Greetings Steemians!

I just wanted to take a quick moment to say thank you to all of you who have been following me until now. You guys have been amazing! I have finally had an audience for my photographic work, and it feels amazing! I am a working man, with a family to take care of, and my dreams of doing photography full time have been shelved for several years now, possibly until I retire and just do it because I love it. Which I do! I love photography! I just don't find myself having much time to do it as of late. Up until now, all of the photos I have posted to Steemit have been from my archives. Archives I have built up over a period of years! I have put thousands of dollars into equipment, and road trips, and camping gear to get these images. And it's worth every penny, because I love it!


That is the value that Steemit has brought to me. An audience! I have been running a blog on another provider (which will remain nameless), for years, and I have kept meticulous track of visits, and demographics, and whatnot, and the number of eyes PALES in comparison to the number of hits I get on steemit. That is awesome!


Secondarily, but possibly more important to me is the feedback! I can count on one hand how many people stopped and took the time to write some feedback on my old blog! As rife as Steemit is, with people who just want to advertise their own feeds (which is annoying as hell), the HUGE perponderance of people commenting on my stuff has been genuine feeling, and non-spammy in nature! So awesome!


I have made myself a new rule. I used to puruse the feeds looking for fantastic posts by other users for using up my upvotes. I still do this. I do it in this order:

• People I follow
• New
• Hot
• Trending
• Trending spammers
  
  
  Let me break it down for you.
  
  
  The most important people on Steemit to me are the people who bring me value. That said, recently I have developed a policy of re-vetting my follow list. Early on in my Steemit experience, I just followed people for the sake of following. But the longer I have been here, the more picky I have been about whom I follow. As an off shoot of that, I have begun pruning my follow list. As I see new posts from people I follow, I have been unfollowing ones that I see do not fit my vision of awesome. Believe me, it is tedious, but it is worth doing. And it's great for the people that I keep following, because I'll have more voting power left for them! If you have written a post that brings me useful information, or even just a little bit of sunshine, you are awesome! And you deserve my upvote! Thank you!
  
  
  Once I exhaust that list, if I still have decent voting power left, I start scanning for new posts that are awesome! The reason I got to "new" at this point is because I have a feeling that new Steemit users are the lifeblood of Steemit. The more the merrier! I find that generally new users don't find their posts climbing into the Hot, or Trending pages. I want to find new users, and do my little bit to help them find a voice!
  
  
  I move on to Hot posts. If you have been on Steemit for a while, you may have already discovered that the sooner you vote on a post (after 30 minutes), the more of a cut you get as a curator. I believe I'm a valueable part of the Steemit ecosystem, and so I like to pay myself well. :) (After my followlist of course).
  
  
  Then, if I have time, I check out the trending posts. These posts tend to be the cream of the crop. The community has deemed them the most valueable, and I don't want to miss out on all the fun. This is basically like scrolling my Facebook feed. I generally don't upvote these, because I've already exhausted my voting power already, and it would be lost in the ocean of upvotes by all the whales anyway. Kind of pointless in my view.
  
  
  As I'm scrolling the trending posts, I love to read the comments. Sometimes they are more insightful than the origional post! At this point I don't have upvotes to spare, but if I see a great comment, I creep on that person's feed. If I find them apealing, I follow them! While I'm viewing comments on trending posts though, I keep an eye out for spammers. If I see them, I will flag them. I see myself as an investor in the Steemit community, both monitarily, and as a community stakeholder. I don't like graffity in the "real" world, and I don't like it on Steemit. It devalues my realestate in the real world, and it does the same on Steemit. It brings the property values down (read "THE PRICE OF STEEM COIN"). It also is tiresome to scroll past it, and it slows down my experience.
  
  
  I don't typically stop in the promoted section, as I don't think more Steem should merit more of a voice. I'm sure there are great posts in there, but if they don't organically rise up the ranks anyway, then chances are they are valueless to me. I don't waste my time. That's one of the beauties of Steemit!
  
  
  Sorry for the long post, I hope you found value in it. It started out as just a THANK YOU to the more than 350 people following me, but it turned into a bit of a stream-of-consiousness thing.
  
  
  Keep on STEEMING!