1 Year on Steemit - A Restrospective

One trip around the sun on Steemit, and here are some tips, tricks, and learnings.

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By the numbers

• 365+ Days on Steemit
• 800+ "followers" (maybe ~100 active)
• 1700+ posts

^{Courtesy of @eroche and SteemAnalytics}

Its great seeing my journey in graph form. It is funny how well it summarizes my basic interaction and emotional experience with the platform.

Going Alone

After introducing myself, I quickly tried to corner the market on interesting posts about career, startups, and my hope for the blockchain. I had some mild early success, and even an amazing whale-vote, but ultimately it began to fizzle.

Seeking Support

At that point, I knew I needed help. I jumped into the Minnow Support Project built by @aggroed and tried to seek help from a more tight-knit community. There were only about 100 souls on the Discord back then. This worked well, and I made full use of the Minnnow Support bot to help get some payout traction on my votes. I was even inspired by the many ways the group was trying to give back to the community. I tried to echo this in my own behavior with resume review contests, but I realized people didn't really come to Steemit for that kind of advice at all. I was never really getting engagement.

Ultimately, I was simply treading water by making some posts, using the bots like @MinnowSupport and @randowhale to get some kind of payout, and then having absolutely no one read or engage with them. This definitely left me a bit disheartened to the point that I ended up just writing a poem to the bots.

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Delegation

So, around this time frame, my heart was not really into posting anymore, and I decided to primarily turn to delegation. I was already delegating to @MinnowSupport. So when @MinnowBooster first came around and offered to turn my meager little voting power into a meager cash flow, I jumped on that bandwagon. I still posted occasionally about things like Burning Man and experimented with things like @dTube and still drifted into the ever growing @MinnowSupport room, but I had pretty much moved Steemit to the background of my life. Work got busy and other things took precedence over begging for nickles from the general Steemit populace or commanding bots to pay me.

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This Spring

Well, this Spring, after shaking things up at work, I really wanted to rebuild the hobby and habit of writing, which was one my reasons for jumping into Steemit to begin with. I liked the thought of merging my interest in digital currencies with my interest in writing. But, this time, I think I had much more realistic expectations. I essentially had passed through the change cycle:

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Now What

So, unfortunately there were quite a few changes to the platform that I had to deal with. First, the @MinnowSupport group has grown in leaps and bounds including a very different self-voting bot. Second, Steemit overall was even more dependent on bots to lift people up out of obscurity. Curation and engagement still existed, but seemed a secondary concern to a lot of greed. Overall, these changes weren't surprising. People were going to use the tools available to them to make it easier and easier to get an ROI from either their Steem Power or their posts. I'm a little worried this isn't good for the platform though.

What To Do

Well, I'm a big believer that it is always best to build a system of success that is easy to follow, track and adapt. It is always easier to learn from taking action and pivoting from data. So, in this case, I removed my delegation and started to share small little posts almost every day. I started to comment and engage with a handful of writers across the platform and Discord in a more consistent way. I also started exploring and using tools like Steem Analytics and Spectacle to get a better sense of who was actually paying attention (Thanks @zararina!). My new goal is very similar to my old one which is to maximize engagement and ignore the more toxic vanity metrics.

Whats Next

• I'll try to continue to post and engage frequently.
• I'll try to share a bit more of my true self on the platform. e.g. More vulnerability and honesty posts and less copy-pasta.
• I am a little eager to explore the @dbooks.org platform and see what it would take to put a non-fiction book together about my career journey from intern to job hunter to interviewer and more.
• May explore becoming a witness... but that may be more of a pipe-dream.
• Oh, and my wife and I are pregnant and in our second trimester... so all of this may be moot in a few months anyway.

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Conclusion

Like all things in life, you get out of it what you put in. If you want to put greed and entitlement into this platform, you are going to get out disappointment and frustration. If you want to put in some engagement and interaction, then you'll be pleasantly surprised by the output. So, who knows how well I will be able to keep my promises to write and engage more earnestly, but at least I'll try. I'll try to keep people up to date on the life of an Ohio chicken farmer in California, working for a startup, investing in crypto, traveling, occasionally writing bad poetry, and all while preparing for an inbound infant!

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Previous Posts

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Decentraliztion & Network Effects	Startup Advice	I hate your poem
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