How I Improved My Steemit Viewing Experience

I am not going to pretend that making money is not an aspect of Steemit; but it that is the only reason you are here; you are missing out. You might not always understand this by looking at the trending topics on the popular tags, but Steemit is nuturing some amazing creativity and innovation. People I have talked to who are new to Steemit are often uninspired by the work they find right off; so I thought I would make a post to help people understand.

What is happening is real; creativity is being nurtured and exploding; and I keep hearing people talk about the crap content instead. What I am trying to explain to people is; the content is amazing!

For example; there are a lot of emmerging, underappreciated and world class artists now posting on steemit. They are joining the contests, teaching each other and being inspired themselves to create more work; and these artists are getting funds. That might sound indelicate to say; but more money means more art supplies, more time to make work; even more coffees at a favorite cafe to sketch at. Some artists are even going full time on steemit; and putting a lot of hard work into building a community on here as well as their art. Heck, I still have to work; but this place pays for my exhibition studio downtown..I am forever indepted to steemit for it!

Just think about this; more great minds spent, not just doing art; but thinking, developing projects, going on travels around the world and truly learning and teaching about other cultures. There is a maelstorm of greatness happening on Steemit that more people need to know about; but they don't.

There are more tools being developed for both viewing and contributing to Steemit, and I hear curie and others have projects in the works to help people find good content and a sense of community. In the interim I thought I would share, for newbies and others, how I have worked out an inspiring experience for myself, so perhaps they might understand how they can find good content to suit their interests.

First off, tags were key for me starting out. Some tags I have to type in manually at the top; like the # surreal and "Surrealism" tags. (My favorites for truly amazing images) Lesser known tags are often less populated by crap as well. I also like the illustration, painting, drawing, landscape and adventure tags. Other tags I like that are fairly popular; like # travel, # photography # slothicorn # contests and # colorchallenge tags. Yes there will be some of what you might consider crap voting itself up in there, but once you start finding and following artists and the great work they resteem you will slowly find your feed filling up with greatness.

I also found some great art, not to mention a fun community; joining and viewing the work in many of the contests. For art there was the # arttrail # artstyleart and now the # artexplosion contests; and the # collorchallenge is always going. @opheliafu and @agneslaczo currently have fun weekly contests going as well. I followed so many great artists that I found in the tags for the contests and challenges. If art is not your thing, don't worry, check the # contest tag you will find contests for everything from app developement to music to charity work.

I also found a lot of great work from viewing posts by high profile curators. There is some amazing talent that can be seen in posts by curie , ocd and juliakponsford with the later focusing on amazing new Steemit artists. These are just some examples of great steemians that put work into finding good content to upvote; it might not all be to your liking but they are a great resource.

(Is it better to @ people or just link to there blogs; inquiring Twirbles want to know)

Then I looked into what the great artists, curators and others I followed liked. You can see what they resteem or talk to them in chat in places like MSP Waves which often has curation streams and art shows and hosts great steemit musicians. They often have networks of artist that they are involved with like the slothicorn community or the visionary artists network.

The colder thing you can do; which I try to avoid but have to do sometimes; is clean out your feed. I followed too many people in the beggining; all that followed me, and this hurt my experience on here. I fell out of sync with a lot of artists I was enjoying due to the business of my feed, and I started to feel uninspired by steemit as well.
I did eventually come to a compromise with myself. I decided to unfollow obvious spammers shitposters and plagerizers, but instead of unfollowing a lot of others, I decided to just follow more steemians instead. (I found some people I had unfollowed and muted by accident, not sure how that happened)

Ok this was my first "Twirble's Thoughts" episode. If anyone has any other suggestions or thoughts please comment, and stay tuned for more of my disjointed ramblings.