My third day on Steemit

Oh I remember day 2 as if it was yesterday...
... What do you mean?
... Uh hm... Ah... Really? ... I see
Okay turns out it was yesterday, well anyways the point is I remember it clearly and I had a couple goals for today and that's why we're here.

First off, if you have seen my previous posts, you might already spot a minor difference: I've selected a profile picture and also set up most of the other profile stuff to fill out. The cover image had me panic for a little, as I didn't know what to put there originally. It's not too common for me to make a picture that's really wide but has a rather low height. Most of my pictures have a character focus and that didn't help find suitable pictures either, but eventually I found something I had almost forgotten I had, and while it doesn't do the job as a cover image perfectly it will do for now (I might adjust it a little later today to better work with the exact format and resolution Steemit is working with). Anyways you can see the full picture here, in case you're interested:

(image: Aurora Borealis painted by me, October 2016)

In general, I'll try to make these posts appealing in one way or another, if I can through content other than text or at least by using somewhat acceptable text formatting, to make reading a little easier. Please don't get too excited though, I don't really have all that much to show off, so you might see more of the latter.

Where do the DTube videos come from?

About my other goals: I wanted to find out where DTube stores its videos and I did. Turns out they use a protocol called IPFS, which makes files recognizable via their hash and DTube uses some of the video's earnings to pay for IPFS nodes owners to keep the video files available to seed. So It's still decentralized, but it's not directly part of the Steem block chain. However a downside to this system is that depending on how much revenue the video generates it might be required for users to either pay for their videos to be available for the rest of eternity, seed their videos themselves or accept them becoming unavailable eventually. Please note that all the information about DTube I got is from this post and some of the information could be outdated by now as I didn't have time to read all the update articles (yet).

Contributing to the community

My last goal was brainstorming what I want to do here on Steemit and this one was a lot harder than the other ones. After thinking about it for a while I figured out that it would most likely not help me to specify one single goal and dedicate all my resources to that right away. I don't really know if there's one single niche I can fill here, so what I'll most likely end up doing is keep up this daily Steemit experience blog, where I'll try my best to address topics that were relevant for me as well as share my experience with the platform and what I learned about it. Additionally I'll be thinking of other formats I could create that might be interesting to just some of you. Since it's so early on I don't really know what you or others really want to read about, so I guess a lot of what you'll see here will be me experimenting with all sorts of possible options. I'll try my best to provide something useful as well as something personal. Hope that doesn't disappoint you. In any case I can only really find my place here, improve my content and contribute to this community with your help, so definitely let me know what you want to see more or less of in my posts.

A bright future for content creation and consumption

I'll end today's post with a small theory about the months and years to come. With Steem and Steemit it seems like we might be right at the start of a golden age for content creation. The internet has revolutionized how we interact with each other and how we spread information. Some people have already found great success creating content on various different platforms, and having content available to consume is great for everyone else. However in a world where we have to pay bills for shelter and buy groceries to consume there's simply no denying we have to think about how we're going to make the money to stay afloat. "Just get a job!", will some shout at anyone who's wondering how they can do what they love while also being able to afford to live, even if they enjoy their content. But my question is, if someone is good at creating content, why can't that be their job? And the answer is it actually can, but so far only for a few people who either got incredibly lucky or are outstandingly good at it. So far most content creators either receive their payments directly from their fans through patreon, twitch subscriptions or similar services or they get their revenue from placing advertisements on their content. I'll spare you an in-depth essay on whether or not it's fair that the providers of said services take a large fraction of the content creators earnings or if advertisements have gone too far with user tracking on websites and biased presentations of their product on sponsored content (my TL;DR answer is a clear MAYBE). 

Introducing Steemit

Steemit seems to present us with a both lucrative and convenient solution to this problem. Not only do content creators of all popularity levels have their effort rewarded, but also the people helping good content get the deserved attention. It's pretty neat to think about it this way: Everything you do in this community is part of the value of Steems currencies. That's why the chain can constantly distribute more currency, without the currency losing most of its value! As long as we keep creating content that's equally valuable or more valuable than the content we already have the Steem cryptocurrency should keep a stable value or increase in value. And that's why I think Steemit has a good chance of being a true game changer and possibly mark the beginning of a golden age for content creation. Because of the incentive to create good content in a network controlled by everyone.

Thanks for reading!

(final note: just now after finishing proof reading the post I realize how fitting the painting in the context of a 'bright future' and 'golden age of content creation' is, heh!)