My first impressions of Steemit

As I wrote in the previous, introductory, post, I am a complete newbie in the world of cryptocurrencies. I am also one can say a newbie in the area of online content publishing despite being online for more than 20 years now. And yes, I am also - OLD. I am no millennial and no digital native. I can still safely say that most of my life I lived without the internet connection. This changes though and obviously the older I get the less relative time I can count for the happy wireless days of my youth.

But what it means is that I do not consider the internet or in particular the social media my natural environment. I am a tourist here, a spectator of sorts. A flaneur as the French would have it. So let me delve into a few first impressions of Steemit after a couple of days of sightseeing.

It's really huge!

The first thing that struck me was how big the place actually is. I have been constantly exploring the site, clicking on many of the links and I was surprised at the depth of the site. Initially I thought these were just a bunch of people creating content here but now I see how huge the place is. Incidentally an estimation of the number of Steemit users has just been published here. Spoilers: Steemit has reached 1 mln users.

It's not all about content

True, you could just hit the keys on your keyboard and produce publishable content. But it seems Steemit is so much more than a personal blog. The learning curve is steep and I claim I am nowhere near the first 1/3 of knowledge yet. I am slowly learning about the upvotes and curating but having been hit with three different currencies (Steem, Steem Power and Steem Dollar) seems a bit cruel.

You need to find your niche

It seems to me that the best road to success is to find a niche and publish good quality content. But what I see a lot around here is that a lot of comments are quite perfunctory or from bots altogether. So I guess it's best to find a group of people with whom you have something in common and stick to them... otherwise the big fish will eat you in no time.

There are popular and unpopular topics

As everywhere else, Steemit has its own topical favourites and its own pariahs. I have found a few tags that are really not very popular and do not get upvoted much but are of interest to me (one such tag would be #haiku, another #esperanto or #philosophy, #literature, #poetry) and I would like to find or build a community around them.

The money is where...?

The whole idea of Steem as cryptocurrency is way above my head now. Despite reading upon it (e.g. here) I still find it hard to believe there is real (ain't that an oxymoron!) money behind the scenes here. I am treating this platform as an experiment now and definitely a challenge for myself to wrap my head around the cryptocurrencies.

What's in it for me?

Well, that I do not know yet. I feel this is an interesting place to be. I feel challenged to understand it and would like to know more about the whole economy of crypto money and how it connects with creative effort and spirit. I also wish to find content that is valuable and worth reading and be sure that it gets rewarded, even if it's in virtual money ;-).

P.S. If you know a way to follow tags - please let me know; I'd like to follow some topics alongside people and cannot for the world figure out how...