Not many of us Remember the Early Days.
It's been one Hell of a ride!

A few brief thoughts before I get into the Memories.

When I joined Steemit in July 2016 (thanks to @winstonwolfe), I had no idea what I was really jumping into! I'd heard of Bitcoin, but never actually done anything with it. I had written before, but that had been at least a decade before. I've never been a big user of social media and really not that social in general.

BUT...

Man did that change!! I was thrilled to make my first penny, first dime, first dollar! My introduction post response was just flat mind blowing to me...and not just because of the payout!

I'm not sure how many of you know this about me...I am transgender. I couldn't EVER imagine myself sharing anything as personal as this on the general internet since most the time you'd get the trolls and all around nasty comments to deal with. But after spending some time on Steemit, I began to feel comfortable with my fellow Steemians and decided to put myself out there. Especially once I got to meet and start talking with the amazing Mr @WilliamBanks!!

The number of supportive responses blew me away and pretty much solidified my addiction to this platform. Yes, the money is a part of the motivation people have about this place...but it's The People that truly make it what it is (both good and bad.) So many of us became accustomed to a photo-shopped world and happy go lucky Fakebook profile where everything was unicorns and rainbows.

While I won't go so far as saying that Steemit completely brings out our REAL selves, it's a hell of a lot closer than anything else I've participated in!

A Few Quick Thank Yous!

Now while as an entire community we've had our ups and downs, Steemit itself has continued! Obviously those a part of Steemit Inc. and their development team have played a role is getting us here into 2018 (now with a Steem price I hadn't expected to see quite this early.) SO much of what we've become is due to the fantastic members in our society. So as a final delay before my Steemit memories I wanted to give a HUGE Thank You so some of those that have helped to get us where we are today! (I'm sorry it's impossible to include everybody.)

Many of the people listed below donated their time, effort and opportunity cost solely for the betterment of our community. Remember they could have been making posts or something instead to be earning more money! But instead...they wanted to help others.

The 3rd party developers whose projects I've used and recommended countless times!

@good-karma with Steemit's first ESteem Mobile App

@Jesta with Steemstats, Steemdb, and the Vessel Desktop Steemit Walle!

@firepower and @riverhead with their work keeping Steemit.Chat going no matter how many users it gets!

The various Minnow and Newbie Helper Groups

@Steemprentice with myself, @Gonzo, @VirtualGrowth, @Kryptic and countless other mentors!

Minnows Unite group by @Cryptohustlin who brought so many people together to help them grow!

The official No Nonsense Steemit Guide brought to us by @Donkeypong, @KevinWong, @Stellabelle, @Cryptoctopus and @Steemship

To the ones you know today like the @MinnowSupport project and PAL Network with the help of @Aggroed, @Ausbitbank, @TeamSteem, @SirCork and many many others.

Finally on to the Memories!

In the beginning...

Like most of you I dropped in here and had pretty much no idea what was going on. I see my blog, these strange currencies in my wallet, all these blogs about cryptocurrency, and markdown formatting?!?! Hah!

I watched the trending pages seeing posts with absolutely mind blowing payouts! One of the most Iconic and still burned in my brain belonging to @guerrint for her Make-up Tutorial that had a payout over $30,000 US! Heck, the top comment on it earned almost $1,000!

This did lead to some makeup tutorial followups, with one of my favorites being @reneenouveau's Drunk Makeup Tutorial.

That's how it it was back then. The posts that got the votes from the high Steem Power holders were way up there with thousands of dollars! So much of the game for the newbie like me was trying to get their attention for that rare but lucrative vote.

Now, please don't take any of this as complaining...it's just what it was.

See in July of 2016, we didn't have things like:

• The vote slider bar: Meaning votes were all at 100%!
• Followers/Feed: There wasn't anything on the actual Steemit UI to see your followers or their posts. Just a 'Follow' button. Though Steemstats did give a feed, though I didn't know it at the time.
• Uploading Images: This meant that everyone HAD to upload their images to image hosting sites (like imgur, tinypic, etc) and then copy over the direct link. This doesn't sound like a huge deal...until you try to teach it to god knows how many people that have never done anything like it before!
• Curation Guilds: We can easily take curation guilds or groups for granted nowadays. But back then, this again meant you had to somehow get on the radar of a whale if you wanted some meaningful payouts. @Curie was the first one that focused on finding good posts by smaller users to begin getting votes spread around.
• Steem Power Delegation: This meant that the only way to spread around Steem Power was to actually buy it, sell it, or possibly make a separate account to send it to. This mechanic has been a huge help in getting the payouts spread around to more people. While other things had effect, this is one of the reasons we're not seeing the $30k posts anymore and more niche things are able to be 'curated.'

I know many users think they they have it hard now, making $0.50 or $1 US on their posts. But back then, there were many users, like myself that struggled to get a $0.05 or $0.10 most the time. But every once in a while you'd hit that jackpot.

Memorable Posts and Projects

@Teamsteem hangout with @Fyrstikken and @Stellabelle

One post that I will never forget was by one of my favorite Steemians @TeamSteem. It was a Google Hangout/Podcast of himself with the famous @Stellabelle and @Fyrstikken. While in all honesty, I was so new I didn't fully understand or retain everything...THIS is led to the creation @SteemitTalk Podcast (which I'll discuss shortly.) We also have to commemorate the famous artwork of @Klye that was used for the post and so many other places throughout Steemit!

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Steemit Talk Podcast

As many of you know, when you are first getting into Steemit, it pretty much dominates any conversation. One day while going on and on about Steemit with @WinstonWolfe, @TeamSteem's hangout came up and it was suggested that we should try recording our talk. So we went into Winston's office, spoke into an old iPhone for about 20 minutes, and the first @SteemitTalk podcast was born.

Now...I wouldn't recommend listening to this pilot episode. To this day it's hard for me to listen to, but it was a start. A week later we were joined by @giftedgaia, had some phones tied to microphone stands and we make episode 2, which was better.

Over time we used our payouts to improve our production quality, getting some decent microphones, another mixer so we could include Discord users in the conversation (and have remote guests), etc. In the end we ran for just over a year, with our final episode being with @timcliff in July 2017. Nothing bad happened, nor any sort of falling out...but over time we had all needed to focus more on life and 'adulting' which make giving up most a Saturday and all the prep time to do it 'right' very difficult. So it just sort of faded away.

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@Stellabelle's Secret Writer Service

The posts that came out of this series would emotionally barrel you over! The idea was that people could submit stories that they'd would never publically tell, to @Stellabelle, who then worked them into a written form and posted them so the person it came from could remain anonymous.. They could range from titles like I Wish I'd Never Been Born to The F&%#}ed Up Letter I Got From My Dad. It's impossible for me to do these justice with a basic description, you'll just have to Google them (@stellabelle secret writer) and read some of them for yourself!

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@Fyrstikken's Roger and Snore Cartoons, the Shitcoin Song and the Early Days of @Steemspeak.

Some days you just need that geeky sort of laugh with some rather intelligent humor. Being new to the cryptosphere, things like his Roger and Snore cartoons did get me some laughs. It was also one of the first occurrences where someone told me they'd upvote any real comment on the posts! Again..I know this was small money, but it was quite meaningful to me at the time!

When I was really in a mood, I could turn to his Shitcoin song (which I understand a LOT better now!)

What really started me down the trading path was once I started hanging out in his @steemspeak channel, which back then was on Teamspeak instead of Discord like it is now.

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And of course, Beyond Bitcoin Podcasts by @officialfuzzy!

Originally I was invited in with @VirtualGrowth to talk about the @Steemprentice mentor group we worked with, ideally to get the work out and possibly get some volunteers, backing, etc. Even though I didn't get to spend a lot of time there (I'm sooo not a morning person), I picked up so much seeing how @officialfuzzy went about things. I saw him trying to help out existing and new projects, fund various projects of his own that seemed way more daunting than something I'd try...yet was always that easy going and fun to talk to guy.

One thing he always preached to me was to "Become a Whale Myself!" Now, I know I'm not huge compared to many people here. But considering I knew nothing when I started on Steemit and put in no money myself...I'm amazed with where I've gotten.

@KevinWong's suggestion of using Crypto to Build a Retirement Account

I feel horrible that I wasn't able to track down the post from @kevinwong that nudged me towards some long term views of what cryptocurrency could do for me. But this list wouldn't be complete without at least bringing it up. The general idea was that if you took just a little of your Steemit earnings and put them into buying some cheap coins for a project you though had long term potential, it could set you financially for a long time if you guessed right.

Now I know I'm not doing this justice and while I have put smaller amounts into some projects yet to take off, I've still kept this long term view on choosing what to keep for longer periods of time. Being the type that doesn't like taking huge risks, I did find what worked for me in cryptotrading and have been lucky enough to have done pretty well! I'm sure his response will be that "I was the one who did it," I still have to pay homage that provided that first spark!

Problems and Disagreements

I wanted to end with some of the issues we've encountered and overcome on this platform because we are ALWAYS going to have the next hurdle we have to cross as a community. Rather that focus on the specifics of these historical issues, I'd rather it provide you some HOPE looking into the future knowing just some of the hardships we've already dealt with and still survived.

The early difficulty of getting votes

Like I mentioned earlier on, there were way fewer votes to go around (since there was no slider bar) and Steem Power was way more consolidated that it is now. This meant that if you didn't happen to get a whale vote, you got pretty much next to nothing on your payout. On top of this, was the call that low quality posts would get paid well...but again, those few whales could only fully read so much in a day. Hence voting bots that automatically voted for specific people, on every post.

While we're never going to have a perfect system, this did bring about the formation of the first curation guilds @Curie and Steem Guilde. A major thing I want to point out here is that a lot of the Steem Power put towards these projects, meant that whales were sacrificing their 'bottom line' to do something for the good for the whole community. Yes, there were their own issues that came out at times...but this marked a major time I saw huge users sacrificing for our society.

The @Asshole Account

The @Asshole account was said to have been a social experiment, when it basically went around and flagged as many posts as it could. Even though it didn't have very high Steem Power, it did cause new or smaller users post's to get hidden, on top of the turmoil caused by so many people 'freaking out' that their post got flagged.

Eventually it ended, especially with the help of @anyx putting together an 'angel' account that would upvote anything it flagged. Having working so closely with newbies at the time, it was something that had to be dealt with. The other takeaway was that most users became desensitized to getting flagged, so long as it didn't effect their payout.

I know I could bring up other issues from back then, but I really don't see the benefit of rehashing most of them.

Final Thoughts

This place is unique, not only for the technology and as a place to onboard people into crypto (though cryptokitties is doing the same now)...it gives us a chance to build something to foster learning, growth, discussion and form a society that ideally can figure out how to prosper on it's own. There are so many things in our day to day lives that we depend on others to do or provide for us. But this is a perfect opportunity to find what YOU can bring to the table and share with others!

If you can't think of something now, just keep learning! Find what interests you, ask good questions, put forth the effort to grow into a better version of you! Steemit has collected techies, economists, philosophers, artists, moms, dads, kids, entertainers, homesteaders, the list just goes on and on! Find what mark YOU can make...how YOU can help...how YOU can contribute! I know it's cheesy to hear, especially when we're surrounded by greed...but be Better than that! Rise above it and be a part of finding the Win/Win solutions that do exist!

Always remember that the end goal isn't to be Perfect...but instead to be Better!!

Image Sources:
Reflection
Good, Bad, Future
Hands
Thank You
Better Quote