It's been a little over a month since my first #introduceyourself post, where I was quite candid about my first impressions of the content on the steem blockchain.

Author's log, day 30. Source, by designedbyjess, under CC0.

Since then I've delved more deeply and have had a generally very positive experience. Apart from finding great sources of interesting content (more on that later), I read a number of useful posts, such as @theferalone's field guide to the first 30 days. I'd like to give back to the community by recording what I've learned over my first month while it's still fresh in my mind. Without further ado...

1. Great content is here

If you're coming here from other social media, such as I was, two of the first places you may intuitively look for content are on the trending and hot lists. This is a mistake, and it is one of the main reasons I was so dubious at the beginning.

Of upvotes and men

The initial premise of the steem system was (with some simplification) value-weighted upvotes and comments correlate to quality content. This premise is useful, but it turns out to not be sufficient. This is because:

1. Apart from a temporary loss of voting power, upvotes don't cost much.
2. There is a thriving trade in paying for upvotes (more on this later).
3. Because you're potentially rewarded for upvoting/commenting on 'good' content, there's a tendency to bandwagon once a post reaches critical mass, regardless of its actual quality.

We already know that other lists based on money spent are not foolproof. Just look at any top-100 sales chart and the ways it's gamed. Now, imagine you could tell consumers you'll pay them to buy the book, they don't have to spend much, and they might even get a reward for doing so.

Enter the curators

This is not to say that upvote rewards are useless. Indeed, apart from incentivizing content creation, they are also fairly useful if paired with another mechanism that filters for baseline quality.

How to save a blockchain. Source, by Walton LaVonda, under CC0.

One of the recurring themes in my thoughts about blockchain-based media is that it provides power to the users to extend the platform beyond its original design. This is exactly what has happened with curation groups. There are a lot of these, and they differ in their degree of focus, community size, promotion potential, and a few dozen other criteria. What they importantly all have in common is that a good curation community acts as the missing filter which sets a bar on quality. As two examples near and dear to me, the @steemSTEM and @geopolis groups tirelessly, manually evaluate general STEM and very discipline specific articles. If those articles meet the grade, they get a seal of approval in their comments and really great articles even get more visibility in their periodic newsletters (Steemstem distilled and Daily Field Notes, respectively).

So how do I find the good stuff

The obvious first answer is to follow some good curation groups, here's a incomplete list in no particular order:

• @steemstem - Science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM)
• @geopolis - Global sciences (geography, geology, ecology, anthropology, archaeology, history)
• @thesteemengine - General content, interesting curation model.
• @steemiteducation - Promoting high quality educational articles. Focus is on content, not pedagogy itself.
• @sneakyninja - General content.
• @curie - Give a boost to good, underrated content. They gave me a much needed lift when I started out.
• others I don't know about - please tell me about them

Beyond following curation accounts for their digests and resteems, you can find a lot of good stuff by checking out who they're voting for. There's two ways I like to do this. First, for any account, it can be useful to use steemd.com. I like using it to keep track of who gets a steemstem-bot vote.

Lastly, if you really like a curation account (or an author you've found thru them), you may want to consider joining their curation trail on a site like steemauto. I've done this for a few accounts I like and not only does it help me automatically support good content, it fills my voting history full of stuff I want to read.

2. Making great content for fun and (maybe) profit

Foremost, make quality posts. It's can be tempting to just throw stuff out there and see what sticks. Don't do that. You may get short term rewards, but you won't become a part of the community, and I assert that the community is the key to long term success. Be honest with yourself and only hit the post button if you can say that you'd find what you wrote worth the time to read.

More specifically:

• write coherently. You don't have to be amazing at English (I actually love how international this place is), but you should be able to string thoughts along a logical progression.
• Don't plagiarize
• Don't just post a boring summary
• Don't just post a 'topic profile' that wikipedia probably does better anyway
• Do lend your personal voice and style to your articles
• Have a point or raise a question
• Learn about the proper ways to use images and attribute sources
• Choose a good first image - it is what shows up in the article preview
• Try to engage the community by referring to other good groups or work by other steemians
• Consider having a 'upvote all good comments' policy

I also have a few personal rules for myself

• don't resteem willy-nilly
• avoid upvote 4 upvote/follow 4 follow
• keep articles to about 500 to 1500 words
• try to develop a theme (for me, STEM, mainly microbio, with the occasional steem post)

3. Life as a steemian

For me, there's both a philosophical and practical side to life on this blockchain.

Philosophical

The value proposition which sets steem apart from other blockchains is that good content gets rewarded.
Ideally, every practical decision on what to do here should be guided by that value proposition. It is one of the reasons why I'm a "true believer" and intend to continually , more aggressively, power-up as I gain traction. The idea that steem (the crypto) is tied directly quality content production (the blockchain contents) is very powerful and is personally much more appealing than people just doing market analysis to speculate on the altcoin du jour.

In addition to making quality content, this means supporting others who do the same, actively engaging in curation, and avoiding actions which hurt that value proposition.

Practical

With that in mind, let's frist tackle the big can of worms - upvote bots.

Everyone has to make their own decision on this (and related things, such as upvote for life services). We all know that the issue with trending is in large part due to upvote bots.

Conversely, you can think of these either as marketing or as a necessary evil. I have mildly used some upvote services and here is how I sleep at night:

• I only use services which at least try to fight against poor content
• I only use services which limit the total amount of upvotes they send to a user
• I try not to get greedy and boost a post that's already been boosted organically
• I try to prefer services that have some other broader benefit (shoutout to @treeplanter)
• I give real curators a chance to vote first

Powering up

I'm still getting a handle on all the steem currencies. Right now, I'm still in a growth phase AND experimenting with stuff. Ideally, I'd like to stay at 50-50 rewards and HODL to any of the SP from that. The SBD is planned to get split into a few categories, roughly in this priority:

• powering-up (protip, use the marketplace, not buy/sell)
• promotion/contests/buying @steembasicincome shares for new writers
• paying bills (I am a poor grad student, after all)
• playing with other crypto (I'm enamored with the idea of cryptokitties, cryptobots, and other ERC 721 tokens, despite my better judgement)
• paying taxes on steem income. Yes, taxes. I'm nowhere near making enough money for it to be an issue, but I want to make sure this doesn't become a headache for me later.

Interaction

You may have noticed most comments range from Good post! down to shameless promotion of unrelated services. Don't do that. There are plenty of articles that tell you how to make a worthwhile comment.

Quantity

First, understand that quality trumps quantity. However, quantity is important. I've noticed the authors I most want to emulate almost never post more than once a day, but they do post multiple times a week. Some of the best post daily.

Ideally, I aim to post something worth reading every day. However, I have a busy personal life (grad school + family), so I'm happy to get something out every few days.

Posting just often enough helps retain and build your follower base, keeps good content in circulation, and acts to keep you in practice.

Other tools

As I mentioned earlier, one of the great strengths of a decentralized social media platform is that the users can grow it to address unanticipated needs and extend it to completely new services. I mean who would've guessed at the existence of Utopian.io, which rewards open source contributions, when steemit first came out?

I've already mentioned steemauto and steemd, but you should also be aware of:

• steemnow
• busy
• steemwriter

Closing

I realize this was a bit of brain dump and outside my usual topic area. I hope that it helps future newbies and similar posts have helped me. By all means, if there's other lessons you've learned that you think should be included, please comment about them.

One final thought, echoing my first post. Honestly, I'm a bit less conflicted about all this.