I've been on steem for a month now.
I had missed steem, and was not happy with myself, when I learned about it from some bitcoin news site. I have followed Dan in the past and was impressed with what he did. I own bitshares and watch anything crypto pretty closely. How could I have missed it!
I got my first real rush when an article I wrote about a lion hunt went above $1900. That was really cool. I woke up in the middle of the night and saw what happened. It reminded me of when i won my first online poker tournament. that also happened in the middle of the night.
Writing on steem to me feels like playing poker tournaments. Every time you play there is lots of luck involved to win, however if you play well you will win over the long run. Only if you win the whole thing, can you actually make money. If you make the final table regularly but don't make it to the top, it will be hard to win in the long run. You really need to win in order to be successful.
In steem it feels the same way. I feel I got lucky, but since then I have never made it above a few $. To me that difference is a little too much. I think it would be better for the community if the payouts were a little more even.
However it is better than anything else on the market. At least until some other blockchain social media system hits the market (ps. I am also invested in a few others social projects such as AMP and NEM).
When I heard of steem I bought a little right away at $0.70. Then I read the white paper and liked it and bought more and more. Starting at around $4 all the way until today at around $0.8. Anything I made via posting I have re-invested as well.
You can see how my vest have been going up steadily. When the price started to tank I just thought that the platform has lots of potential so I started to accumulating. I have done this a lot and for kinda for more btc than I wanted originally.
Today I fired one more time. In tournaments, buy ins are often referred to as bullets. Most tournaments allow you to re-enter when you bust, and the amount of buy its are referred to as bullets.
Every time I bought more steem and powered them up right away, I figured the price has to go up again. This time I will have to stop, simply because of how much I have put into the steem so far.
I am confident in steem because I think overall I like the economics of it as well as many features of the blockchain. I also am impressed with the user growth of steem. I have seen many people post really cool things that you cannot find anywhere in this quality and frequency. I have read many interesting technical post as well as personal stories. You can see how people are trying hard to earn rewards by writing good content. The system is working.
There are a few things that I find troublesome:
- Activity has been stagnant according to the stats (even though it feels like more and better content is popping up all the time). While user growth can be seen every day, the amount of votes and post have not been going up since I joined even though the amount of users has roughly tripled in one month.
- I think the voting does not work as well as expected. I find myself voting like a robot for things that i think will go viral, vs things that i like. My curation reward is usually between 0.01SP and 7SP. A huge difference. Of course I try to hunt the big rewards, instead of rewarding who and what I like. In fact I have voted for many post I thought were bad and things i did not like, just because I thought it was profitable.
- The curve between highest paying post and low paying post as well as the ones in the middle is way to high in my opinion. I think there are many good posts that do not get rewarded, and others that are not that amazing that get way overrated.
However overall I think the positives outweigh the negatives immensely and the issues can also be fixed. Steemit has shown how flexible they can be and steem is still in beta. I am excited for the future of steem. While I might have to be less of a user, due to the time vs reward I put into this site and more of a by stander/investor only, I will try to keep active and contribute to the value of this platform.