In early Feburary I learned about Steemit from a stray comment on a former colleague's Facebook page. It looked worth investigating, so I came, looked around a bit, and signed up for a free account. Then I forgot about it. At the time there was a three-week lag for free account signup, so I got an email saying my account was ready on March 2.

I bounced around for a little bit trying to figure out how I wanted to fit in here. I tried posting some of my photography, I did some copyediting for another poster, I started writing a little bit about books and movies. But mostly what I was doing was trying to grasp what was going on here, and by the time I got a little bit of a sense of the Steem economy, I knew this was something I wanted to be a significant part of. I've only become more sure of that since.

The biggest risk in cryptocurrency investing is that so many projects are fly-by-night scams, sold on strong marketing without any intention to ever follow through. It's extremely difficult to judge when a project has a real future. Steem has solved that problem by backing its investing platform with a community of content creators, not only allowing investment in a variety of ways but creating an expectation that anyone who operates a service on the platform will be a member of a real community. This may not remove the risk, but it mitigates it immensely.

On the other side of things, traditional social media is a colossal time-waster. As it has evolved across platforms, the expected quality of content has decreased along with the social and professional reward for communication, and a focus instead on punchy, viral, shallow posts. It has also shown its extreme vulnerability to centralized control, as Facebook has repeatedly made choices to harm its users. Steem has solved both of these problems by backing its blogging platform with an investment opportunity, putting ownership of the network in the hands of the users, and creating a system where creating good work can lead both to greater ownership and financial rewards.

Do these systems work as well as they might? No, they don't. Steem isn't a money tree, it's a money sapling. It needs nurturing to become its best self, and I see that as both personally and financially rewarding.

The future Steem ecosystem I see is one where the major population is composed of content creators who are also small-time investors, reaping the benefits of platform ownership while also developing a community where we reward each other for quality communication. To me this is the revolution that creators need in the 21st-Century economy, a way to lift our work forward while generating financial benefit at the same time. This can also benefit the large-scale investors by creating a thriving platform and market for their capital.

I was fortunate enough to be a small beneficiary of the rise in Bitcoin, allowing me to become that creator/investor hybrid from the moment I decided to commit myself here. But there aren't all that many creators who fit that category, and if we want them, we're going to have to make them. I see a two-fold strategy for that: support account growth and retention for creators who are already here and participating, and recruit valuable creators from outside with the promise of an easier path to ownership and rewards than they would have coming in without assistance.

There's no end of work to do on that. But it's springtime on Steemit, and if we nurture our saplings, growth will come. I've been pleased to discover that there are many foresters here, with many different methods.

_{Spring trees outside Hallgrimskirkja, Reykjavik, May 2016.}

I've been thinking of this post for a while but I wrote it today at the suggestion of @abh12345 in this post. You can see other posts from this initiative here.