Thanks for the comment. I joined Steemit because I had been thinking about blogging for a while...and there is no better place to start than here. If I got a domain, I would be blogging potentially without getting comments/feedback for months or years? The active community here is just so amazing.
When deciding to put money into Steem power, it was really a decision on which crypto currencies to park my money. I had X amount I wanted to invest...so I spread it around in places where I thought had potential. I traded around between Bitcoin, Ether, Stratis, Waves, Factom, etc etc. The value of Steem was 3 parts to me
- I liked the platform and thought the value would grow in time
- I wanted to blog and it became apparent pretty quick that to get followers, you have to spend time writing posts and also write engaging comments on other posts and upvote that comment (along w post) to have it get visibility. A 5 cent upvote gets no visibility....a 50 cent or $1 upvote moves up my comment past the spam at the very least.
- I like the dividend aspect of having Steem power. Stratis gives me no dividend, Waves gives a decent one, etc. It's part of the equation, but not everything. I have no intention of maxing out to the 10%...I don't have the time and I don't have a bot. But, the 1 month where I spent a lot of time reading other posts and writing thoughtful comments and upvoting them, I hit 1%. Getting 1% wasn't my objective, it was a nice bonus....better than 0 in other cryptos.
As far strategy, I don't curate to earn money. It seems counter productive....to earn money as a curator, it feels like I would have to blindly upvote authors with a ton of followers or those that have bots autoupvote them. I don't care for that...so now I upvote posts that I like after reading them. I don't spend enough time on the platform to where I am out of voting power, so I don't care to be too conservative. I probably should just start upvoting comments I like at a much higher power...because I never get below 60-70% power seems like.
LOL your vote was worth more than most of my posts take in =p
I appreciate your considered reply. While you apparently seem to curate just as I do, which is to simply vote for stuff you like, I note that that are vote cliques, bots, and the like, that do curate as a means of garnering income.
Were voting power not weighted by Steem power, do you think the attraction you have to Steem would disappear, or is it possible that Steem would still be an attractive investment?
Since I joined Steemit in May, Steem has declined in market cap from about 15th to about 22nd now. I conjecture that the appeal of the idea behind Steemit (that content is rewarded through curation, and rather than the platform reaping the rewards, it is the posters themselves that get paid), is largely moot, because the largest holders of SP, such as @dan and @freedom, are beyond competition.
A new guy like me, or even modest investors like yourself, are left with but the crumbs that the wealthiest accounts just fail to absorb. When most new accounts, drawn here by lurid tales of posts that take in $30k (as @dollarvigilante's first post did, he says), find out they can't get that kind of instant wealth, they are discouraged, and give up.
Were rewards more evenly distributed (note: I am not talking about redistribution of wealth, merely allowing curation to be less manipulated for profit), I believe the real power of Steemit to blossom would reward investors far more, through capital gains, than the current potential of rewards to be manipulated for profits.
As Steem resists the kind of appreciation that Steemit becoming THE social media platform of the 21st century would potentiate, capital gains of tens of thousands of points remain unrealized. Despite my not being well heeled, and deeply invested in Steem, I strongly advocate for those capital gains being realized by investors, because I want Steemit to replace Fakebook.
I really think it's only a matter of time before Fakebook is taken down, and I like Steemit.