I have officially been on Steemit for one week and have collected my first rewards from my intro post.

Steemit is the place to be, folks.

Steemit doodle

I love this place! Now that I have gone through the whole process of posting, building up a hopefully genuine community, received rewards, and transfered rewards, I feel like I can give a good impression of the place.

I have been waiting until I got my first reward until I went nuts and told all the people ever to join me here on Steemit. Now I've got that.

Excitement.

Currently I have 148 followers in 7 days. I don't do follow-for-follow and I try and let people know that right off the bat (check out my Hopes and Intentions for Steemit). My secret to that is - be genuine - reply to people's comments and go searching for people with your same interests. There are a couple of neat groups that help newbies also.

It's very exciting to watch your post grow in value. It's even more exciting to meet people with like interests and learn new things every day, every time you click on a new post.

There's a lot to learn.

There is definitely a high learning curve here. It definitely is very confusing to the beginner, but you get it kind of fast. And the things you don't get right away, either come with time, or I guess they're not so important.

Some not so great things.

Some negative things about Steemit is, there's lots of spam "Follow me, I follow you.", information and how-tos seem to be really complicated and they could use better laymen's terms, feeds and blogs should be filterable (so you don't have to see all the resteems), and a real simple TL;DR of how the wallet stuff works would be REALLY great.

Some things about getting your first reward.

The earnings under your blog is in Steem Dollars, not USD.
The earnings stated under your blog is not how much is coming to you. A decent sized portion will go to the "curators", people who have upvoted and resteemed your blog. (This just took me off guard, not a big deal.)
There is an option when you're publishing your post to choose between 100% of the earnings go to Steem Dollars (SBD), 50% goes to SBD and 50% goes to your Steem Power, or not to claim any earnings made from the post.
Because of the above, you do not get to choose how much $ goes to Steem, Steem Power, Steem Dollars, or Steem Savings. In order to do so, you have to switch some monies from Steem Dollars into Steem, and then you can distribute from there.
It's faster to switch Steem Dollars to Steem in the Market rather than doing it directly in your wallet (where it takes 3.5 days or something).

THE BEST PART.

The best part is the community. I have met some real great people in these 7 days who make me want to come back for more. There's a huge #homesteading community, and it's growing everyday. There's a ton of help for newbies, and no one yet has made me feel dumb for asking a question.

Then there's the bonus. Which is commenting, sharing, and creating content can make you some money. That's usually why people come here, but the reason they stay is for the community. At least, that's why I'm staying.

Thank you to everyone who has made my experience a positive one so far here on Steemit. You all deserve big ol' hugs, but you'll just have to imagine it, cause I'm not a hugger. :D Ha.

I've got nothing but high hopes for this place!

As always, Hive account@farmstead blogging from FarmsteadSmith.