Reflections on @just2random leaving steemit

Today I found out that Team Australia member and Random Drinks organiser @just2random is leaving steemit, at least for a while.

@aghunter has already written an excellent article: just2random-is-leaving-steemit-and-this-is-a-real-problem which I'm going to try not to overlap with too much - although I did find myself coming to the same conclusions.

After finding out @just2random was leaving I reflected on my interactions with him and also my own experiences with Steemit. In his post he said that the effort he was putting in wasn't lining up to the rewards he was getting. From what I have observed (online, on discord, and at meetups) he has been working hard on Steemit related things. He was posting daily and produced the steemaustralia.com website. He really wanted to do more recruitment/outreach to new members too.

Although I have to constantly remind my students that they aren't just graded on effort, in this case @just2random was doing the right things - networking, engaging with the community, producing good content. I think his hope was that Steemit would become his full-time gig in some capacity and that didn't happen and didn't look like it was going to happen any time soon. Some of the issues are ones that face us all:

• The feed is terrible - you can produce amazing content and there is a good chance your followers will never see it (and even less chance for non-followers). I didn't even see @just2random's post about leaving, I only found out about it on discord.
• The value of Steem and SBD are falling again. This means even if you are getting votes this is worth far less real money than it was in those happy days of December and early January.
• Building a following is hard (@aghunter talks more about this)- in all forms of social media we see the viral success stories but these are a very lucky and select few. Coming back to point 1, with crappy filters and feeds your amazing content is easily lost in a sea of spam.
• You need to be lucky - if you don't already have a following from elsewhere and/or a friend who happens to have a huge SP account to give you big votes - you can slog for many months and still be only getting a couple of dollars.

So how do I relate this to my own experience? The first question to ask is whether you would still write the content/post the videos if you weren't getting rewards. I have liked how Steemit got me in to a regular writing practice. I'm not sure I would do quite as much for absolutely zero $ but for me it is not just about the money. The first time I got a big @dtube vote on a video (which sadly doesn't seem to ever happen now) and SBD was over $10US maybe I entertained the idea of Steemit being a real income source but this seems less likely for the foreseeable future. I also started running Meetups and have really enjoyed meeting so many super-interesting people. As @just2random said on the steemaustralia website, "come for the rewards, stay for the community". This is something that has happened for me but perhaps was not quite a strong enough pull for him.

Of course sometimes a break can do you good. For all we know we might see him back in month more enthused than ever.

Source: https://www.pexels.com/photo/cash-coins-money-pattern-259165/