I was introduced to Steemit a month ago by @dragonanarchist. My first impression was that this is just too good to be true. How can anyone make this kind of money just by posting blog entries or even simply upvoting and commenting on the work of others? I smell a scam. 

But I also knew that users didn't need to put any money forward in order to participate in this kind of platform. What kind of ponzi scheme doesn't ask you to risk anything other than your time and effort? Steemit was worth looking into. A couple days later I saw some Facebook friends talking about their first payouts:

Yes, the money is real.

Yes, I was able to trade it for bitcoin.

Yes, it's in my wallet now, free for me to do whatever I want with it.

Maybe there was something to this new platform. I set up a profile and read through the Steem Whitepaper. I'll admit that there was a lot I couldn't understand. I'm pretty new to this whole cryptocurrency game. Maybe the best way to learn would be by using the platform. So I got to work on my first post. Here are the six things I learned from that first post and my first month on Steemit.

1. You Don't Have to be Famous to be Successful

Within the first day or two of hearing about Steemit, I saw many complaints in the vein of, "there's no point in joining. If you don't already have a big following you won't make any money." I'm pretty much a nobody. But look at what happened to me:

Is this real life?

This wasn't my only success. Here are my first 4 posts from my first four days on Steemit:

There I was... someone with no following jumping on to this brand new platform and raking in over $1000 in my first week. 

Obviously having a previously existing following or fanbase will help. More than help, it will all but guarantee success. But it isn't necessary. I'm sure I'm not the only person who hasn't seen success outside of Steemit find it here on the platform. 

2. Success Comes and Goes

Right now you might be thinking, "Wow Seth! This is a real rags to riches story." Not so fast, the rags are coming back. Let's take a peak at my next 21 posts...

Not... great. My article "A Day in the Life of an Anarchist" was one of only four to break one dollar, and the only post to get into double digits. The average earned from all of these articles was $1.97. If I take away the single high-earner, the average drops down to a dismal 46 cents per article. 

I was starting to wonder if this was worth my time. I put at least an hour or two into almost every single post. Posts with original artwork could have been as much as seven or eight hours of work. Don't get me wrong, I love writing and I love art. But I was beginning to thing that I should start directing my artistic energy elsewhere. But with my next post, things changed.

3. Finding Success Means Attracting a Whale

It sure felt good to finally get some recognition in the form of them dolla dolla bills. 

Sorry. 

I'm a white, middle-class Canadian. I'm not gansta in the slightest. I shouldn't try. 

But seriously, it was nice to get a decent reward again. And then it happened the next day. And the next. And this continued for every post I made. It seemed that I had attracted a small whale who was consistently upvoting my work. He or she was acting as my "patron" in a manner of speaking. None of my posts were trending, but I was making a steady income. 

I learned from this that making any kind of decent money on Steemit required whales. You can get lucky and have an article noticed by a random whale, or you can get really lucky and have a whale follow you and provide you with a daily paycheck. 

4. "Patrons" May Not Last Forever

This only lasted a week. I posted a new blog entry about my first attempt at animation from when I was seven years old and only earned 25 cents. 

My patron is nowhere to be found. I couldn't find them on my Followers list. I searched for the account and it seems like he or she may have left Steemit behind. 

EDIT: It seems like I was wrong about this one. I'm not sure why I couldn't find this whale before when I searched, but it seems like he/she is still here and still giving me the occasional upvote.

I learned that it's a scary free-market world out there. It's nerve-wracking knowing that your income depends on only one person who may abandon you at the drop of a hat, without any warning whatsoever. But it's comforting to know that there are many others out there who might take up that role. I've been lucky again for my last 2 articles. An even bigger whale has found me. 

Do I have a new patron?

It's too early to tell, but I sure hope so. 

5. Nothing is Guaranteed Until You Reach Your Payout Time

Points 1-4 took a chronological journey through my first month on Steemit. Now we're going to jump back to my fourth post for a very difficult lesson. I purposely cropped the image of my first four posts so that you couldn't see this dreaded little icon:

I watched the progress of my article, "I Made $700 With My First Post and $0.06 With My Third - Steemit: A Lesson In Free Market Economics" with so much excitement. Every hour or so I would check back to find that it had earned another couple hundred dollars. At it's peak I saw that it had over $1100. But then I got flagged by a whale - a big one too - and by his witness account. 2 more flags followed in the next few hours. This more than halved my potential earnings.

This user was gracious enough to explain his downvote in the comments. I replied to him trying to justify why my article had value. Thankfully he threw me a bone and upvoted my comment, but he never removed his flag(s).

I'm over it now, I harbour no ill will toward this whale but I can admit that at at the time I was pretty bitter.

This is a game of subjective value. That cuts both ways. Some may percieve content has having positive value for the community and others may see that same content as a negative. Those users will use their voting power to put that blog entry in its place. That's just the way the market works and I wouldn't have it any other way - Free people freely determining the value of work and products.

6. Anything Can Have Value

I wrote an article 2 weeks ago about how Steemit has changed the way I think. Learning that my contributions to this community can be valued in a tangible way has totally altered my brain. I now view everything through the lens of economics and I'm constantly on the lookout for new content.

As I said in that article, Steemit has supercharged my creativity by changing the way I think about economics and providing real incentive for me to continue creating.

And just for good measure, I'll repost the little animation I made for that article:

Thinking Economically

While anything can have value, the flipside is that anything can also have no value. It depends completely upon whether or not the larger community finds it and determines that it is worth something.

Sometimes that happens. Sometimes it doesn't.

Either way, I'll just keep on Steeming.

Thank you for reading, and thank you Steemit for existing! I've learned (and earned) a lot so far and I hope to continue learning and creating on this platform.

If you liked this article, please follow me @sethlinson.

~Seth