Hi former TSU folks! This is the post I linked to over on Facebook’s TSU Veterans group. It explains 10 things that I like about Steemit, 8 things that are different from TSU, and 7 things where Steemit is more complicated than TSU. Of course, just like on TSU, all these photos are "original content"!

I won this great prize artwork by "Dog a Day" on the Flower Pictures channel on TSU. You can check out her work on facebook at @idrawdogs.

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I hope this post helps you compare Steemit to TSU and the other social platforms you have been exploring since TSU folded. If you have any questions once you sign up with Steemit, I’m happy to try to answer them and help get you started here with as little trouble as possible. I’ll also try to answer questions over on Facebook. I do hope to see you here on Steemit, though.

10 Things I Like About Steemit

Here are 10 things that I like about Steemit, that I know TSU folks care about:

1. The comment system is great.

You can edit comments. There are nested comments, all visible with no extra clicking. When you are notified of a reply to a comment, you can go right to that part of the comment thread – you don’t have to scroll down looking for your part of the conversation.

2. The system is designed to encourage good conversations.

People can get rewarded for making good comments and having sustained conversations. You won’t see all those one word comments like these favorites: Nice! Great! OK

3. The potential monetary rewards can be so much greater than TSU was ever able to provide.

This is because Steemit payouts are not based on ad revenue or a few venture capitalists that might pull their money out. I’ve made over $40.00 in just 2 posts and a bunch of comments. Most of that came from one post on wild salads.

4. You should do no more than 4 main posts per day.

If you post more than 4 times, the payout on any of your posts is heavily penalized. This really cuts down on spam and puts the emphasis on good content and good conversation. A single post can have multiple photos, though, so photo essays are great! And you don't feel like you need to just keep uploading and uploading and uploading more photos.

5. There’s not much incentive for people to take your photos from Steemit.

Steemit loads fastest with images that are only about 858 pixels wide - not the highest quality, but they show up fine, especially on a phone or tablet. You don’t upload any photos to Steemit – you keep all your photos on your preferred image hosting site and just provide the link to that lower quality image. You can also provide a hot link to your high resolution image (like Flickr or Fine Art America), so someone can click on it if they really want to take the time and bandwidth to see the high quality image.

6. The developers are focused on making the system work for content creators and users.

I have seen them adapting to confront fake accounts, spambots, people who spam, trolls, and other attempts to game the system. That’s one reason you have to sign up through an existing Facebook or Reddit account. There is a big emphasis on verifying that content is not stolen, not just by saying “original content”, but by demonstrating it somehow, if people ask. There are ‘good bots’ that are combing Steemit content to identify any plagiarized posts, too.

7. The Steemit social platform is just one part of a larger enterprise.

Steemit is built on a software foundation that will grow to include other tools that integrate with that underlying software code. They implemented the social platform part first, to ensure the whole enterprise could scale up to the size of big social platforms, like Reddit and Facebook, and to test that all the parts really work. So they need people to be making posts and engaging with each other as part of a much bigger objective, and are willing to pay for that.

The development team is big, because it’s not just staff. It’s an open source project where all the priorities, software development, code review and approval, and new releases are managed in github, a long-standing repository for collaborative software development that anyone can see and even take part in.

8. Their economic model seems more secure than TSU.

There are a lot of investors in the system and it has a big market capitalization, over $100 million right now. In fact, anyone can invest their own cash in Steemit for a larger share of the whole enterprise. People can trade their shares on an open exchange, similar to a stock market exchange – so there are a lot of traders and speculators that benefit from Steem doing well. (Disclosure: I do not have any money invested in Steemit.)

You can load some of your money earned on Steemit onto a Visa debit card and use it anywhere that takes debit cards. Or you can cash out – but only by weekly checks over a 2-year period, like withdrawing from an annuity, so that people focus on the long-range success of Steemit.

9. There are financial safeguards in the system.

They are building escrow accounts so people can sell things or do contract work, but not risk losing their money up front. Your money is in stored in something more like a savings account than a checking account, with a time lag for getting money out, so that it can’t be drained by hackers.

10. Anyone can look at your Steemit posts.

Posts are showing up well in Google searches, so if you have a message you want to get out, people can find it. I could never find any TSU posts in a search! Here’s an example - my post on making salads from weeds, tree leaves, flowers, and seeds ranks #1 (how crazy is that!) when I do a Google search for “salads from weeds and tree leaves” and it's #3 from a search on “salads from tree leaves”.

8 Things About Steemit That Are Different From TSU

There are some things about Steemit that are just different than TSU.

1. Steemit has implemented a reputation system.

This is something that TSU was aiming for, but didn’t get done. That means when you come in as a new user, you are low on the ladder. Even if you upvote someone else’s post or comment, you won’t have much influence. You get a higher reputation by posting, making comments, and making your tiny upvotes. It also means that people who plagiarize, try to buy upvotes, spam, or negatively flag other people, can have their reputation hurt really badly – so they will stop being a problem, or simply drop out of the whole system.

2. It’s not about the views!

In fact, nobody tracks how many views you get. Instead, it’s about whether your post will move people to give you one of their limited upvotes, which translates into earnings for you. This is to encourage quality content.

3. Steemit prefers long posts to short ones, generally.

I see a lot more posts that have a lot of writing, instead of the short comments that many photos had on TSU. That is not always the case, though. Take a look at the posts under the “Photography” tag to see the variety of what kinds of posts have been working well.

4. There is still a lot of development that will happen on the interface.

For example, people used to be able to put lots and lots of hashtags with their posts and now they can only choose 5 tags to include. Everyone has to go with the flow as the developers are testing and adapting, with the aim of making more effective engagement and better content. I guess that's not really so different from TSU, after all!

5. It’s mysterious about what makes a good post or not.

Posts that obviously took a long time to make can be good, but just not get attention or traction. But in general, you can see that people with a lot of loyal followers do pretty well, if they post consistently. It’s not enough for your followers or viewers to just look at your content – they need to leave a comment or upvote.

6. People have conversations on Steemit and in a separate Chat app.

To promote their posts and have casual chats, people use a different site with its own registration, at http://steemit.chat/home. That place is more like a discussion forum, and is organized into different topic areas, like gardening or beer. There’s no financial rewards for participating in the chat – just for posts within the Steemit social platform. But it’s a way to have groups and channels like on TSU, promote your posts, and have private discussions.

7. There are a lot fewer stolen images.

Steemit works to root out plagiarism, and there isn’t near so much mindless posting of memes as on Facebook. However, some people do use a lot of royalty-free stock photos, and images from Pixabay and places like that. It annoys me, but it is pretty easy to spot those posts and pass them by. The TSU standard of original content should stand out and go over well! People do seem to value original photos here.

8. There is no hidden information, whether it's posts, financial transactions, or system development.

All the posts, including comments, are archived, although comments, edits, and earnings are cut off after 30 days. There are tools for seeing who is earning how much money and from what kind of activity, who is trading their shares on the market, who is cashing out. There are forums for deciding the priorities for upgrading the system. A lot of people spend their time tracking and reporting on all that! You don’t have to pay attention to it, if you don’t want to.

7 Things That Are More Complicated Than TSU

There are some things about Steemit that are complicated. They shouldn’t put you off from participating on Steemit, though! I hope not!

1. You need three different passwords.

Those passwords are long and generated by Steemit as strings of random letters and numbers. To make posts and upvotes, you will login using only the posting password. You will use the others when you are doing things related to moving money. These passwords are really important – you can’t just get a new one emailed to you, if you forget it. If you lose the top level password, you could lose access to everything. However, Steem just implemented a system for someone to personally vouch for you being the right person, if you do need to recover your account.

2. You have to learn Internet formatting.

Because Steemit posts have more text than TSU posts, they need real formatting, including different sections within a post, section headers, multiple images or videos, bold and italic type, highlighting of any quotes, hot links to other posts or external websites, and more. So you have to learn a little Markdown or HTML. There are editors to help out, but there is a learning curve, if you don’t already know how to do this. And it takes longer to actually make a long post, like this one.

3. Posts are organized differently than on TSU and you can expect changes.

There are categories that track posts like on TSU, including "Trending" - lol, it comes with the same controversy, too! But there are other categories, too. “Home” is your custom feed made from the posts of people that you follow. “Active” shows the posts that have had comments recently. I like it because it shows the posts where people are engaged in conversation. There are others, like “New” and “Promoted”. But for anyone new to Steemit, they are more complicated than they are worth to explain.

You can find posts by clicking on specific tags , like Photography, Food, and Gardening, from a list that's provided. There are other ways to filter your search, too, but I still haven't figured that out. There's no tag for Flower Pictures or Cats yet, I don't think. : (

4. Upvotes are what make you money.

You can get upvotes on an overall post or on comments. The value of an upvote changes all the time, even during the course of the day. That’s because a certain amount of money is made available specifically for voting, every day (I’ve seen something like $27,000 per day recently). As people are voting throughout the day, the value per changes.

Some people have a lot more voting power than others, and it changes all the time, too, as they are putting money in or taking money out of the system, or are earning money. As you make more money, you have more voting power. One person with a lot of voting power can make you a lot of money. Otherwise, it takes a lot of people voting with a little power to add up. (TSUvians unite!)

5. Your earnings are complicated.

Your post will make some money in the first 24 hours, and then it will continue to make money for 30 days. Then it’s archived – people can see it, but no edits can be made to it and it can’t get any more earnings.

When you see how much one of your posts has earned, that’s not how much you will actually get. Certain people that upvoted you in that first 24 hours will get some of that money, too, because they helped your visibility. And when you get your earnings, it’s in two parts: Steem Power and Steem Dollars. They can be swapped back and forth, but with time delays to keep people from gaming the system. The more Steem Power you have, the more influence you have with your upvotes and the more money you can earn by making upvotes. So a lot of times people will convert their Steem Dollars into Steem Power.

6. People earn money in different ways, too.

People earn money by “curating” content – identifying high quality posts and posts that will be popular, and upvoting them right away. This is a special skill that some people have cultivated over at Reddit. You have to have a fairly high Power level to earn money this way.

People also earn money doing computer tasks, called mining. This is keeping track, in a computerized ledger, of all the little transactions – posts, upvotes, transfers of money, and amounts in accounts - that are required for the whole system to work. It takes a lot of computer power, electricity to run those computers, and air conditioning to keep those busy computers cool enough. This is special work that needs fast, reliable computing power and people that are reliable, too, to keep their machines working fast, 24/7. This is where some of the big money is at, because this capability of securely documenting everything is the ultimate value of the whole enterprise, not just the social platform.

7. To get your earnings, it’s more complicated than just getting a TSU check in the mail.

You have to convert the internal system currency (Steem Power or Steem Dollars) into US Dollars. That means you have to go onto a currency exchange, like a stock exchange, to make the swap. The value of the Steem currency changes every day compared to US Dollars, just like the value of a stock changes from day to day, too.

Well, that was a lot of reading, but I hope it helps you compare Steemit to TSU and the other social platforms you have been exploring since TSU folded. If you have any questions once you sign up with Steemit, I’m happy to try to answer them. I’ll also try to answer some over on Facebook. I do hope to see you here on Steemit, though.

There are a few people here already that were active on TSU, including @the-bitcoin-dood, @fpcvirtual (CloudExplorer on TSU), @uwelang, @steevc, and @infobunny. Be sure to say Hi to them, if you sign up here on Steemit, too! And here's a shameless plug -- be sure to follow me, Haphazard Homestead!

Note: I added the minnowsunited tag at the suggestion of @englishtchrivy. This is also a test of what happens when I try to edit a post within the 25 hour - 30 day window. I will remove the tag if the minnowsunited folks prefer.