Steemit Journey - 5 months on the platform and my thoughts so far

Hey Steemians! Time really files. Another month past and I have been writing on Steemit for 5 months now. In this month's article, besides my usual monthly stock-take, I will also share my thoughts on the state of Steemit.

Reputation and Followers

Once again, there is very marginal increase in my reputation from 52 to 54. I think it is going to take another 3 months at least for me to reach my target of 60. On the other hand, my number of followers increased from 530 to 703, which is a sharper increase than previous month. I think this is largely because of the #HKJPSG collaboration contest that we had in this month. If you are interested in what the contest was about, you can check out this post by @orientalhub. It was a contest which brought the 3 communities together and at the same time, we all get to know more people on Steemit.

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Posts

I made 15 posts in the past month which is slightly more than what I posted for the previous month. My favorite post is the one on the inaugural #TeamSingapore meetup, it was very memorable and I finally got to put a face to the few account names on Steemit. The other post which I like a lot was the tutorial on REMME's demo. Besides being one of the most voted posts, it is also the most popular Tweet I made on Twitter for the past month.

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Investments

When I posted my 4th month look-back article, the overall market capitalization was US$400 billion. Today, it is standing at US$334 billion. Did we take a step back? I think not, because not too long ago, we were staring at a US$240 billion market cap. The market progresses in cycles, and such ups and downs are normal, especially for the cryptocurrencies market. Looking at $STEEM, it took a dive against $BTC from 41620 satoshis to today's 37004 satoshis. As mentioned, this is very normal and there is no need to fear if there are no fundamental changes to the STEEM network itself.

My take on the STEEM network

Over the past 5 months, I got from being clueless about the STEEM network to this day which I have understood the mechanics behind it. Moving forward, I will also be developing a project on top of the STEEM blockchain (I will save this topic for next time). Anyway, I have read various posts on what different authors feel about Steemit as a platform. Like anything in life, some are positive and others more negative. Allow me to give my thoughts on a couple of key topics on Steemit.

Humans vs Spammers vs Bots

If you use SteemPlus, which I strongly recommend you to, these 3 terms will be familiar to you. Steemit accounts can broadly be categorized into these 3 types. In the ideal scenario, Steemit should only have humans who focus on writing quality articles. However, we know the world is not perfect and so is Steemit. As a result, we see accounts that are spamming poor quality articles, hoping to gain a few upvotes here and there. I have a habit of heading over to the #introduceyourself tag and say welcome to some new Steemians. Spammers are exceptionally prevalent in the #introduceyourself tag and the worst kind of spammers are those with fake profiles. I think it is a consensus that spammers are bad for Steemit.

Bots, on the other hand, are more controversial. Some people have zero tolerance for bots, some are absolutely for the idea and of course we have some sitting on the fence. Personally, I am one of those sitting on the fence. I like bots like @cheetah and @introbot. Why? Because I think they are useful in helping us identify spammers and plagiarisms so that we can downvote them accordingly. As for bid-bots, I think they are a necessary evil for now because we simply do not have enough humans to provide enough traffic and upvotes to articles. Once we have enough users on Steemit, the effectiveness of bid-bots will decrease and that is when I think humans will take over 😎.

Developments on STEEM network

The ongoing developments on STEEM network is what made me so bullish about this platform. Every now and then, we see new projects and apps being built on top of STEEM. That is because the STEEM network is highly flexible and there are countless of ideas that can be implemented. You can head over to Steem Projects to see a bunch of those. And with the Smart Media Token in the horizon, we might even see projects being funded through Steemit like some form of ICOs. One recent example is SteemHunt. The application of the STEEM network is endless and @SteemHunt will not be the last project raising money from SMTs. In addition, when the Hivemind update is here, we will be able to see more collaborations and communications within communities.

There are others that are trying to challenge STEEM. For example, Akasha and U Network. With STEEM recently reaching 1 million accounts, I am confident that STEEM has the network effect and will continue to dominate in this realm of decentralized social network.

Lessons learned

This month is going to be same. I will end the post with the lessons I have learned and I hope they serve as some pointers for new joiners on Steemit.

• Focus on delivering quality content and comments.
• Be patient. Do not be upset or disappointed when the post your spent hours on only get a 5 cents upvote. It takes time to build your profile and reputation on this platform. There are over 700,000 accounts and it is impossible for your content to stand out instantly.
• Be active and social! Try to engage your readers. I always make it a point to reply to every comment I receive and selectively upvote good comments. In addition, join your local community like #teamsingapore!
• Use bots wisely. As you might have noticed, most upvotes on Steemit is done through bots. I am not entirely against it but I advise to use them wisely and do not abuse it.
• Power up if you can afford it. If you are not in need of the cash immediately, try to convert your rewards into STEEM Power. It helps make your votes more valuable and since people tend to follow others with high reputation or STEEM power, it will help you gain some followers.
• Be kind to others, especially new joiners. We want to grow Steemit collectively and in order to do so, we have to make it as welcoming as possible. So we should all do our part to help each other out.
• Have a niche and build on it. Focus on blogging on what you are good at or passionate about. Do not blog about topics that you think is popular even though you may not know much about it. Why? Blogging takes time and effort, if you keep writing on things that you are not interested in, it will just bore you and eventually you will stop writing. This is especially so if you do not get the upvotes you expected.
• Upvote the content you like and downvote spammy and poor contents. This will help everyone build a more sustainable Steemit platform.
• A little bonus: Using SteemPlus add-on really helps! The add-on allows you to quickly identify potential spammers or bots. It also show you some important statistics like your actual reputation and your current voting power.

Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed my little rant 😂.