potato. I revisited the papers after BAT had their awesome ICO and I had read their whitepaper, basically comparing those two. Why? Because at first glance, they sounded similar as in "reward content producers", but I found the BAT / Brave combo much more appealing than Steem. You create content someone views, you get rewarded. Easy. No curation rewards, no Steem, SBD, SP, voting power, voting weight, etc. - what could go wrong? I immediately started using Brave as one of my browsers.

Somehow, I came back to Steem, though. BAT took its time to get included into Brave (and still kinda is), so I revisited my thoughts and wanted to give Steem a try. It took another 2 months to actually convince myself, sign up and get approved (which took around 2 weeks I suppose), and - voila! - I could post my first article.

My stats

So, apparently (if I trust @steemitboard) this is my 51st post (exluding comments), my 240th post in total, I've made it to 50 reputation (yesterday!) and 462 SP, of which I bought most.

I've also finally bumped up my @steem-ua score to > 0.000; it's now at 0.144, which ranks me in the top 100000. Woohoo! :-D

My highest-paying post was this one about earn.com at 15.61$ and it's still being read - evergreen content ftw!

Overall, I used to have higher rewards than now, I guess everyone did, when Steem / SBD price was super high. I'm not unhappy about my rewards at all; more so about the general interaction one gets on Steem. The post mentioned above is also the one with the most comments, which is 13.

Most importantly, I've made it to 350 followers, with some really good ones, but unfortunately also a lot of bots or inactives.

My impressions from 365 days on Steem

I think in those times where half the community is upset about HF20, broken curation, bad content quality, reward pool exploitation, inequalities and many more things, it's important to keep a couple of things in mind:

• Steem is awesome
• Steem is one of the blockchains with the most users, and is probably the one providing most value to its users (not talking about monetary value necessarily)
• Steem is a censorship-resistant news and social platform
• Steem is being used worldwide
• Steem actually provides rewards to content producers
• Steem is a community
• Steem is experimental technology

There's obviously a lot that needs improvement, but this post isn't the right time to get into details. Just remember: You're pioneers! You're transforming the way the world discovers and consumes content! Be patient.

My wishes for the next 365

I'd love to get to 1000+ followers. I'd really enjoy getting more interaction on my posts (maybe because my posts are boring, but nobody would even tell me that :-D). So far, commenting has been the much more interactive way of communication here. I must admit I'm not that much of a Discord / chat in general person, as I like communicating in asynchronous ways. Anyway, it would be great to have a greater community and more active followers.

I'd also love to see Steem grow to 10m+ users in the next year. Steem needs more easy-to-use products built on top of it, but we can see the way it's developing towards with @steempeak, @steemmonsters, @steemhunt, @partiko and many more (sorry if I'm not mentioning you, please complain in the comments). This is awesome! We could probably use some of the large companies build actual enterprise-grade solutions in the next 12 months, but we probably also need to professionalize the upgrade process a bit in order to get there.

The last wish is that we reach 1m active users per week, independent of price. Obviously, if the entire crypto market sees yet another bull-run, Steem will surge as well, and many more people will be drawn (back) into it. However, I actually much more enjoy the more quiet times like now where the most loyal and serious people are sticking around. Can we multiply by 20? Hard to tell.

Thank you!

Thanks to all of you who I've been quietly following, reading, commenting, voting, getting votes and comments from, etc. There are some outstanding people on this platform, and I hope you stick around much longer and keep up your great, helpful mindsets.

Hoping for the best and wish you all a great next year!