Thanks for this effort @paulag, I really like a lot of your points here. Steem is way harder than people realise, and I think it takes a few weeks for it to really sink in.

The thing is, it's confusing because this very blog post counters a lot of your points. You've gotten paid pretty well for this post, because of the relationships you've established on this platform. This platform probably isn't that interesting to others outside of Steem, and you probably didn't advertise this post on all the other social media sites. This post probably isn't that interesting to Google either.

Instead, it's very interesting to us, which is why it gets upvoted, but I've only seen it because someone else I followed resteemed it, and that's because of the relationships you've made.

If someone new had written this exact same post, they wouldn't have made anything.

I think Steem is more like Medium than anything else, people don't get any claps unless they have a significant Twitter following, but I do think it's also like Reddit, and Instagram and everything else too. It's all about the relationships you have right now.

I actually have a ton of Googleable content I want to write for this platform (in that it would appear fairly high in search results for particular popular keyword searches) but don't want to publish it yet because I just don't have the number of relationships established to get it the exposure it would need.

Thanks for provoking-many thoughts!