One month of steemit: I still don’t quite get it / my experiences and look at it

My first month on steemit has passed. Time for some reflection. I started with no expectations. I thought it looked like a nice platform to blog a bit about my interest in cryptocurrency. I had some reasons to choose steemit for this blogging as you can read in my introduceyourself. At the time mainly technical reasons and curiosity.

Decentralized?

A month later I almost forgot about those. Along the way I learned things are more complex than they are advertised at first. When you start it seems too good to be true. There are too many blurry concepts (witnesses, minnows, whales, nodes, long term promises,…) which create some fog and one can’t fully understand it all. But there is a great motivation that one will earn money and I think that blinds a lot of new users. I’m one month into it and most terms have their place in my mind by now but that doesn’t mean it all makes sense yet. One thing I learned is that steem is not as distributed as most of us like to think. @cryptogee wrote an easy to understand article about it: (steemit.com is not the decentralized platform you think it is)[https://steemit.com/steemit/@cryptogee/steemit-com-is-not-the-decentralized-platform-you-think-it-is]

Money incentive

IMHO too much content is created on this platform on how to become successful. Too much bloat on how to increase your following, how to get more votes, how to get more reputation, how to make more money. I appreciate the money I make. Who wouldn’t? But it bothers me how much my attention is drawn to post that tell me how I could do better. When I came to steemit my intention was to share content, not to make money. It literally tears me apart. I want my content to be appreciated. I love it when my reputation goes up and I love to interact. That’s why I’m on platforms like slack and stackoverflow. No money incentive there. But it seems I can’t escape it. The dollar signs are all over. I’m still in doubt about how I should feel about it.

Appreciation and curation

The thing I care about most at the moment is my reputation. I think it best reflects what I’m doing. It also seems unrelated to my own steem power and this confuses me. I don’t think steem power itselfs brings me anything I see it as a confusing way of telling me how much steem cryptocurrency I have but can’t trade right now. It’s sort of an investment in the system. My steem dollars I see as my steem cryptocurrency I can trade right away. I don’t see how any of that is related to appreciation.
I don’t think the amount of currency one has is a good measure for curation/appreciation. I don’t think it is a good measure to let the good content surface and get the attention it deserves. I appreciate some content a lot but since my steem power is limited I can’t express my gratitude well. On the other hand quite some users buy steem to have more steem power. They have not proven to be good curators but still they weigh a lot on curation.

Future

I’m not yet sure on how I will continue with this. I got to know some nice people, mainly in the #gridcoin community. I will keep blogging because I like it. Steemit has some very nice aspects, and it doesn’t have certain drawbacks of other social media. To me it seems it has other drawbacks however. But there are two points that will keep me here for now. First I’m only here since a month. I still need to learn a bit more, gain some more experience. And second: steemit is a very new and evolving concept. It might involve in a good or bad way. Or it might even not evolve at all. Or maybe something else surfaces and takes over. We’ll have to wait and see.

Proud minnow, eager to grow.