Greetings Steemians! Welcome to the first installment of what I'm thinking may be an ongoing series discussing my experience here on Steemit. As many of you know, I've only been on Steemit for approximately 5 days now. I am completely new to blogging on social media, I've never used Reddit or Twitter, I don't have a YouTube channel, and cryptocurrencies and blockchains are things I'm still trying to wrap my head around. I was actually one of those MySpace holdouts when Facebook started really taking over. This whole thing is something completely new to me. I've had several things that I've spent quite a bit of time reading up on and thinking about over the last 5 days and I thought it might be interesting to document my thoughts and experience thus far.
I'm still trying to figure out the whole formatting my posts thing as well as trying to figure out how to find and use free public domain type images for posts like this that I don't really have any relevant images to post with it. I expect it to take me awhile to figure all of that stuff out as I only have so much time, and I'd rather focus on the actual content for now and perfect my formatting and such over time. Bear with me.
For this post, just to keep it from being too monotonous, I'm going to drop a couple of random pet pics in (Have I mentioned that I live in a house with 7 dogs and 4 cats? No, they aren't all mine, I'm not a pet hoarder, ha!).
My number one observation from the past 5 days, Steemit doesn't seem to have the negativity that is all over Facebook these days. I get on FB and it's a bunch of angry political stuff or inane bs memes. There's very little real substance to it anymore. I find myself getting aggravated pretty quickly.
I've looked at a lot of content on here the past 5 days. Some of it was really good. Some of it, not so much. I even came across my first copy pasted article earlier today, not credited at all. That was disappointing. But I've also read other posts that have made good suggestions, like picking one day a week to dedicate to resteeming the highest quality posts that you've come across that week from people who are still just newbie minnows to help give quality new users more exposure. I'm probably going to implement that particular idea.
One I haven't been implementing is the follow for a follow. I love all of my followers (I mean holy crap, I actually have followers! How did that even happen?!), but if I look at the history of what you've posted and there's nothing there that I would even remotely be interested in, there's really no point in me following you back. My follow does zero good if I'm not interested enough in the things you post about to actually be interacting with any of your content.
I had a few minutes of excitement yesterday when I discovered I had a $9 upvote on one of my comments courtesy of one of the bots on the site. It was actually really encouraging.
I've spent a lot of time trying to come to a basic understanding of blockchains, cryptocurrency, STEEM, SP, SBD, etc. Most of that stuff is still unintelligible technobabble to my brain. If anyone has any posts or links to discussions of these things for morons, please post them in the comments. I've decided that for now, until I have a better understanding of these things, that I'm just going to put everything into powering up
I've toyed with the idea of starting a blog for awhile now. My main issue was always that I didn't want to waste my time writing posts that no one was going to ever even see. Because let's face it, I didn't want to have to jump through a bunch of hoops to attract followers and advertise and crap. Always just seemed like more hassle than it was worth. Enter Steemit. When I made my first post 5 days ago, I really didn't expect to get any upvotes or comments. I really have pretty low expectations as to my ability to make money on here. I was really pleasantly surprised by the response I received. I figured I'd be lucky to have 5 followers by the end of the first week. Day 5, I have 14 followers! Wow. I know that seems minute and insignificant to many of you. For me, it's exciting. Shoutout to those 14 followers! Thank you so much for making my first 5 days here so great!
Thanks for visiting my post. As always, if you have comments, questions, suggestions, etc. please leave them below. I have lots of content planned, so stick around, I'm just getting started. Happy Steeming!