Last week I made 1 whole month since I registered and started using Steemit, so I have posted a list of things that I have managed to achieve in those first 4 weeks, so this week I'll be posting a short update on my stats and compare how things have changed just 1 week later. My focus in this post however is to also share some thought about Steemit based my personal observations and experience after spending quite a lot of time here already...

The Important Stats

Current Reputation Level: 59 (+1)
Number of Followers: 189 (+35)
Total Number of Posts: 1034 (+143)
Number of Blog posts: 141 (+21)

Data provided by Steemit and Steemdb

The Not So Important Stats

Rank by Estimated Account Value: 989 (9 down)
Rank by Reputation: 353 (3749 up)
Rank by Total Posts: 80 (2 up)
Rank by Number of Followers: 208 (17 up)
Rank by Posting Rewards: 834 (71 up)
Rank by Curation Rewards: 299 (12 down)
Rank by Steem Power: 933 (106 up)

Ranking data provided by SteemWhales

Lately I'm seeing that I'm kind of losing my willingness to write a more than one or two posts per day, used to have no problem writing four to five decent one per day in the first month, now I'm not so encouraged to spend that much time writing for Steemit every day. I've also not been very active in curating posts like I used to do, feeling a bit discouraged in that as well, though I've been working on bots that should help hopefully. Generally I have been spending less time on Steemit and that is why probably some of my stats lost ranks instead of gaining some...

Some More About Promoted Posts

Two days ago I have posted some thoughts about the new Promoted Content feature as well as my concerns that it is still not functioning as it should. I need to add a bit more about it since I actually had some success using it, but not the kind I had expected. My first experience was based on spending a few dollars and that pretty much did not work well. Then I have decided that I can spend a bit more to test, so I have boosted this post How to Get a Better Sleep When Using a Computer Late at Night with a little over $36 SBD. The post was good and deserved to get the attention of more readers as it could be useful for people that spend a lot of time on Steemit, especially late at night. So it was the perfect candidate for testing with a good and useful post getting promoted with a larger amount of SBD...

I wanted to have the post in the top 20 promoted posts and the boost amount was enough to keep it at around the 20th place, so that it would be easy to be seen by everyone without having to go through a specific category. The post did not have a popular tag, so otherwise finding it by category would be very hard, though I don't like to abuse tags just to make a post more visible as you can see from my posts' tags. Guess what happened? The post did do pretty good finishing with a total of $106.75 SBD reward ($82.93 SBD for the author or 41.463 SBD and 45.402 STEEM POWER). So it essentially has managed to just cover the SBD used for promoting it from what it has earned, while being pretty visible to anyone checking the Promoted page, but that is not what is important here.

What is important is the fact that while the post scored some Whale votes, as apparently they do check the Promoted page, it didn't get a lot of attention from regular users past the first hour after its publication at about which time it was promoted. Sure, Whales voted for it, but apart from them not more than a few votes from other users... not to mention getting more comments or actually gaining new followers. If a post goes trending maybe there will be much more good results, but how can that happen unless a lot of Whales upvote it believing it deserves to go trending which will hardly happen for the normal average user on Steemit. Since there are not much regular users, besides maybe others who actually also use the Promoted feature, but at the moment that page looks more like a place where people brag how much they can spend on promoting their posts...

So again, the only usability for the Promoted page at this moment seems to be for gaining some extra Whale votes for good posts in order to aim for the Trending page. That would however require a really good post and spending at least 30-40 SBD just to be sure that more people (Whales) will see it. Other than that there does not seem to be much point using the Promoted page for the moment, or at least based on my experience with it so far.

Some Observations About Tags

Another big disappointment on Steemit is regarding the usability of tags... it seems that unless you use and actually abuse some of the popular tags you risk a lot in not getting your post seen by many people after the first 30-60 minutes. Even if it is a good and interesting post, if you just set some tags related to the post itself without looking for the popular tags or even thinking about adding any of them it will most likely be buried and not seen by many people after the initial period after posting it. Go figure why people abuse popular tags and use them on posts that have nothing to do with the content of their posts...

This is really a discouraging thing, especially when it happens with a post that you just planned to start a Blog post series with... really does not help you in motivating you to even write a second post. I have previously written on series of 10 blog posts exploring 3D Printers and 3D Printing that had moderate success, but I have temporary stopped it as although some posts did Ok on terms of rewards my goal was to find more people that would be interested in what I'm writing about and there were just too few. So I decided to continue with the 11th post of the series at a later time. Meanwhile I have decided to try and start a series about RC models as they are one of my many hobbies, guess what, I may need to postpone that for a later as well even after the first post I made...

I really don't like writing for a few Whales that may or may not like what they see (if they manage to see it at all) to give you an encouraging vote. This has already happened to me a few times and while it works well the first time it is not very encouraging when it happens often, but other than the Whale vote(s) nothing much else happens and when you to the next post that is better than the previous and even more interesting and it slips through the attention of Whales... that really acts much more discouraging than anything else.

What Really Needs to Change

People should not need Whale votes in order for their posts to be able to earn a decent reward, but more importantly to get more people to find and read what they write about... they should not need to promote their content or to write it in a way that may attract Whale attention. Whales certainly do have their place in the Steemit ecosystem, but we should not be needing them to get encouraged or get a decent reward for a good posts... maybe for going Trending for now it would still be Ok to rely on them, but just for now. I know Steemit is still way to small and it needs to grow and attract a lot more users, however if we expect these issues to resolve themselves by just waiting for more new users to come the problems may just as well get more serious instead.

Steemit needs to grow its middle-class of users fast, so that these people with decent Voting Power would be able to make a difference and significantly influence the way things are currently happening. How can that happen, I don't know, I don't have the right solution, but people should not stop giving ideas on how things might improve and the ones in charge should actually be listening more to the advice they get... I see a lot of users giving ideas, myself included, but I also get the feeling that nobody is listening and many of these just fall through the holes of getting unnoticed.

If you have a question or want to add something, then please leave a comment below.

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