Steem as a blockchain is new and experimental. I have been a part of this community for 8 months now and have experienced some turbulent *(but exiting)* times.
The platform continues to grow bit by bit and keeps onboarding a couple of thousand new users per week constantly. I never experienced the STEEM price at 0,25 cents *(I would be at least dolphin if I had)* but the price has hovered around 1 dollar for most of the time till november.
I joined in august and was able to start blogging and make some money and power that up.
In the beginning I was very happy to get a couple of cents on my posts and I faithfully powered those up. Then I got a couple of whale votes and also powered those up.
This gave me a small voice here and I have from the beginning spent a whole lot of time reading blogs and commenting on them *(most of the time even in a meaningful way)*. Those comments earned me more then my posts back then. And I was grateful for that in a sense I did not even feel the need to go around and beg for them on whales.
I can understand that not everyone has the opportunity to invest money to buy Steem tokens (like I did, for in total 200 steem)
I also lived through the rise of the bots and I was using minnowbooster to get a little edge on my posts. In the beginning there was no real issue with them and even the bidbots were profitable and I did not really see massive (ab)use. Now its almost impossible to use them without taking a loss. So I use Smartsteem that lets me break even on my investment which is enough.
Lately I do see a lot of newcomers on steem that are attracted by the concept (just like me) but I guess the difference with a lot of them is that they do not take the trouble to try and understand how the whole thing works. There are huge dynamics here and they are constantly changing and evolving.
Being new does not make it OK to go around and:
- spam people
- beg for votes/resteems
Instead of chasing small upvotes by grinding out 500 comments per day (I think on an hourly rate you make less) just read a post and make a few thoughtful comments.
But what kind of annoys me is that some people feel entitled to receive my vote just because I happen to have gathered a bit of SP