Follow Friday: All I want for Xmas...

We are in the home stretch for 2019 now. It has been an interesting one for Steem with the big hardfork changes and continued evolution of dapps. We still have not seen the big breakout in user numbers, but various people are trying to make it happen. Despite what some people may think there is no conspiracy to scare users away to keep the rewards for some mythical 'elite'. The Steem price would only plummet if we did that. I am always looking for ways to bring in new users and I will do what I can to support them. The only people I would downvote are those who are exploiting Steem for unearned rewards and giving nothing back.

The prices according to @coingecko are not great, but Steem keeps coming back to around 12c. I may have to buy more.

Here are some people you may want to follow:

• My good friend @slobberchops has done an updated newbie survival guide with some good tips. He tells it like it is. You should not expect rewards if your posts do not have value to anyone, and buying them could earn you downvotes.
• @subtlescopes is a photographer who just joined and has over 200k Instagram followers. If a few percent of those join Steem it will make a big difference. We need more like him.
• @mstafford is the power behind the @exhaust exercise logging dapp. He blogs about his own cycling and climbing exploits.
• @papilloncharity is a charity in South Africa helping the needy. I saw they are getting some downvotes from someone who thinks @steembasicincome is wrong. For now those downvotes do no real damage, so I would not worry about them. We can always give more votes to those affected.

I think I need to start a section for communities on these posts. For now this is just on the Steemit beta site. For 3 Steem you can create a community. I think these will have a real benefit as you can follow a topic rather than all the people who use it as they are likely to post about other things you are less interested in. I have just joined a couple, but they do not have many posts yet:

• Running was created by @ervin-lemark. I may not be able to post my runs there until @exhaust supports communities. They make use of hashtags, but I am not sure if just putting the tag on a post is enough.
• Steemflagrewards will have posts relating to fighting abuse of this platform. This set of users has done a lot to get rewards back into the pool whilst risking retaliation. @SteemFlagRewards members do it for the good of Steem.

I would like to create some groups, but I need to check they will not duplicate existing ones. I do not thing there is away to search for them yet. Let me know if I am missing anything. I hope this feature will be a full part of Steem on all the interfaces soon.

Steem on!