I recently mentioned Steem to somebody who needed to get some extra income, and offered to answer any questions she has. Doing this made me realise that Steem does not have a friendly way of explaining itself, especially to people who do not know that much about cryptocurrencies, so I have decided to write an explanation that hopefully anyone can understand.

Disclaimer: While I have joined steem about a month before writing this, I still have a lot to learn, and I do not have any direct knowledge of the code behind it (I just have not had the time to look through it). So, take everything that I say with a grain of salt. 

Steem and steemit keep changing and upgrading. I will try to keep this article up to date, but if you notice any inaccuracies or mistakes, please let me know! I would also appreciate any suggestions and feedback about how I can make this guide more useful for new users, so if you have just started with Steem, and feel that you have questions I have not answered, please ask. If you have mastered Steem, and see things you think belong here, please let me know. 

I have written this guide from the point of view of somebody interested in Steem as a publishing platform, as such, I am not going to go into the details of how it runs on the nack end, and how it is managed. If you really want to know more, read the whitepaper.

Steem vs. Steemit

Something many people find confusing is the difference between Steem and Steemit. Steem is a currency and a blockchain that anybody can use, write to, and read from. Steemit is a site that acts as a front end to interact with Steem. At the time of writing it is the way in which most people interact with the Steem blockchain, but anybody could write their own front end to interact with Steem.

Images

At the moment, you cannot upload images directly on Steemit. You will have to upload an image somewhere else such as imagesafe, and link it from your article,  

Tags

You must have at least one tag for a post, and you can have as many as you want. Try to keep them relevant. The post will always get classified under the first tag that you enter, so you might want to make sure that you chose the right one. The order of the tags after that does not matter.

NSFW

You can post NSFW things on Steem, since nobody has any way of censoring it. However, Steemit does not display anything with an NSFW tag in the main feeds. If you search for the relevant tags, it will show up. If you do post something NSFW without tagging it appropriately, you will get downvoted.

Upvoting 

Upvote the stuff you like, or that you find useful, or that you just feel deserves a reward. You will get a reward based on how much the item gets upvoted by the people after you, which will increase your steempower.

Flagging

If you see posts that you think do not belong on Steem (not that you just disagree with), you can flag them, using the flag icon. This will tend to remove them from visibility if enough people flag them. 

Follow and Mute

If you do find somebody on Steem whose posts you enjoy, you can follow them from their profile page. Similarily to avoid seeing the posts from somebody, you could mute them from the same page. 

The Currencies

Steempower

Steempower measures the amount of influence you have on Steem. As a currency on its own, it can get converted to and from Steem, but converting to Steem (powering down) takes two years. The more Steem power you hold, the greater your earnings from your activities. 

Steem

Steem is a more liquid currency that the Steem network uses. You can get Steem by converting your SteemPower, or by converting Steem dollars into it.

Steem Dollars

1SD equals approximately 1USD, so this will give you an idea of how much money you have, and can withdraw.

 
Converting Money

At the moment, you cannot do anything with Steem Dollars or Steem outside of Steem itself, but you can convert them. You can find a good guide to how to do that here. 

I hope that you have found this guide useful. We look forward to seeing more of you on Steem. Please join us, and enjoy steeming.