My journey on steemit thus far, a story about communities, tools and bots.

Hello everyone,

When you just start on Steemit, you will feel like a very little fish which has thrown itself in a big ocean. You will notice that you swim between many other small fishes which are called minnows. Occasionally you will see a dolphin or a whale and all you will want is to become like them.

(This picture is from pexels.com which provides pictures you can use without worrying about copyright)

I have been a member on Steemit for 28 days now as i post this. I have spent around 8 hours a day except for the weekends on Steemit. Most of my time spent was trying to understand how everything works and which community's are helping in which way.

I have met great people in the process, learnt alot from users who have been here for a year now and also they have helped me improve my self.

I decided to make this post to tell new users where to look for answers and also where to find some help in getting started off.

Lets start with usefull tools that i've found to manage your account and keep up with the stats.

Steemworld.org Credits to @steemchiller for building this

Steemworld.org/@yourusername gets u on a page where you can find alot of statistics about your account. The best thing i found here was that i could actually calculate how much voting power i would get with certain amounts of Steem Power. Basically, you can fill in any number of SP you like and see how much voting power that will get you. Great tool for people who are looking to invest in SP to power up their account.

Steemd.com Credits to @roadscape for creating this!

Here you can find alot of information about your account but i believe the most important one is that you can see how much bandwith you have remaining. Unfortunately, new users some times overpost/overcomment which results in bandwith issues. By using steemd.com/@yourusername you can check out alot of other stats including your bandwith.

You can find many more usefull tools under the "Tools" tab on your blog.

Communities

You would wonder which community is the best for you. Well, nobody can tell you that because communities are all about getting to know people and connecting with them. Talking to people in the same community every day will get u some friends and also some support. Most important thing is, it will get you ALOT of help, which every new user will need. Don't get me wrong, the communities are not for gaining upvotes. It's for making friends and asking more experienced users how to deal with some things.

To start off, i'll start with the community that helped me the most and where you can find me every day.

Steemit.chat Credits to @riverhead for creating it and @followbtcnews for continuing his work after he stopped.

This is the best community by far for me. There are alot of people active here all ready to help you with every question that you have. The general chat is full of nice people and most of the times you can participate in interesting discussions about steemit but also about everything around it. Sometimes it's just like a chatroom where you can talk about other stuff too, but mainly the topic is about steemit. Steemit.chat has alot more channels which focus on specific topics. Think about gaming, contests and challenges amongst many others.

Discord servers

Alot of groups on Steemit have discord channels where you can join them and have a chat with them. I will not list all of the servers here as you can find plenty of posts about them by just using google. I have noticed that alot of people join Discord servers just to spam their posts in post promotion channels. I can tell you, this won't even get you 1 upvote. The whole idea of joining a discord server should be about connecting to the people who created the server. Which discord server you join is a choice you have to make, you can join all of them but it will be hard for you to truly connect with them then. Choose one you are really interested in and where you can actually be part of their community. For example, i have recently joined @curie 's discord server. @curie is all about helping new steem users that create good content. I would advice you to check their profile and discord channel to learn more about it.

Facebook pages
My experience with Failbook pages are terrible, every community i found is all about "follow for follow/upvote for upvote" which is the worst thing you can get into. If you get those people to follow you or upvote you, you will get 1 upvote and never get any upvote or interest from them again. They will just be a follower count on your page, nothing more than that. Stay away from them, that's my advice.

Bots & https://steembottracker.com Credits to @yabapmatt for creating this very usefull page.

I had alot of questions about bots when i first heard about them. What are they for? How can it help me? How do they work? What does it cost?

Thanks to the communities i've learned alot about them, while i probably still have some to learn. First of all, everyone needs to know about this website: https://steembottracker.com

You can not use a bot in a good way without checking that page, i advice you to use it to understand more about bots and to see which one is the best for you.

Bots are mostly being used to "buy" upvotes. This means that someone would send a certain amount of SBD's to a bot so the bot would go and upvote their posts. I have learned that small amount investments don't do much, keep in mind most of the times you will lose a part of your SBD's because you share the upvote worth with curators plus it gets split in half to reward you with SP. Sometimes you'll see posts with huge numbers on it, but you have to realize in some cases the author has invested alot of SBD's to get that amount just to get in the hot or trending section. Lets be honest here, a post with a huge payout gets more attention than a post which has a smaller number on it. I see bots as an investment in your post in order to get a bigger audience, but i believe that larger investments are working better than smaller ones. This only counts if your post is actually GOOD. Never use a bot to promote a bad post or a copy paste post because it will only damage your reputation as you may get flagged by the audience that you reach.

That's it for now, i still got alot to learn and alot to discover but i will make sure to share it with everyone in order to be part of the helping community here on steemit. I'm a huge fan of the people who help new users on this platform instead of just making money for themselfs and not caring about others. They are the reason this platform will succeed along with the people who do everything else to improve the platform. In my future posts i will make sure to share more about them so you can follow and support them too.

Thank you for taking the time to read my post, i hope it was helpfull.