2 Years on Steem - Learning While Earning

_{Background image by nanoom from Pixabay}

Today is the two years anniversary of the day I joined steem... so today is all about coffee ☕ cake 🍰 and creativity. I'm going to give some massive shout-outs and props to people who've inspired me and added value to my journey later in this post, but for now I shall 'reign in' my tagging trigger finger. Here is a quote from a previous article I wrote detailing how I discovered steem blockchain.

My journey started with cryptocurrencies. A friend of mine managed to pay off his mortgage after only three years of investing in crypto, seeing this success, I decided that I wanted to invest. In my mind, there was going to be a shower of golden Mana from heaven, but I soon learned that it's not that easy. I dabbled in trading for a while, unsure what I was doing like a minnow out of water before I found steemit.
_{Steemit Do’s & Don’ts - My Journey to 1000 Followers}

Since landing on steem on the 8th of August 2017, I've been involved in many wonderful projects and helped share my skills with other steemians. Some of my proudest achievments on steem have been around improving the standard of writing around the world. I found a great deal of satisfaction when working in @promo-mentors running workshops in creative writing to help improve peoples journeys on steem. Also, submitting poetry (and having it accepted by the @curie reviewers) was one of my proudest achievements as many other curators seemed too scared to put poetry forward for curie awards 😉

• I worked in @promo-mentors for 6 months running creative writing workshops.

• I have, and still do, work for @curie for the past 18 months curating the creative and travel tags.

• I ran a segment on the Monday night whaleshares show for six months, called Literary Corner (when Whalshares was still part of steem) highlighting talented poets and fiction writers of the steem blockchain.

• I worked as part of a team building the @projectgiving charity which helped fund a community/environmental project in Tanzania.

As I will elaborate upon later in this post, the sharing of skills, knowledge and expertise is one of the great strengths of the value that steem offers any active member of the community. This goes two ways, as when I joined steem I was recovering from a long period of writers' block which various other steemians helped me escape. In my first 6 months on steem, I spent a huge amount of time editing, and re-learning my craft with the help of communities such as @isleofwrite & @thewritersblock. Many people helped me immeasurably during this period, but those who are still active on steem are @geke @carolkean and @sunravelme.

I studied imaginative writing in university and after working a few corporate jobs, the creative inspiration had drained out of me. Steemit saved me from this creative block. The support in comments on my Scuba Scribe articles gave me the boost I needed to start writing new material. Before I knew it, I was posting poetry and fiction alongside my scuba diving articles. It felt amazing to have my creative drive back, all thanks to steemit.
_{Steemit Do’s & Don’ts - My Journey to 1000 Followers}

Community is undoubtedly the greatest strength of steem and what will see it through the current alt coin blood bath. So I'm going to spend a little bit of time talking about how steem has improved my life, and what has been the biggest value proposition for me. No, it's not the $$$ I've used to buy my lambo (I've never powered down). The title says it all really, learning while earning.

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The Undervalued Benefits of Steem

Learning new creative skills is a massively undervalued, and under-promoted, benefit of interacting on the steem blockchain. When I rocked up here in 2017, I knew nothing about image editing, HTML/Markdown formatting, SEO, video editing etc. I had none of these skills and thanks to various people/content on steem I've managed to build my skill set in all of these to a high degree. When it comes to creating complementary visual arts to accompany my writing, I feel like steem has made me a much more accomplished creative professional in the digital age.

The title image of this post is one example of how the knowledge base on steem helped me level up my digital game. I first learned how to use GIMP image editing software to create more visually appealing text in thumbnails for @dtube posts thanks to @kenanqhd's post, How to Make a Thumbnail That Doesn't Suck - Adding Text. I followed along each week with his tutorial posts and learned the best way to remove the background in my photos so that I could place cut-outs of myself in images using GIMP.

This isn't the only example of how steemians have shared knowledge that has helped me to feel confident creating unique and interesting digital art. A steem friend called @yahialababidi shared a post one evening about a website he had found called Deep Dream Generator. I've found this site to be really useful in creating images such as the one below.

This image was created in GIMP image editing software using a creative commons licence image from pixabay (please see below) which I put through the deep dream generator...

_{Image by David Mark from Pixabay}

Before adding the arty cut-out of myself and a free to use vector graphic from pixabay.com for the speech bubble. As you can see this has created a completely unique image which would make a nice thumbnail for any creative post.

There have also been many individuals who inspired me to learn new skills or look at existing expertise in a different light. Collaborations can be a massive catalyst for learning, and I was inspired to further explore how to visually compliment my poems by this photography/poetry colab with @soyrosa.

In the case of video editing I have had to do a lot more self teaching via YouTube videos and google research but various steemians have been instrumental in my journey to find a decent level of editing knowledge to explore different ways to express my creativity. I first started learning video editing using video pad editor by nchsoftware, so that I could make short films to accompany poetry readings of my work. I learned a lot about composition with video by studying @buttcoins short films and @tibfox's vlogs. I was also first inspired to try making shorter vlogs by @nathanmars with the #dtubesnap initiative, and it's from watching various vloggers on steem like @nonsowrites @priyanarc @adetorrent @emsonic @camuel and @josediccus that I pushed myself to learn adobe after effects to create animated video intros.

To put it simply, what has given me the greatest value on steem has been the people I've interacted with and all I've learned from them. There are also people (and groups) who have supported my posts vote-wise, which is partly what keeps us motivated on steem. I'd like to say a big thanks to @sndbox and the guys who made the incubator happen, @voronoi and @hansikhouse. Being a part of sndbox cohort 2 really pushed me to up my game both in widening my interests content-wise, and improving my travel writing. Huge shout-outs to the @bananafish community for prompting me to write fiction each week on steem. Without the finish the story competition I would never have reached the level of confidence I now feel about my creative writing. A big thanks to @theycallmedan for being the only manually curating whale I know of on steem, you're a legend sir. And finally, @curie for supporting my creative works (on and off) in my first year on steem. It made a huge difference knowing that my content was considered in the higher tier of writing on steem.

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The Future of Steem - An Honest Appraisal

I think it is impossible to predict if steem will be a success. It would be a stretch to even give a probability value at this point. The amount of development that is happening on steem is astounding, but my chief concern would be to point out that quality trumps quantity!

I feel like steem has been, and still is, trying to be everything to every man. I firmly believe that if we could market steem in the right way, to the right people; putting the emphasis on steem being a place to learn and share content, while selling the earning narrative as secondary, then steem could blow up again. The biggest hurdle to get over at the moment is fixing the reward mechanism to actually reward the quality content that will attract outside interest. Unfortunately, steem still runs on a 'not what you know, but who you know' basis. I see a lot of talk bandied around about 'believing in steem', and this worries me. The more evangelical a group of people get, the more prone to overlook the obvious cracks in the woodwork that could be fixed.

But I agree with @exyle's sentiment in his recent vlog about why he is still buying steem. Let's cast aside the question of belief at this point and look at the cold hard facts.

• Steem is in the top ten of blockchains with real development happening.

• Steem has one of the largest active communities in the crypto space.

• As Mark says, the market moves in cycles, and even if we take on board the theory that most alt coins from the last bull run are dead, there is a good chance that steem is among the few that aren't.

However you swing it, selling at $0.20 is insanity. Any successful investor buys the lows (like right now) and takes profits at the highs (in my first six months on here it hit $8/steem 😂). I personally would rather lose it all, or win massively and those are the two options as I see it if you hold on to your steem.

But what about HF21?

It will only work out if large stake holders live up to the suggested aims stated in the EIP and start to change their behaviors in regards to curation. We are at a cross roads where with a little honesty, and less passivity, from large stake, steem could attract a large user base. Add to this the potential for curation to payout as well as posting and we could be onto a winner, but it will take massive culture changes from the people who have traditionally stayed in their own little cliques. To be honest, I've put across my opinions and concerns in this comment on a recent @steemitblog post so I'm not going to re-hash it all here.

I love what this platform has the potential to become. I think that it will take looking both backward and forward to make steem great again lol

Here's to another two years on steem! I'm interested, and slightly apprehensive, to see what the future will bring 😎

All gifs used in this post were ethically sourced from giphy.com. Pictures are creative commons, linked below pics. If you have enjoyed this post, please check out my homepage @raj808 for similar content. Thank you.