Open letter to the Steem community - A year on the blockchain.

Hi everyone,

I am one year on Steemit! Well, I am on #steempeak these days, but hey, it is still the same chain.. Time has flown, a year has gone by and I would have never expected that it would have such a big influence on my life. I am even considering going to @steemfest.

It all started with me discovering crypto thanks to a friend of mine and that was a huge shock to my system. My mind was (and still is) blown by the endless possibilities and since I was spending quite a lot of time on social media for our hostel on wheels project it wandered straight into the direction of a social media app based on the blockchain. After a short search on the web I found out that there was already such a thing and it was called Steemit.

I didn't take me long to sign up and create my first post (which was kind of horrible if I think about it now). However, I dug deeper in the Steem ecosystem and found out quite a lot about it and decided to start writing more meaningful content. A couple of weeks later I got noticed by @geekgirl and she even wrote me an email asking if I wasn't impersonating someone else and if not, she would be able to help me start out on this platform. I had neve heard of the @curie project, but suddenly I got a substantial upvote and quite some genuine interaction on my post. I said to myself, this is it, this place is home.

And so, I stayed and started writing more content and trying to find out even more about how this platform works. After I while I spotted that most posts in the trending page got huge upvotes by people called buildawhale etc, which I found weird and since anything is open on this platform it wasn't hard to figure out that these accounts weren't actual people, but bots and you could pay those bots to get a part of their upvote. That's when I decided to invest some money into the system by writing content and upvoting these posts through some bots in the hope of finding a bigger audience and that worked quite well, I wrote a couple of posts and got more than a hundred comments on it. It even got my excited to create a special account that would try to highlight the kindness of humans @humankindness and delegated 500SP to it, because in my travels (which is something I do for a living) I have met countless people who are really kind and friendly. This account was going to be my way to give back to the community. I might have stop this side-project, because there is no interaction whatsoever going on it, sadly.

However, the moment I started using bots and smartsteem, upvotes from some curation trails stopped (and because of that it seems like I fell of the radar of a part of Steemit) and up till today I have no idea if this was the right strategy to invest, but that is what I did. In a way I feel sad about this, because all I wanted was to commit to this community and create meaningful content. Everyone is saying SMT's is going to change a lot and I really hope so, because if not, that might trigger me to pull away from this chain, because for now creating content on this platform is just to damn hard and not rewarding enough in terms of interaction and ease of finding the right community.

Anyway, at the moment it is what it is and it is time to move on. I still believe in the potential this chain has, so I am sticking around and getting involved in projects that I really like and deserve to grow (in my eyes sort of pre SMT's) and I keep talking to people on discord, where the real interaction is.

I really like the fact that you can support projects on the chain and in my humble opinion these are the most important ones at the moment. I have invested/delegated to each of them.

1. @steemmonsters
   Impossible not to have heard of this one if your are at all serious about the Steem blockchain. I am quite invested in this card game and will write an elaborate post about it in the coming week. They are currently running a kickstarter and it has the potential to change the whole chain.
2. @actifit
   I have become an ambassador for this app that pays you to be active, because that is something I really relate to in my daily life when I guide people on hikes or skitours. People need to be more active.
3. @steemhunt
   I love discovering what creative minds come up with in this world and Steemhunt is such a good place to do that. Really impressed by them!
4. @air-clinic
   A healthcare platform and social media that pays you money for living a healthy life. Their grand aim is to promote affordable and accessible Medicare worldwide. This is huge!
5. @steem-ua
   Fairly new, but really promising! It is all about replacing the Current Steem Reputation Score System.

As a last thing I wanted to say is that Steem is a place where anyone can find their way, you just have to look around and see what you relate to the most.

Cheers everyone!

Thanks for being around, dear Steem!

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