My first Steemit birthday! Happy Birthday to me :)

in #steemit6 years ago

Yesterday I got the badge reminding me that my full first year passed here on Steemit. It is just one year but I feel like it exists forever. I still remember the first weeks and months, how exciting it was to be part of this project. I was on holidays a few days after I started my account. It was so new and revolutionary, I could not put my phone away. My friends were laughing at me when I was showing them that my comments were getting a few cents. They were joking that next year holidays are on me because I am getting so rich :)

I spent first months learning about the platform from posts here and from youtube. @jerrybanfield was the loudest there and with a huge collection of tutorials. He was so enthusiastic and creating the impression that everybody can succeed on this platform. I started believing because look at his high paid posts and poor quality of the videos when compared to my previous benchmark, smartpassiveincome.com. He looked like wannabe Pat Flynn minus talent and charisma but still very successful on this still growing platform. I don't feel supertalented either so starting early would give me an advantage in my field :) I started showing my toys and figurines and imagined great future where I can supplement my income from writing about the process of making them. I quickly started discovering that the posts are not seen by many people. I explained to myself that I don't have followers. So I started using promotional services, mostly @minnowbooster to put my post in front of peoples eyes. It helped a little, back then there was this small icon of an eye showing how many people opened my post. Later it was removed, probably because it could show that you could get a hundred upvotes while just 10 people opened the post. I had my ups and downs but I started investing my own hard earned cash to gain some influence here and make my upvotes matter. Then there was this huge ride up and it looked I will be able to fund next holidays with my posts. Especially after one of them was discovered by a curator from @curie and gained some bucks. I added another thousand euro to the pot and continued writing. The numbers of followers were growing but my posts were still seen but just a few people. I started getting few small auto votes and understood, that the successful writers get them too, but from more powerful friends who they probably met during one of the steemfest events. It is great and bad at the same time. It gives higher payment but still is not a sign that the post is good quality or it matters to anybody. I read many posts from the top of the trending list and most of them was the waste of time but they were promoted by a growing number of bots. It must be a great business in delegating the power or selling votes so I tried it too with the quite small SP I was buying for cash at 3 and even 4usd levels. Then comes the crash what made me approx 3500 euro poorer than a year ago plus hundreds of hours invested in this platform at this stage.
I will hold my Steem Power for longer, at this stage, it does not make sense to sell it anyways. I see the enthusiasm of developers and real believers on the stage of Steemfest. I hope they are right and this is just the early stage of development of something new and revolutionary. I wish the improvements were implemented much faster but also understand that it is harder than I can imagine. I wish I was programer and help with this development but I am just an artist trying to work on my craft and sometimes sharing it with the world. Will be trying it here, with the hope that someday the system will start showing it to the people interested in this subject. If not, my website http://themodelmaker.net/ is always active and possible to find on google. I don't care about this SMT until the trending is broken. Please fix it first before spending resources on another way of creating fake money and fake value. Let the quality win, change incentives that we don't need to post crap to upvote it with bots to be successful here and we can find value in just watching like everywhere else. I want to see well-known artists posting here instead of Instagram. They will not come here if their work just disappears among quick napkin sketches. That's my birthday wish :)

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Awesome trials and tribulations you have had with your Steemit growth, here is to another year of more crazy bots on here for you and much more!

Thanks for taking time and reading :) Great image too :) I hope all these troubles here were worth it, this experiment will succeed and we can be proud to be the early adopters. On the up and downs graph, I bottomed and trending up with optimism but ready for another bottom :( I wish you better luck!

May all your birthday wishes come true m'dear.......for all our sakes;)

Ha. 152 upvotes and probably you are the only person who read it :) Let's hope the smart people here can fix this system before Steem reach 0. Where are the people who slept under rock with their cash. We need another wave of FOMO, bigger than last one. I miss the times when everybody with crypto wallet could feel like wolf of wall street :)

Ah mitchy, I do love to read and you're never boring;)
I'm confident the FOMO will come again and we'll be flying first class next year.....but don't quote me on that, will ye.

I'll enjoy reading your posts! Keep on going. Don't look at the money. Post like you would do on Facebook or others platforms where you get nothing. Focus on your art, it is really amazing stuff you build, just keep talking about it here and everywhere else and at some point, you will get bigger votes here on steem or wherever it is.

I'm in a quite similar position than you, just joined 2 months later...still refuse to give up as long as there are a handful of active readers of my post I'll enjoy writing it and I combine it with stuff I would do anyway.

Thank you. I will keep posting even for 5 readers here :) and will see where it leads. I am quite persistent in doing things which look useless for normal people :) I am the best in finding the least profitable tasks :)
Yes, the facebook or instagram does not bring any monetary reward, but because most of the people are there, shares and likes generate some traffic to my stuff and I get sales because of that.

I sure hope your wishes come true too @mitchunter :)

I think one thing we need is a better system to demonstrate engagement, maybe a combination of # of people having actually read the post (in terms of time spend on the page) and meand/median upvote values.

As it is, there can be 700 1% votes from accounts that have never posted, and a couple that are worth a fortune, and the system finds nothing suspicious at all.

Course, that won't solve all the problems, given the economic incentives tend to meddle with people's brains a bit, and that it's near impossible to properly control how fairly the Steem gets distributed, what with the pre-mine and high stakes holders having such overwhelming power on the platform.

Lot's of stuff for the devs to work on, though of course they'd rather work on the shiny new additions than fix the parts that their most powerful users are exploiting most of the time X/

I personally hope for the best, and work on documenting whatever I find interesting / whatever projects I'm working on.

If it all falls to pieces, the Discord communities like @slothicorn, @steemsilvergold, @steemmakers, @curie and others will most certainly organize themselves and migrate to some other crypto-powered platform that's more suited to their particular goals, or even make their own.

But who knows... maybe Steemit is just experiencing growing pains and will find it's way to a better system one of these days :)


In any case, Happy Steemday to you !

I am affraid that there is alrady too many problems here to solve and moving to new place will be the only way to make it work :( massive stake holders are probably already rich even selling at todays prices when they premined it or earned easily at the first months of platform. How many millions of dollars from ordinary people we need to suck into the system to let them exit and move the price up :( Who would need to buy steem if the system would work as intended? investors only come in to make passive income with bots, self voting and leasing?


Welcome to Steem @mitchhunter.

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Happy Steemit Birthday!
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Happy Birthday bro!