RE: A switch of mindset that could change Steem forever!
Hi @mejustandrew. @ginabot just sent me a message that you had written about me. Thank you very much! I appreciate the comments.
I write blogs for pleasure. I interract in comments for pleasure. I never came to steemit for the money. I have a day-job for money.
I came to steemit because I had some good ideas that I wanted to write about. These were things like “Satoshi the billionaire who never spent a penny” and “The rise of the zombie bitcoins”.
I think my earliest blogs were my best ones. The ideas had been in me for months, so I was really fired up to go when I found steemit, and could start to express myself. Sadly, my first 10 blogs had less than a dozen votes worth under 10 cents in total. Less than 1 cent per blog - which I typically spent two days perfecting.
I was not discouraged by this lack of support. One day I wrote a comedy blog “How to make a fried egg sandwich”. I got my first 5 followers! I also earned $5 for the first time! My friends laughed at me and said “keep your day job!”.
Persistence paid off. Eventually I had one or two whales following me. Blogs started to earn $100s. That’s very nice, but I was still here for the pleasure not the money.
I made alot of friends on steemit, including you, @mejustandrew. It is a great community where we can forget about race, skin colour, religion, country and class.
People like me will stay whether the rewards are in money, or just thumbs up. Still, the money is nice because you can give it away to people who deserve it. For many poor people the money is a tangible thing which gives them extra security.
A small point is that part of the steem I have was bought. I borrowed some money (fiat), and invested in steem. I think it will prove to be a good long term investment. Having more steem was useful because it meant my votes for bloggers were worth more. Every time I bought some steem, I saw a leap in the number of followers. I am happy because my blogs reach a much wider audience and I tend to get 100s of meaningful comments.
For the most part the spammers tend to stay clear of me. Maybe I am on the spammers “avoid list” after I flagged a few.
Thank you so much for your reply and for all the support! This is an exemplary comment that you just made here, once again, showing us a good way to interact! Sorry because I wasn't able to reply your comment right after you gave it, but it was 2:30 am and I went right to sleep after I published the article.
About your first posts that got unnoticed, I would make some summary post which includes references to all these articles. I know how it feels to come here with great ideas that are worth to be shared and making a whole post about one of them gives you just a very small number of views. And this is what I am talking about, it is more about the views and the comments newcomers receive, rather than the payout.
It feels awful to share really big ideas that get unnoticed and I believe that this is what discourages most of the newcomers. This and the too high expectations, especially watching the trending page and some authors that get rewarded for very unvaluable content. The newcomers believe that they can produce better content and these people are the people that leave the platform first as long as they realize it is not at all like that. After all, as I said in the article we are not all successful bloggers and we are not even supposed to be, as this is just a social media platform. If we had 500 million users, then how much good bloggers must be around them? 50 millions? That is a lot and that is the change that we must make into how we perceive Steem.
I have already reached work so I can not go on with this comment, I hope things will getbetter with Steem and I really appreciate the fact that you see me as a friend. I must say that I am honored for this. You are one of the people who make this community better!