My first month using Steemit & Dtube: A Crude Analysis

I started using these platforms for a variety of reasons and although I would like to say that generating revenue was not a part of it...it was. The more important reasons though were to expand what I share beyond my friend group, find more folks doing similar and also interesting things in life, have more engagement with those that I am sharing with, utilize the really awesome technologies that are the backbone of both Steemit and DTube, and ultimately archive my video project on a decentralized platform.

Have I found much of those things? Absolutely.

Has the amount of time and effort I have put in over the past month been worthwhile? That is debatable and ultimately as a new user not really something that I can appropriately gauge because I just have not used the platforms long enough to have the sort of data to compare the time, effort and resources versus the 'return' of my endeavors and alas some of that 'return' can only be quantified as 'enjoyment and fulfillment' and thus wholly subjective.

Considering that I have basically used every drop of electricity that I have generated for an entire month just to upload videos, write articles, make posts, write comments, create snaps, write replies and generally utilize the platforms...I have to say if I was actually paying for said electricity I would probably feel very different at this point about things.

I also went about twenty gigabytes over my cellphone's data plan to accommodate what I have shared so most of what I have done has been with my data throughput throttled at 14.4 Kbps which means everything that I have done has been rather tedious and mind numbingly slow. Considering that even using a cellphone repeater (which uses even more of my limited electricity) I still have intermittent cellular signal which not only adds to the difficulties of doing what I do but also the time it takes to do them.

Something that I noticed that seems profoundly suspect to me is that my first several post had significantly higher earnings than all my posts thereafter. I am a rather suspicious person by nature so this leads me to think that there may perhaps be some automated upvoting to help encourage new users to keep posting but without any empirical evidence to support that notion even I must admit that it is only conjecture.

I quickly learned that if I unfollow users that spam and resteem low grade content that this does not remove them from my feed and thus my feed is clogged with so much junk that I do not even bother looking at it anymore and instead directly load the profile of the people whose posts I want to see one by one. This is extremely annoying especially since my aforementioned bandwidth/connectivity issues and that each time that I do this (if I want to comment or upvote their content) I have to login again and again for each profile that I load.

I tested some of the bots that infinitely spam my wallet with ads for their services and also researched some highly recommended bots and ultimately I think it was just a waste of both Steem and SBD to do so. Yeah the 'coverage' that some bots provide is appealing but ultimately I would have been better off just using the Steem to 'Power Up' and just saved the SBD. One nice thing about the bots spamming my wallet is at least they give me 0.001 Steem each time they do it.

Overall I like the platforms and must say that although there is plenty of room for advancement and fine tuning of the systems being implemented...I came into it understanding that 'beta is as beta does' which means there will be glitches, bugs and dysfunction galore and ultimately I can whine about it or just buckle down and be a part of the growth process but overall it is the actual people that I have interacted with that have kept me wanting to contribute and continue to 'be a part' of that growth.