Lessons. Learned. 💭 | A one month review: Recommended Steemians/projects and how not to annoy whales as a new user. 🤔

introduction

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As a medical student from Amsterdam that takes photographs of strangers and curiosities, I decided to join Steemit a month ago. 🇳🇱📷
I encountered what felt like an intellectual jackpot. Steemit has a way more advanced infrastructure than I could ever have imaged. The userbase, and therefore also a possible new audience, felt a lot more elaborate and heterogeneous than I had encountered on Instagram in two years. Sadly I didn't hear about Steemit sooner. Instagram therefore, was the platform I published all my work on, something I do regret. 🙄 The only thing to come out of that endeavor was a decent following of 14k, but never a constructive piece of feedback, discussion or enough money to cover expenses. 😬 >more info<

Today I woke up with the strong urge write about Steemit though.I will be discussing the following:

• Steemit, my experience so far. The community and how the core of its intriguing users are going beyond my expectations.
• Some behavioral guidelines for new users are provided, if you are new, stay with me. You will piss off a lot less powerful people.
• The potential for great projects to come into existence, and what is already out there.
• I also want to make a better introduction of myself now that I understand the platform better.

Since my last (and first ever) writen post was received with 50x more love than all my previous art posts, I thought to do some writing again. Below I am doing my utter best to give back what I was so lucky to learn from some lovely dolphins and whales.😘

Today I will 100% ignore the magnificent benefits of Steem over other cryptos. Steemit (the social media) is only possible because of these differentiating fundamentals and one should not only care about the looks and feels of the outermost layer of this great machinery, being exactly what you are reading now.

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The first 4 weeks

It seems only the most likable and smartest people were allowed to join Steemit at first. This must be true since the people I have spoken with that are here for more than a year are, by far, the most intriguing folks I got to have conversations with online ever since I opened up my first web browser on windows 95. There have been many communities in which I was active but I did not ever found a userbase this heterogeneous and helpful.😎

I’ve just met the most amazing folks Amongst them, is a space agency worker, a writer that before 21 already published 2 books, a loving father of 3 with sick photography skills, somebody who is now devoting so much time helping others on steemit that he/she literally had to take some time off. I've met a climbing and diving fanatic that now organizes photo contests, a group of people getting the best science posts to be greatly promoted, and so on.

A list will be provided at the bottom (use middle mouse to open these in a new tab)

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Steemit is not only about positivity

Since steemit is decentralized there are no strict rules you have to follow. (Although one clearly should). When new users are rushing into our ecosystem with nothing but $$$ in their eyes, things start to derail.
News articles, mentioning steemit, always feel the need to overstate how easy it is for the average person to earn some dough.

There is no need to call out on these articles since news mostly is nothing but exaggerated binary thinking and overstatements, that is worthy of an independent post altogether.

These falsely promising headlines do profoundly irritate me, since it leads to growing numbers of new "I WANT MONEY AND I WANT IT KNOW" folks ("retards" in short) floating into the ecosystem. What happens next is troublesome for so many reasons. The behavior of a "retard" could be summarized with:

I saw $$$, therefore I don't have a clue what the fuck I just became an active member of. The only thought passing my, now obsessed, brain was "why the heck did they choose Steemit as the name..". After this extremely elaborate study about an already established platform, I will now for the lack of knowledge and without true intent, show behavior that will ruin the platform piece by piece. I will copy content from the web, pretend that it's mine, and spam it on my account. Now my master plan has finished and I, the retard, will become a millionaire within a week.
If I am a rich retard, I am also blindly putting in money since I have read on more than one website that Cryptocurrency is booming right now, That means I have to invest in NOW. Of course I did not read anything about this before doing so. The graph went up right?! that's enough information for me!
The next day I see that my posts are not at all liked. Not that it was my content in the first place. Now since I am a human being that should receive love an appreciation for however little effort I try to put into the things I do on social media, I am pissed, Pissed and angry. Up next I will do something that even the most sacred and helpful of the community will directly annoy if it's not my own retarded retard behavior it will be the sum of all of us retards. I am now going to spam each and every one of these settled users on chat or discord and when they tell me I should do some actual reading myself, I will just repeat the question over and over again. That's just me, I am used to social media platforms where I do not have to put in real effort in order to receive some likes.

The "retards" spamming their post-links or standardized copy-paste "great post" comment underneath the hard work of established Steemians is even more destructive. This behavior will eventually lead to nothing but discomfort in the ecosystem. Yes they will be downvoted, and yes folks trying to make it here on steemit, without willing to work hard for it, will Parrish. 🤐The thing is though, that there are A LOT of retards on this planet, and I cant see a world in which Steemit sentiment (and also price) would not be negatively affected by this behavior eventually.😮

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Luckily, there is no need to re-invent the wheel on how to behave

As a new Steemian I have learned that there is no need to try, fail, and learn with all aspects of Steemit. A lot of people have written great pieces on how to behave and what to do on Steemit (for example, @sykochica has you covered)😗

Here are some of my very simple guidelines:

• People want to receive genuine feedback on whatever they decide to coin publish-worthy. You need to be lucky enough to be born curious about other peoples thoughts and behavior and show it accordingly. Be honest, don't be a ass, nor don't try to kiss one.
• If the above is not true for you, you either need to be to be an insanely skilled writer/artist/musician etc. Or have the time (and therefore already money) to built up such skills in order to impress people with your cutting-edge skills
• You are not going to make any money the first weeks unless you are a natural that happens to get everything right the first time.
• Honestly you should not even care about money for a long time. Being stuck in the never-ending urge to want more and more of it, keeps you from seeing the true potential of Steemit. Which is not money, but a decentralized form of crowd-sourcing? Go, meditate, and come back with a new Steemit project we can all benefit from
• Don't think to much. Try, fail, learn, try again. Also, don't care to much what strangers think of you. But do ask feedback from the ones who do know you?

Become familiar with these simple guidelines and show appropriate behavior accordingly. Figure things out for yourself by doing research of Steemit's past. Get to know both the social environment and the mechanics on which it is built (the blockchain and the economics behind Steem in particular)

Let's stop Steemit retardism🛑
If we cant find ways to learn freshman how to behave, there must come a great search in order to be clever about new retards on the system. (I will write about this in a later post)

You do not want to be a retard. Learn how to behave, try to fit in. Only after some weeks, try to touch the borders of your comfort zone. Also try to look futher on what is missing on Steemit, why not try to innovate?! See if there is more to be explored.

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Steemians

Steemians come in all shapes and forms, for now, I think the long lasting users are the smartest, most creative and nicest folks around here, and they should be approached accordingly, with some respect that is.
And I am talking about them when I am saying that there are a lot of people showing each other genuine appreciation for their mutual hard work. 👍When there are disagreement there is room for a decent adult discussion (SteemSTEM for both academic and leisure interactions. And the various discussions I had with total strangers on Steemit chat)
As a consequence of all this user interaction between the skilled users that are amongst us, there are some serious collaborations already taking place. I feel Steemit is heading in the right direction generally speaking and I will be providing proof of that shortly.👌

The community is making Steemit

Let me say that again, It is us that is actually pulling the triggers on how things will look like in the future. Whereas it used to be that we all had to do exactly what the CEO’s of the social media companies wanted us to do. In short: make them money. On Steemit anything is possible, since the users power its wheelhouse, not the CEO's Here are some examples:

• Want to create a new kind of Instagram based on the same blockchain? SteepShot, there you have it.
• Thinking to provide a better way to view your steemit feed? Whoop buys.org just dropped from the sky.
• Want to create a lottery what actually has a quite decent chance of actually being won: There you go.
• Think about learning how to do photo editing? @Cryptogee has you covered for that.
• Have some great stuff you want to sell? There is even a Steemit "Ebay" called @steembay
• want to have more info on your steemit account? how about the chrome extensions and websites purely built to view your latest steem statistics
• And there is also a ton of great artists that provide relaxing "sit back and enjoy" content on here as well. @velvimir has that all worked out with his awesome artworks. Also for a better model photographer than I am visit @axeman

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As for me since I started 4 weeks ago,

I choose to focus my time and effort on the Steemians who’s personality I could at least somewhat sense through reading their posts (and how they reacted to specific comments). Trying to do so is both fun and extremely important here. Empty gestures are not going to get you anywhere on Steemit. That is what other platforms are built from. (Instagram)

I must have been extremely lucky that my natural way of communicating with people in real life worked also on this platform. all people I decided to talk to respond back to me with great enthusiasm. Not one exception. This in turn gave me more energy! 💥
Being a medical intern does entail having to spend 11 hours a day in the hospital without getting a salary for the past 4 and coming 3 years.This means that time management is essential for me. People that truly intrigued me got my natural curiosity fired at them. Showing them my enthusiasm and appreciation for the community enabling me in something iI long sought after: Have a chance to get my art and thoughts to pay for my medical school.
Things just started rolling from there on.

I tried to actually putting myself to the test by:

• Writing; as said before this is only my second written piece ever. I am as dyslectic as you will find them. So this, in a non-native language, makes me super nervous actually releasing it.
• Videos; I have both made and uploaded my first ever video tutorial to steemit!
• Cooking up Innovative concepts and Ideas for the steemit community. Some have to do with photography, some with medicine.

I am now trying to find people with technical skills (python mostly) that would be up for collaborations. Since I feel like there is so much more missing still. If you do want to contact me, dont hassitate. >thi-js on steemit.chat< 🤓 👍

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The past 4 weeks have been quite the rollercoaster ride for me personally.. I won some photo contests, got to have the most interesting conversations I ever had with 100% strangers.(And I have had a ton of those being a portrait photographer with models I don't know)And then there is this:

I even got myself a mom and dad!.

Yep, I got adopted by the kind @suesa. Visit her and read her stories. you won't regret it. the only thing that sucks is that you will be late for whatever appointment you have up next.

And remember this is just my little personal experience. All I can say is that this is just the beginning of whatever steemit will be like in a year from now.

I did not talk about numbers and $$$ in this post. since I feel that is already the way to much over-represented here on Steemit. I will only say this: Since you are reading this, you probably got on board at the right time. Congratulations on that.

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I recommended middle mouse clicking all of the below Steemians!

Steemians I love
@suesa
@photocontests
@fotomindo
@velimir
@apsu
@juliank
@shortcut
@pollux.one
@steemSTEM
@sykochica
@axeman
@lemouth
@fredrikaa
@pharesim
@reggaemuffin
@skypilot
@cryptogee
@justtryme90
@trumpman

UPDATE (17-1):Well, this was not the response I would even dream of actually receiving once in my steemit life ever. I wanted to openly thank everyone for taking their time to respond with this openheartedness. I received a lot of good feedback! Also some great people (25 or so) that were willing to prove my point that people dont read the articles and post spam comments 2 (see them (down-voted) way below). I tried to comment on each and every one of you but with over 150 comments that got to be quite a day job. Once again, I hope this did help you some bit in getting know what to do, and what not to do on here. My appreciation for all this exposure is gigantic. Will use the money that this post makes to further power-up and maybe try to do some interesting ideas, about which you will hear later. (This post alone got me 50 followers more). Back to the original post:

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As always thanks for your time, I hope you enjoyed this. Feedback is always appreciated!

"Emotions are there to be expressed, not to be suppressed and bottled up. I do photography in order to take my mind away from the dilemma's I encounter during my medical internships."

Thi_js. Out.

Up-vote, re-steem and follow ♥