It’s My Steemit Birthday!

A year ago today I started my Steemit journey after waiting patiently for about a week for my account to be approved. I joined Steemit after I had recently become obsessed with the crypto world. I didn’t have any other social media or blogging accounts other than Facebook. But I had been very inactive on Facebook anyway, so Steemit seemed like a good match for me. I created an introduction post which received a warm welcome from many people including some dolphins and whales.

Despite the popularity of my first post, my next few posts were noticed by hardly anyone. This is very common on Steemit and many users quit after this happens. But I stayed and I quickly figured out that Steemit is too vast and there are too many users to just follow people willy-nilly. It is best to find users/communities that have the same interests as you. So I got involved in some areas/communities that I was interested in. I searched for niches to create posts about such as caturday and photo of the day contests. I started participating in some sports score prediction games. I tried to find friends in the fitness community and later joined a 100 daily reps workout challenge. Later on, I participated in some writing contests. More recently I’ve been active playing games on Steemit such as battleship, guess the movie, etc.

My Suggestions for Improving Steemit

The two main things that come to mind to me in order to improve Steemit are: 1) Spread the wealth and 2) Encourage quality content. Steemit could definitely use some improvement in both of these areas.

Spread the Wealth

The current ecosystem constitutes near abuse. Almost all of the money is at the top and the rest are fighting over leftover scraps. And so for the vast majority of people Steemit can only be a hobby. I think it’s unfortunate that more people can’t make enough money on Steemit for it to be a supplemental income source. Steemit could lose a lot of potential users to paid article writing sites like medium or blogging sites.

Encourage Quality Content

The current system benefits shitposting. Posting lower quality content frequently will generally result in greater rewards than poster higher quality content less frequently. This is the last thing Steemit needs because good quality content gets lost amongst the clutter.

A couple ways to try and encourage quality content I have thought of are: 1) Have more than just a one week payment. Instead, how about an initial one week payout and then monthly payouts thereafter. 2) Have ways to organize posts into playlists, promote/pin your most popular posts, and for users to search your old posts on your profile page. Users could be given a way to make playlists and categorize their posts as well as promote/pin their best/most popular work on their profile page so that their good posts don’t get buried and forgotten. There should also be a way to search because the way it is now if I want to go back and reread a post that I really liked, I potentially have to scroll though months of posts to try to find it.

Conclusions

I started out with the intent of Steemit being a hobby. I never hoped that it would become a supplemental income source. Steemit was simply a way to express myself, meet some people, and get a little crypto in the process. I’ve always tried to make my posts personable and cover a range of topics that interest me. Thanks for all the upvotes and comments over the past year.