I'm coming up on a year since my Steemit account was created. It's been a fantastic journey full of learning experiences and meeting some great people. I've just surpassed 500 followers and this will be my 1000th overall post (blogs + comments), so I want to take a moment to reflect on my Steemit journey.

Two months ago, I shared some thoughts after 500 posts, which included a little bit of background information about how I joined Steemit and what some of my favorite early posts were.

Many of the sentiments expressed in that post still hold true. I've appreciated the support of my friend @vandeberg, and I wish him and the rest of the Steemit developers success as they launch new initiatives in the days ahead.

I've also had support from a variety of communities and users across Steemit, so I'll be mentioning many of them in this post. Every interaction I've had via comments on blogs and group chat discussions and direct messages on Discord has helped me become more in tune with many interesting people who choose to spend their time pouring into this platform. So that's where I'll start.

Thoughts on Engagement

There's a lot of discussion (both positive and negative) about the future of the platform. I've seen all sorts of commentary on the ethics of paid bot votes, appropriate flagging etiquette, spam and plagiarism, and free speech- all vital issues that are worth discussing. I've engaged other users on many of these issues in an effort to see various viewpoints, and such discourse has definitely taught me much about what I personally want out of my time spent on Steemit.

At the end of the day, the platform is user-driven. I'm constantly impressed by the amounts of original ideas that people have for content on this website. The community has encouraged not only sharing pieces of your life with the public, but doing so in a way that is thoughtful, tactful, and promotes discussion.

One of my favorite Steemit data websites to look at periodically is SteemTracked. It gives you some great insight into your post engagement and many other stats about an account. I took the liberty of pulling some data and graphing it myself in Excel. I wanted to get a measure of the engagement I've received over time. This could be measured by upvotes, but I decided a better metric to base this on is the comments I've received on blog posts. Here's what that graph looks like:

I broke these data up into two sets. The first set includes my posts from 7/18/2017 to 9/11/2017 (the date I posted my 501st post update), and the second set includes 9/12/2017 through the present. You'll notice the large spike at the beginning for my intro post, and then you can see that the slope of the line I fit to the points increases at a good rate over the first time period. The rate decreases a bit over the second range, but it is worth noting that it is still an increasing slope.

What's more interesting though, is that the average comments per post over the first period is 12, and the average comments per post during the second period is 30.

I believe these values are directly attributable to my involvement with groups across Steemit. Joining groups has been a fantastic way to promote my posts and get fantastic engagement at the same time. I'm constantly amazed at the thoughtful questions and comments I get after sharing a blog post.

My point here is to stress the importance of finding a community that you can fit into in order to engage other posts. This blog will be my 48th since I joined Steemit. That means that the other 952 things I've posted have been comments. If you engage others, they will engage you. So I want to highlight several communities I've become involved in and point you to them in case you want to begin your own journey of building community on Steemit.

Communities You Should Check Out

The Unmentionables (@unmentionable)

I've been especially impressed by the quality of posts from one of the first groups I joined on Steemit, the Unmentionables.

Founded by @fatpandadesign, the goal of the Unmentionables group is to promote engagement among its members, help its members improve the quality of their posts, and provide extra value to the best posts via a group account.

Many groups have post promotion channels, but they are nothing more than a place to drop a link and leave. Not many, if any, users actually stop to scroll up and view previously shared posts. The Unmentionables requires its members to upvote and comment on at least two other previously shared posts in post promotion before sharing their own. This has fostered a community of quality engagement among the members. I always look forward to their comments on my posts.

You can check out the Unmentionables by visiting the group account on Steemit. You'll find curation posts that feature our members' great work, as well as instructions on how to apply to join our community.

Steemit Ramble (@ShadowsPub)

Image source: @shadowspub

I joined Steemit Ramble only a short while after it was just an idea in @ShadowsPub's brain, but it has quickly become one of my favorite communities to visit. It began as a Discord server for Steemians to share links of posts they thought worthy of inclusion in a daily curation post. That's how I got involved. I would find a great post that I thought was undervalued, and I'd drop it of for @ShadowsPub to review.

The community has since grown much larger, and now features a weekly event called "Pimp Your Post Thursdays," where twice every Thursday (11:00 a.m. EDT and 7:30 p.m. EDT), users can hop on the voice chat and talk about their posts. I've participated in this two weeks in a row, and I've found it very refreshing to actually talk to other Steemians and get their thoughts on my posts.

If you've never experienced a live voice chat session where people just chat about Steemit and things related to the platform, you should definitely check out Steemit Ramble. You can join the Discord server here.

SteemUSA (@steemUSA)

Of the communities I've joined, this one is the most recent. Formed just this week, SteemUSA is a group dedicated to promoting the posts of Steemians from the United States. I'm very optimistic about the success of this group just after interacting with the group's founders in their Discord server this week. If you'd like more info on the group and how to join up, I just did a blog post about the server, so you can check it out here. Alternatively, you may find more information about SteemUSA by clicking on the banner at the bottom of this post.

Qurator (@qurator)

Qurator is another group that strives to curate great content and reward its members through the efforts of its voting bot. They operate on a voting tier-based system, where the members who contribute more to the community receive larger votes from the group account, @qurator. They also have a paid upvote bot that's exclusive to their members called @qustodian. The two users responsible for this effort, @scrooger and @gingerninja, have been very helpful to me. They currently use voting bots created by @inertia, who created the curation trail bot that I recently posted a tutorial on. They also post daily curation blogs featuring the best of their members' posts. If you're interested, you can find instructions on how to join in this post.

Other Groups and Services

There are many other groups and services that I would like to point out in this post, because they have been very useful or interesting to me as I've progressed along on the platform. I hope you'll take the time to check out what these accounts have to offer.

• Steemit World Map (@steemitworldmap)- A service that tracks the location of Steemit posts and places them on a world map here.
• Humanbot and R-Bot (@humanbot & @r-bot)- projects developed by @carlgnash to promote truly original content across Steemit
• You Are HOPE (@youarehope)- a charity organization founded by witness @sircork that seeks to be the first decentralized charitable organization bringing relief to impoverished people across the globe. Join their Discord server for more info.
• The Writer's Block- founded by @gmuxx, this group can help you improve your writing skills unlike any other group I've found. While I'm not too involved with this group, I support their curation efforts, so I wanted to point them out to you. Learn more by joining their Discord server.

People

Finally, I could fill up several posts elaborating on how many users have helped me and supported me over the past few months. I wanted to give a shout-out to a few in particular.

• @vandeberg- Thanks for your votes and encouraging me to get involved in the first place.
• @fatpandadesign- Thanks for allowing me to get involved with the leadership of the Unmentionables. It's really been a great experience.
• @HopeHuggs- for your support and help in leading the Unmentionables through whatever comes our way.
• @apanamamama- Thanks for your thoughtful comments and engagement on my posts.
• @gogogadget- Thanks, inspector, for helping me support new members of Steemit
• @ShadowsPub- Thanks for allowing me to be a guest on PYPT.
• @inertia- Thanks for making great voting bots and helping me figure out bugs in my code.
• @scrooger and @gingerninja- Thanks for letting me bug you about Qurator and your bots
• @carlgnash- Thanks for inspiring me to support great original authors across the platform.
• @unmentionable- This one goes out to all of the members of The Unmentionables who engage my posts and chat with me in our Discord server. It's a privilege to be one of your group.

I could go on and on, but thank you to anyone who has ever commented on my posts or upvoted them. I appreciate all you do to support me, and I look forward to more fantastic interactions in the future.

Be sure to check out the folks I tagged above. They'd all make excellent people to follow and support.

Final Thoughts

I always like to wrap posts up with my final thoughts. It's a good time to reflect on the post in general and set the tone for my next blogs. This time, I'm going to leave it open-ended. I'm not sure where I'll be headed on the next phase of my Steemit journey, but I'm glad to be part of the groups I'm involved in, and I look forward to meeting more fantastic people.

If you're not involved in a Steemit community, I hope you'll consider finding one. Just search the site for people with similar interests, and you'll find a group in no time. If you have questions about any of the groups I've mentioned above, feel free to find me on Discord or Steemit.chat (ethandsmith) or leave me a comment here.

If you have other groups or services that you have found helpful during your time on Steemit, I'd love to hear about them, so leave a comment!

Here's to many more thousand blogs and comments!