13 Days Into Steemit - 6 Things That I've Learnt So Far

1. There are thousands of users with nothing to contribute, just waiting to miraculously hit the mother lode through asinine comments and feeble upvotes

This is to be expected as the apparent premise offered by Steemit is one of gains with no risk and little effort. But it is as if these people are not even trying and in the process create a lot of static to sift through, especially when you are new and more serious.

I'll be the first to admit that I came here too hoping to generate an income, but surely it should quickly become clear that rubbish posts and generic replies will get you nowhere. Yet it's not stopping anyone.

I wish there was a way to hide things like the following from the comments section:

Great post!

I agree!

Upvoted and resteemed!

Resteemed. Please upvote and follow me @...

I may have something serious to ask or say, but it gets buried under a metric ton of crap.

It is what it is though and because of the nature of Steemit, will probably always be part of the landscape.

2. Nothing comes easy and there are no free lunches

I joined not knowing what the hell was going on and very quickly realised that the barrier to proper entry wasn't a simple blog or upvoting as many posts as possible. So I spent 10 days with Steemit open in one tab and everything about it open in enough tabs to put strain on my RAM.

This aint your daddy's Facebook. Steemit will win no prizes for UX design. It is technical and comes with a learning curve. It takes time to "get" it if you plan on making the most of it. I am still in kindergarten and learning every day.

It makes you work. I am sitting in WordPress as I type this because of the ease and control of a visual editor, revision history and auto-save. I then redo it in markdown once it is good to go.

You have to work for it. There are different ways to build yourself up, but you will work for it if you arrive here broke. Even if you invest money, you will still work for it.

3. You may work the system, but you can't game it

There's a bit of Newton's Third Law built into Steemit regarding certain functionalities. Easy on the random gambling upvotes people! Know your voting power at all times. Don't let it drop to nothing like so many allow to happen. It will leave you powerless for a very long time. You have to be careful and thoughtful.

The least you can do is to familiarise yourself with the Minnow Support Project

This is also not a lottery. You will not be riding the lucky wake of a whale to riches.

4. Forget about the money - Approach it like a game

I focus on earning points. I want to build up my reputation and SP. I only strategically upvote two or three times per day. The others are spread around to my taste. I have to get my voting power up, even if that means less curation points for a few days.

Unless I very quickly start producing virally compelling content at a rate of four posts per day and earn hundreds of SBD per week, it's pointless to have more than a liquid dollar if I don't have rep or SP. All current work and learning is going into hopefully laying a foundation which in time will pay off.

For now, collecting points is what excites me.

Not that I don't have my eyes on the prize.

5. You will learn about blockchain tech, crypto and markets in general. You'll have to.

For someone who has never had the slightest interest in the economy, I am suddenly looking at a lot of charts and articles these days. Three weeks ago you wouldn't have found me dead watching a video on crypto, blockchain or anything related to economics. I find that the best place to get a balanced view on this is right here, rather than the business sections of media outlets.

This is another learning curve and I have barely started crawling.

Then you have decentralization. This is something I've known for a while to be of importance for the future of global connectivity. Little did I know that Steemit would place me firmly in the middle of the action.

I am learning new things and opening my mind to what I chose to ignore in the past.

6. Finding your voice and then finding people who will listen is not so easy. You have to cast many lines with different lures. Again and again.

This simply means that you will work for nothing many times over until you hit the right note, but it will be of no use if you are tone deaf to the spirit of the core community.

Not everyone can write. I believe I will become good and fast enough with practice. Spelling and grammar checkers will go a long way towards helping you if language is not your forte. You can convey a compelling story in simple, yet neatly used words.

Be prepared to earn $0.001 on something that may have taken some effort.

Again and again.

This post took me hours. Find images, edit them. Rewrite whole parts. Go over the text again and again and trim where I trailed off topic or became a bit verbose. Add something. Read the whole post in preview. More mistakes, more changes.

And I have no guarantee that it will amount to anything more than $0.18

I'm perfectly fine with that because I know this post is of higher quality than my previous one. I have have improved myself.

If you want to write, then write. And then some more. Until the community signals to you that you have their attention. Then become even better.

If you don't end up making money, you will have lost nothing. You will walk away having learnt quite a bit.

Best
nonsqtr