Minnow Musings: Reflections on my First Two Weeks at Steemit

Greetings World!

I thought I'd take a few moments to gather my thoughts and share my initial impressions of Steemit. In a sense, this is just a personal essay about how "a normal person" might experience coming to this site. Maybe it'll even be mildly educational as an intro for future newcomers pondering whether this is "real."

Let me back up a sec...

"A Normal Person" meaning someone who is not a developer and not a cryptocurrency/blockchain enthusiast, but who's perhaps your average social media user who stumbles upon an article on their Facebook feed that just happens to be published on Steemit. Or maybe a blogger who's searching for something, as part of research... in short, a non-technical person.

Just thought I'd clear that up... don't want to insult anyone in the process, here!

The Path that Led Me Here...

I found Steemit thanks to a post on a friend's Facebook feed. The post wasn't about Steemit, instead it was an article about VIVA, but it was published on Steemit. 

For no particular reason-- but that might include general disgruntlement with Facebook, with publishing on Medium and Blogger, combined with a strange longing for the "social blogging" days of the early 2000's-- I decided to explore this place for a few moments. I think it was the simple clean interface and lack of jarring advertising that were the catalysts... followed by the surprising degree of interaction I noticed on articles/posts.

I thought to myself "So here's a publishing platform I've never heard of, yet these people are getting more comments and feedback from 50 views than I get on a Blogger or Medium post that passes in front of 1000+ eyeballs? Intereeesting..."

I guess I was just ready to try a new venue.

Crypto.... what? (a side note) 

I'll be the first to confess that I don't know jack about cryptocurrencies and blockchain. 

Sure, some of my nerdier developer friends were all hot to trot about Bitcoin a few years back. I looked at it... and found that the tech was over my head... or, rather, the learning curve was longer than I was interested in spending bandwidth on. Somewhere in later passing, I came across Ethereum which invoked the reaction "oh, so now there's more than ONE of these gigs" but I still moved on. 

Here's why: It all seemed rather "black box" to me, and like one of those things you could spend 800 hours on, at the end of which you'd be told "Congratulations! Your investment is now worth seven cents!" 

I'm a skeptic. 

My dad was somewhat of a "speculator," which basically manifested as pouring tens of thousands of dollars down a black hole from which nothing ever emerged, aside from shady promises of "the next great thing."

I guess my own primary "problem" with the idea centered around the irony of a group of people who seemed highly critical of central banks and the way they could just "print money" with nothing to back that currency... whose solution was to create a virtual currency based on... computer calculations? 

Again, please understand that I am content writer and blogger, not a developer... just sharing my perception as someone OUTside the loop.

My point here being that my eyes started to glaze over-- just a little-- when I realized the Steemit reward system was based on one of these... "things." 

But I thought, "what the heck," and created an account, anyway.

So, you get rewarded with STEEM... but there are several kinds?

I poked around a bit and read some FAQ-like posts. 

In fact, the record will show that the only thing I did for about three days was to "poke around."

My interest in resuming my social blogging and publishing (90% of what I write could be considered highly specialized niche writing) had actually grown a little bit when I realized that Steemit is actually a "revenue sharing" platform, after a fashion. 

Well, not exactly. But that was my initial perception, based on 20-odd years of writing online.

Anyway, I had some trouble understanding the whole relationship between "Steem" and "Steem Power" and "Steem Dollars," and how it all divvied up and interacted. First impression: This is a lot more complicated than "you get $3.00 per 1000 page views." 

Then there's a "Savings" account, which I still haven't really figured out... seems nobody else has, either, as I am yet to find a profile where someone has anything in their savings account. Maybe it's one of those features that was released but never caught on.

My Love/Hate Relationship with Revenue Sharing

Confession: I have a love/hate relationship with revenue sharing sites-- that is, publishing platforms that reward contributors for their words and (sometimes) also offer rewards for a system of peer curation. 

I love them because the idea of rewarding content creators for their content makes sense to me. As a writer, I don't dig the mindset that an article is worth $200 in a printed magazine, but should mysteriously be FREE when the exact same words are on a web site. I love them even more when they manage to create an algorithm that successfully allocates rewards based on quality, merit and user participation. 

I hate them because they almost inevitably FAIL, and often suddenly and miserably. Even the well-managed and well-funded ones. These failures happen for a number of reasons, some technical, some philosophical, some business-related... but almost all those failures involve a staggering degree of the project creators being naive about the level of greed and avarice humans will display when confronted with an opportunity to "get paid online." 

There's a whole rant/article on that topic inside my head, but I'll refrain, since this is meant to be about my Steemit experience!

Minnows, Dolphins and Whales, oh my!

It took me a few days to figure out this somewhat informal Steemit community "ranking" system. I can see how some might be offended by such non-egalitarian labels, but as a veteran of web forums (all the way back to downloading text-based bbs messages in the 1980s-- gawd, I'm OLD!) giving people nickname "titles" as a reflection of their experience on the site seemed pretty natural, to me.

I'm a Minnow, of course. I just got here.

Dolphins seem to be a little more experienced. They mostly work hard and publish a lot, but they are not Whales.

Whales are (as best I can tell) the people we might call "early adopters;" they were either part of creating the platform, or they were some of the very first participants.

I never really found a clear definition of what exactly makes someone a Minnow, Dolphin or Whale... but I can work with it all being sort of relative.

There seems to be a lot of discussion about the roles and power held by the Whales these days... in the simplest of terms, it seems to amount to whether or not the biggest fish in the pond will inherently do the right thing to keep the pond thriving... or will they simply be self-serving and not care... and (in essence) kill the goose that's giving them golden eggs.

Or something like that. 

Am I Real Person? Yes I am! Writing that first post...

So after a few days I decided it was time to see how the site actually would work for me, as a writer. I hadn't been put off by much, and--in fact-- I was feeling intrigued.

I learned that the custom on Steemit is to create an introductory article with "verification." 

What that means is that the post should include a picture of you holding a piece of paper with your Steemit username and the date. I liked that, a lot! Seemed like a good way to cut way down on shill, automated and empty accounts, which is always a problem on user-generated content sites.

Then I "got lucky" with my welcome post!

I mention this because-- obviously-- what happened to me isn't going to happen very often. 

Evidently, more than a few people liked my intro, and next thing I know it had been upvoted over 500 times and I had been selected as "Author of the Day" by something called the "Steemvoter Guild." Pretty damn cool, and totally unexpected!

When all was said and done, the post "made" slightly over $40.00... or 40 "somethings." But it seemed good, especially for a first effort. And encouraging enough to make me want to publish more...

Some 20-odd other articles over the next couple of weeks made much less... all the way down to $0.00, teaching me that things on Steemit are a bit unpredictable.

Guilds and groups and bots and stuff

One of the first mysteries I pondered was this remarkable thing that I could have a post with a few dozen actual views but many times as more upvotes.

Through a little digging around, I came to understand that many of those upvotes were automated; cast by so-called bots. 

That put a little wrinkle in my enthusiasm. Not because I don't like automation, but because it seemed... unlikely... that a bot would be able to recognize quality content from mere filler, and if everything gets an automatic upvote, what's the point of peer curated content?

I also started to learn a little more about Steemit's various Guilds and groups that have self-organized to curate content... seemed like a more authentic tool to sort the wheat from the chaff.

Those mysterious rewards, again...

After a couple of weeks, I'm still not entirely sure how the rewards system works here. My intro post remains my most "valuable," but I've also had posts worth zero. It's unclear to me how that works... topics? Time of day first published? 

I'm not going to lose sleep over it-- I'm just going to play it all as a "game of averages." Can't get attached to what any one post may-- or may not-- earn.

2 Week Conclusion: There's some really good and promising stuff here!

I like that there's an actual active sense of community-- it really does remind me of the old ways of social blogging.

I like that the site is not cluttered with advertising and clickbait-y links.

I like that Steemit-- in a way-- serves as a "soft introduction" to blockchain and cryptocurrencies. I think there really is something to having an "easy entry" system like this if these alt currencies are to have a broader following. The learning curve is shorter because Steemit centers on something I already know about-- writing.

I like that the site is peer curated the way it is. Whether you care about the whole "whale dilemma" and/or are bothered by the many bots, fact remains that published items are typically seen and evaluated by real people. Does the system need some tweaking and building out? Probably... but it already seems to have good safeguards in place to somewhat guard against the most obvious abuses. 

I think it actually bodes well for Steemit that the rewards are in Steem, not in dollars and cents. That layer of complexity will most likely help reduce obsessive "cashing out" in the future. 

At the end of my first two weeks, my stats say that my "Estimated Account Value" is about $156.00. I'm not sure exactly what that means, but it looks pretty good... although I have no real frame of reference for what "good," "bad" or "indifferent" looks like.

So what's next?

Well, for the next couple of weeks I'm going to be experimenting with publishing some more "article like" posts addressing my niche areas and then sharing them outside the Steemit community. I'm interested in seeing how "outside eyeballs" will respond to articles posted on a site they've (most likely) never heard of. That'll be a good experiment. 

I don't get the impression there's anything much to be gained from getting a thousand people to read your posts, except maybe for a new influx of contributors. At least there's this little message that appears at the bottom of posts when someone visits Steemit for the first time:

I do wish there were some kind of "referral program" here. Not because I like referral programs or expect to get paid for bringing in the new people... but because referrals allow you to be automatically "connected" to those you help find the site, so you can connect with and follow them. And perhaps offer them some helpful guidance.