Why does a bee collect nectar?
This post is my response to @snook's challenge. You can read about what the challenge is about here: https://steemit.com/dtube/@snook/kmug58quf73
@snook asked the following questions:
How did I get here?
Why am I still here?
How did I get here?
I was introduced to Steem by my friend @gamer00 in February 2017. Steem was in a bad place back then. I didn't know much about it, though. I wrote an introductory post, which was upvoted by over a hundred people but it was only worth $1 in the end. I didn't come back until June 2017.
I didn't really grasp what Steem was all about in the beginning. Decentralization didn't mean much to me. The rewards didn't amount to much of anything in the spring of 2017 because the bubble of the summer of 2016 had burst and the price of STEEM was close to the all-time low of 7 cents. I had been very active on various social media platforms for a quarter of a century by then but I was busy with other things. I recall @gamer00 making a sizable investment in STEEM. I didn't pay much attention. In retrospect, I should have.
In June 2017, Bitcoin and the just about every altcoin had rallied to new highs. Steem had rocketed from 7 cents to over $2. There was suddenly a lot more actity on chain. It felt absolutely amazing to write a blog post and see $20 below it at payout time. Under the rules in force back then, the author's cut was 75%, which meant that $20 dollar post would be worth $15 to the author come payout.
Getting paid like that for something that I had been doing for free for 25 years felt like a miracle. I was excited to share my fortune with my friends but to my utter astonishment their reactions were mostly negative or complete silence as if what I told them did not compute at all. I guess it was too good to be true. Some suspected that there had to be a catch. From some I heard stupid nonsense like a content creator wasn't supposed to be paid anything for creating content. (Who, then? The platform?)
The simple truth is that Steem is funded by cryptocurrency investors many of whom believe in the necessity of building a decentralized platform like Steem. Much of the price action particularly in the summer of 2016 and also in 2018 could be explained by completely irrational hype. But for the content creator, being active on Steem has never been a losing proposition so long as one has been able to find others interested in the same topics.
Why am I still here?
No offense, but I find that question a little silly. Where would I go? Why would I leave?
I took up photography in the beginning of 2018 because I saw that many photo bloggers were popular. My friend @gamer00 was in the middle of his 365 photography project. He was raking in pretty good rewards early 2018. For the better part of the year 2018, I only used my smartphone camera. It entirely possible to learn many aspects of photography using very modest gear like that. In October 2018, I bought my first DSLR. The price tanked in November 2018 but that didn't bother me. I found photography incredibly fun and Steem was my turf. I was slowly gaining followers despite Steemians being discouraged by the price going down to 20 cents almost exactly a year ago.
@ocdb had been introduced in June 2018. It allowed users on a whitelist made up of those having been curated by @ocd to buy votes guaranteed to be profitable. Around Christmas 2018, @ocdb was looking for new authors to be added to the whitelist because so many users had stopped posting because of the dismal price action. @harkar suggested that I be added to the list. I'm pretty sure a big part of why I was added to the list was because I had always been big on commenting on other people's posts. Month after month, year after year, I've been placed in the top 10-15 on @abh12345's Engagement League. Of course, my photography had improved. Also, not too many people would show up any longer. I would've done photography every day anyway because of having so much to learn about it and having bought the camera only a couple of months before.
The cryptocurrency markets rallied in the spring and topped out early in the summer. Since then, the price of STEEM has been correcting downwards. It may go even lower than now depending on the price of Bitcoin. But the Bitcoin mining reward halving will take place five months from now. The prospects of positive price action are pretty good for the next 1-2 years. STEEM tends to go up violently in a bull market because most of it is powered up and illiquid.
I've forayed into centralized platforms from time to time. A post of mine has once been censored by Facebook algorithm. On a couple of forums, I've had the administrators take the liberty of moving my messages to existing threads and truncating them without asking me. That is highly annoying. @gamer00 lost access to his Twitter account because of using the abbreviation "kys." in a Finnish language text where it meant "the one in question" because an algorithm mistook that abbreviation for KYS ("Kill Yourself"). Apparently, the algorithm wasn't clever enough to recognize the language. That was months ago and I don't know if he still has his account back.
None of that bullshit is possible on Steem. I'm here because I have no reason to go back to being demonetized and occasionally having my communications interfered with on centralized platforms.
So, there you go.