My Experience on @smartsteeam and Should You Even Consider it?

I have been on Steemit about two months or so and I can't say I have been the most active of users. I have noticed that there are endless opportunities in everything you can imagine. I have seen dMania, dTube and posts about pretty much everything you can imagine. As of recently I didn't have enough free time to explore more but one thing I found is @smartsteem. I wasn't very fond to the idea of bots and paying your way through because I have seen posts with one picture and a single sentence earning more then a post I have spent so much time working on. This was not just a case with me, I have seen many users give their all to create quality content and then remain unseen and at a same level as spam posts. Then one day, while I was reading through some posts, I have seen someone recommending smartsteem. I must admit I was skeptical at first but decided to check it out.

I just want to say at the beginning that this is not a guide to @smartsteem! You can find many of them already done with a smartsteem tag (like this one by @ilyastarar) or you can click one recently done by @ramsteem, here
My aim here is to express my personal opinion on @smartsteem as well as my experience until now. If you want to try it right now you can use my referral link but I encourage you to read the post and I'll leave the referral on the end of the post or if you don't want to register via my link just google smartsteem.

Picture taken from @smartsteem

First thing that amazed me was that, when I connected my steemit and smartsteem, I had to wait to be approved. It was quite a difference to the rest of approaches that I have encountered before. Then in my application they requested a short explanation on why should the "Whitelist" me. I already felt that this maybe a perfect platform to break trough as well as help others to do the same.

After a few days I was "whitelisted" and the site was clearly not even close to being done but either way that didn't stop me from exploring. I can't lie that the thought of this maybe being a scam didn't come across my mind. Especially when they requested an authorization to vote from my account. But then I remembered my account was worth 2$, so I gave it a try. I started looking around and at first nothing made any sense to me. The site is still being updated frequently with new features like "Calculate Revenue", so you can clearly see the development, also many more are pending and waiting a review from the moderators to be whitelisted. Almost everything you need to know to start your journey on @smartsteem is available there, like FAQ.

Then I went to went to Features and learned about Vote-Selling. Even though I am not easily amazed, that tab was another thing that amazed me!

As you can see there are few options. You can set your Voting Power Treshold which means @smartsteem will vote for you only if you have enough Voting power. This is the first slider and you have many options. I like to keep it on 90% because I want to have freedom to upvote other content on steemit. I wouldn't recommend going below 80% because if you recently started on steemit, like me, you will have no rewards back because your vote would not be of any value and you couldn't upvote posts that you find great on the platform yourself.

The second slider is not important, you can set a automatic payout from 1 to 7 days or you can withdraw your funds manually at any time.
Lastly, probably the best option and the one that gives me hope that @smartsteem will be even better in the future is the Vote User Selection. Moderators give everyone whitelisted scores based on their content, so you can get one, two or three stars, meaning Good, Great or Excellent content, respectively. This is a great way to push quality content forward for everyone to see it. I personally like to sell my vote to Good content or higher because there are enough great creators on @smartsteem already and I get Steem Power from the curation rewards too.

I must stress that this is NOT the way to get rich fast

This is an opportunity for many creators that didn't invest in this platform but still want to create quality content, but they need help to break through. So I advise you to seize the opportunity, create quality content and build up your audience!

Under the "Balance" tab you can see how much STEEM and SBD you have earned overall, as well as which asset (STEEM or SBD) and how much you earned for each vote you sold and the exact date and time it was voted. You get either asset based on which the buyer used to pay the votes for his post. You would think that is transparent and great thing to know what is someone is doing with your votes but hold on, it gets even better! On the "Profile" bar you can find out your received upvotes if you had any, and you get the names of the user and the post you upvoted with the value and date as well. To be honest, even if my vote is minimal I would not like someone abusing it because I want to continue being a member of steemit community. So, at the beginning I did check the articles that were upvoted by smartsteem in my name and found out that they are really quality content and it is just the start of the project! I can't talk about the buy-upvote part of the experience yet because I only once used 0.1 SBD to check if it works but I heard that it works and if there isn't enough votes to buy you get the rest of your SBD or STEEM back.
I do recon that there will be mistakes made by the developers but I hope that the original idea that started this project never changes. So far my experience has been great and couldn't criticize a single change made.
If you start using it and have a bad experience you can always go to SMARTSTEEM DISCORD chat and @therealwolf will answer your questions and correct every problem that occurs. I joined even though I had no problems and seen people solve their problems easily.

To sum it all up. So far I had noting but a great experience with @smartsteem. I was very cautious for the past few weeks, following where my upvotes are going and keeping an eye on the discord chat for a potential fraud. In the meantime @therealwolf became a Witness and the project is developing at a nice pace.
Even though I am not as big on steemit as others and my opinion maybe irrelevant I encourage everyone reading to give smartsteem a go. Maybe that makes this post so honest because I don't work with smartsteem and have no hidden motives for this post just a hope that it will help me and the others to break trough and develop on steemit.

Give it a try, preferably through my referral link but either way you should definitely consider applying on smartsteem!

Don't forget to upvote, follow and resteem if you enjoyed!