After years of volatility, up and down, up and down, we are now in a restarted system #newsteem that is very exciting for any decent steemian who only wants to write and curate (with decent amount of Steem). I've been saying all along it is a good time to buy Steem to have a better curation score and to be noticed. The way things are set up it is not ideal to be brand new without any Steem at your desposal, before it could be done, now I fear if you want to have a chance at decent rewards you will need to start with bought Steem. But Why?
Before Steem was free from day one with 5 Steem delegated, now Steem is not exactly "free", new Steem users will very quickly find themselves unable to transact on Steem blockchain once they run out of Resource Credits. Resource Credits are essentially here to reduce the spam on the blockchain, they regenerate every day, but users who have low amounts of Steem Power will be stuck if they try to do many transactions per day. I hope new people are aware about this technical aspect of Steem that was implemented in the Hard Fork 20 one year ago.
RC is almost as troublesome as EOS CPU/RAM or Ethereum Gas, but only if you're completely new and without any Steem Power, looks like there are no true freemium blockchains in reality. Transactions on Steem indeed are fast and free, but RCs are a hidden layer that protects the blockchain from bloating are not limitless, you need to buy and Stake Steem to expand your RC capacity, let's just say it like it is, Steem is not exactly free, it is mostly free but not 100% free for brand new users, but once you buy some Steem than you are golden with free transactions. In the upcoming fork there is talk about RC delegations that could help with the newcomers, so this might just be a short term issue.
There are two key points that still needs to be said if there are people who are not too clear what to do in HF21 considering delegations.
If you want to be an author/content creator on Steem you need to keep your Steem Power for yourself and network around, or be a forever vote buyer which could have some negative side effects, you will overall receive less respect from the community and could possibly become downvoted.
If you want to be a passive investor then probably delegating or selling your vote to a good natured bid bot is fine, but also there are other cool projects out there you can delegate to. Explore around, don't let a huge chunk of reward pool become a bid bots playing ground AGAIN.
Hard Fork 21 is here, it works, we only had one day of issues, that is a good deal in my eyes. Let's see how it plays out in the long run. One last tip, don't be an asshole, downvote an asshole.