Have I Lost My Bread and Butter on Steemit?

Now, my policy is kind of to avoid writing about Steemit as I'm more of an arty girl and there are many more people on this platform that have a much better understanding of Steemit plus the vocabulary to speak about it intelligently. But I'll make an exception here as this post has been floating around in my mind and I'm guessing the only way to get rid of it is to write it and post it. I'm warning  you though, if you like this post and decide to follow me - I'll mainly throw patterns, sketches and a million dollars worth of dirt at you (not literally).

Let me start with briefly describing my Steemit adventure so far! I joined the platform somewhere during the first week of June. Leading up to this I had started investing in cryptocurrency in May and had some encouraging results with buying Ethereum before the price at least tripled and on good days has quadrupled. It was exciting to watch it happen but I also realised that I was way too late, only being able to comfortably buy a few Ethereum and leaving it at that. I started to look for other opportunities beside Bitcoin and Ethereum where I hadn't missed the boat yet. But with so many coins around, it all seemed a bit of a gamble. Until I found Steemit.

I remember having a conversation with my investment partner where I pitched Reddcoin (Reddcoin enables you to tip on existing social media platforms through a Chrome extension), explaining the concept and referring to it as the future of blogging. Little did I know that the future was already here and it was called Steemit. Watching more and more cryptocurrency videos I came across Steemit several times but it took another hour and a half video of @jerrybanfield to get me to sign up. 

By that time I had watched enough cryptocurrency videos to trust that with this video if nothing else Jerry himself singlehandedly would be able to gain enough traction to increase the price of Steem significantly and do a great job in promoting Steemit as a platform. Thanks for convincing me to join, Jerry! 

Soon after joining I realised that there were many more in the Steemit community that were willing to help new joiners and committed to making Steemit the new number one social media platform. After sniffing around a bit on the platform I mustered up enough courage and started writing my first posts. I knew I probably wouldn't get many rewards for my posts, but to be able to start something from the bottom you need to do one crucial thing: to actually start! And so I did and so I encountered what many excited new joiners encounter after putting up their first few posts: crickets. The engagement I did get I was unable to reward as with my initial investment of a little over a 100 Steem power my vote was worth next to nothing making voting for comments that were left at my posts pointless. I still did it anyway, just as a gesture of appreciation. Still now post hard fork 19 when my vote is actually worth something (a whopping dozen cents!) I strongly believe in encouraging and rewarding meaningful comments by upvoting them. But with the limited 100% votes we enjoy after hard fork 19, this is becoming increasingly challenging in combination with the curation I'd like to keep up as well. 

I think this is where many users struggle on Steemit right now, as I've noticed that much fewer comments seem to get upvoted which brings me to the title of this post: have I lost my bread and butter on Steemit? See, after joining Steemit, I realised that unlike many other aspects of mainstream social media platforms in one aspect it is the same: you need a following! So I started to mainly focus on reading, commenting and rewarding other peoples posts. I kept putting out my own posts bit by bit as well, as I wanted people that did visit my profile to be able to get an idea of who I am and what I'm about, but I wasn't expecting to make a lot from it. But I did start to make money, a little here and a little there, however it wasn't from posting - it was from commenting! The added benefit of reading posts and leaving relevant and thoughtful comments was that it started to make up around 80-90% of my rewards. It gave me hope: I can read, I can be nice and a percentage of people value this enough or have the means to reward my being able to read and be nice. I saw a way to be on Steemit, getting to know and contribute to the community and making a little bit of money that I could use to power up and slowly increase my influence. That was until hard fork 19 happened. 

Yes, after hard fork 19 my vote was suddenly worth something.
Yes, after hard fork 19 my post value did go up from cents to dollars in most cases.
Yes, after hard fork 19 all seemed well in the world again!

However a few days in and I'm still reading, commenting and rewarding other peoples posts, but not only do I have to vote more wisely, I also seem to not receive much for commenting any more. I'm pretty sure I'm still commenting at the same rate with the same relevancy, but maybe it was just the pre-hard fork buzz that made people reward a lot more generously. 

I've screenshotted some data from the amazing steem.supply by @dragosroua where you can clearly see that my rewards have gone down in the past few days.

The reason it seems that my post and comment payouts are balanced is because the same @jerrybanfield that made me join, recently upvoted my post about a million dollars worth of dirt, that I also mentioned earlier, during his amazingly generous live upvoting session where he gave away $1600 worth of rewards to his following and people that have helped him on the platform. But apart from the rewards I received from this post and my introductory post the majority of my rewards have come from commenting.

                    

Anyway, I will always remain reading, being nice and commenting whether or not I get rewarded for it, I was just excited that it seemed I had found a way to make some money on Steemit with limited Steem power and a very small following. Luckily there are plenty of more experienced members of the community here to offer their advice and projects like @minnowsupport to help us along the way. We'll get there eventually, us minnows :-)