This will be a different kind of post but please bear with me.

I started my steemit journey about a month and a half ago at pretty much the same time I started to look into cryptocurrencies. I didnt have much money to spend investing in crypto so I started looking into different ways how to get payed in crypto for some work I do.

I came upon Steemit which seemed really interesting to me as it offered to pay me for essentially stuff I love talking about like Science, Photography and so on. It seemed I had stumbled upon a Reddit-like or Facebook-like concept that paid you for your content. I registered, eager to start my blogging journey, but had to wait almost 2 weeks to be confirmed. During this time I already lost the interest in the platform because from my standpoint it seemed pretty unprofessional.

I finally posted my first posts in the start of December for a bounty campaign orchestrated by a project called Viberate. After I finished writing in the Markdown style editor, which seemed pretty clunky at the time, I waited kind of forgotten about the post. It wasnt my intention to get visibility here, but to show my dedication to Viberate by posting a pretty detailed post. I checked on it only about a day after I posted it and got super excited when I saw I have some upvotes and some $ earned. This is how my journey started.

I decided I would post every day about stuff I loved in real life, and I thought this would rub off on the posts. This way people would get real quality content and I would love writing about stuff. I thought it would take a lot of time to start getting some real votes in.

I started many series about various topics that are close to my heart and pretty soon I found my breakthrough on my Science series on Fusion. People from @SteemSTEM and @curie noticed my post in part thanks to my advertising and nagging people about it and soon I got some whales coming in and dropping some massive votes. I was almost high with excitement. I thought that with big votes came more visibility. I was wrong.

I got about 100 votes per post I did during my second week on Steemit with earnings of about 50$ per post. Meanwhile I got about 4 comments and 20 views. I was totally confused. Dont get me wrong... I was happy with the payouts but that was not necessarily why I was here. I wanted to build a community revolving around discussions that are sparked by my posts. I wanted to build a following which would provide criticism on my posts. So I was kind of dissapointed by the lack of new followers despite getting big upvotes from whales.

This is where I realized that in a large part, curation is broken on Steemit. I found out that Steemit is one giant circle-jerk of whales upvoting each other, because that is how you got the real curation rewards. Not by upvoting promising minnows. Curation is pretty linear here on Steemit. You follow a guy who gets nice rewards all the time and refresh the page until he posts a post. You wait until about 20 minutes pass and then you upvote it and just beg that you were ahead of whales that brought in the real money. This is the only real way to earn SP through curation.

And my humble opinion is that curation in such a manner is not healthy. The circle-jerk is not healthy. Dont get me wrong, I do not offer a solution here, as I am only a little fish in the great Steemit ocean, but I think there is a solution if the community is willing to break the status quo.

One simple thing would be to simply decrease the amount of rewards for each consecutive vote a person A gives to a person B. To put it simply... If A upvotes every post B makes, B should make less and less money this way. This would hurt B if B is simply spamming posts and also hurt B if B is not curating the other content-creators on Steemit.

Of course this should reset after some time that is to be agreed upon by the community. Maybe even once a day. I post posts every day and in my opinion they are of a high quality. Many words strung together into coherent sentences and paragraphs. This can not be said for some content creators that earn 200+ $ on each post they post, which consists of 100 words in 5 sentences and 2 paragraphs.

Do not get me wrong. I am not discouraged about my content or the platform. Actually I think the platfrom is great and will become much much better after the communities update I read about. But thinks could be approved, especially in the curation department.

My Promise

So onto my promise for 2018. What can I do for the betterment of the platform? What can YOU do for the betterment of the platform?

With growing SP and my vote being worth about 0.15 $ I feel as if I hold at least a little sway on the reward pool and I want to make full use of this power, which means I promise to you these things:

• After my vote worth passes 1 $ I will not self-vote my posts anymore.
• I will upvote a specific person maximally once per day.
• I will cast my upvotes until I have equal or less then 80% vote power each day
• At the end of the day I will choose one of the posts I upvoted and I will resteem it so it gains more visibility. In this manner I can only resteem users with less than 50 reputation.

And the most important promise that I single out here. I will upvote comments on my posts with a 10 % upvote, if I think they bring something to the disscusion. In this way I will promote my own blog by inviting discussion to my posts and I will also give something to the community of people who are quality content creators on Steemit, as I am firm believer that if someone has the ability to post a quality comment he is probably also able to write some nice posts that are missing in the Steemit community.

And dont forget... My 10% upvote is worth about 0.02 $ but as my SP grows so will my 10 % upvote. This means some pretty big money will be thrown around in this way! This is my promise to you all. What is your promise on how you will better the Steemit platfrom in 2018?

I hope you enjoyed this post eventhough it was pretty different than my usual posts and was more of a rant than anything else. Stay tuned for more content! See you soon.