Hey everyone,

exactly one year ago I created an account on Steemit.

Unfortunately, I do not know Steemit catched my attention. But that doesn't matter, because I am pretty sure it was the right decision! :-)

What I've learned

Quality is not quality at all

Sometimes it does not matter how good the quality of ones article is. Sometime I see Steemians just putting a link to a news article into a post (nothing more) and earn pretty high rewards. Others write excellent articles, shoot awesome pictures or try to find the truth out there - but these people do not get much attention sometimes, what is pretty sad in my eyes.

Some whales abuse their high voting power

I've often seen Steemians that are trying to find the truth out there - no matter what truth exactly. And sometimes, even if the post is very good and qualitatively, there are some people that downvote such posts because they doesn't fit into their opinion or world view. I even saw whole downvote flashmobs where huge whales made flagging calls against single Steemians over here (I do not want to mention any names but I think many people know about what person(s) I am talking about). And their reason why? Simply because they say that the opinion of the "truther" is bullshit. That's all. They are abusing their huge voting power to downvote people so intensive that their account is almost useless afterwards. Their reputation goes down very quick while the whale with its huge SP does not even bat an eyelid.

Do not sell all of your SP lol

A friend of mine got the bad idea to power down all of his SP. Now his account is useless :-) So remember: Never sell all your voting power - always keep at least 5 SP in your account!

Resteem services are a good thing - when they are active

I wanted to test resteem services several times. If they work, they work pretty good. It's a good way to increase your range - when they are active. I think I've tried out it about 10 times. But only 6 or 7 times of all these tries it worked. The other 3 to 4 services were simply not active anymore. So: always check the latest transactions of the resteem service and compare them to their latest resteems. Sometimes you see Steemians sending 1 SBD or so to the service but the service didn't resteem anything since a month or so. In this case the service is probably not active anymore. So better check it twice before wasting your SBD or STEEM!

There are pretty much good applications to use on the STEEM blockchain

One of my favorites is Hive account@partiko! It's a mobile device app that allows you to use Steemit at least as good as steemit.com itself. Pretty nice about Partiko is their loyality program. Everytime you vote, comment or post something on Steemit with the app you will earn so called Partiko points. You can use this points to upvote your own posts. For example you can use 1000 Partiko points while writing a post. After posting it, you will get an upvote from Partiko. The more Partiko points you are holding in your account, as more likely you will receive a random upvote, too! And another very cool function: You can send personal messages with their app. Check it out here!. But there are also many other apps that has an awesome use case like Hive account@dtube or Hive account@steepshot.

Use your tags wisely

In the first few weeks on Steemit I was a bit confused about its usage. A important point I realized a little bit late: the use of tags should be chosen wisely. The first tag is the most important one. It classifies the main topic of your post. For example if you write an article about how to learn coding: do not use a too detailed term such as python, java or functions as your first tag/main tag, because not many people will search for the tag 'functions'. It's better to use way more general terms such as coding, howto, tutorial or guide or something. Maybe that's not the best exmaple but I hope you are understanding what I am trying to say anyways :-)

Steemit is a good way to earn some basic income

At the moment I am holding 141 SP in my account (125 SP + 16 SP delegation). With this small amount I am earning up to 0.17 SP a week. At the moment of writing that are approximately 0.04$ a week only by upvoting others posts. I know that this sounds like it is not that much. But think about this: at its all time high the STEEM price was about 8.60$ per STEEM. In this case, the SP I am earning weekly is worth about 1.46$ a week, what is pretty nice. And now imagine where the STEEM price will go the next 5-10 years :-) SP is perfect for being HODLed!
A quick advice: There is an automated upvote service called Hive account@steemdunk. You can try it out here.. Once you've found a few Steemians that always post good quality content, you can configure Steemdunk so it will upvote every post of them automatically. That's a nice feature for those who have not the time to travel through Steemit articles the whole day.

Censorship was yesterday

The STEEM blockchain is a very nice way to prevent information from being censored (for example criticism of the government). Once it's uploaded on the blockchain, it can't be removed. The only way to censor posts a little bit is flagging then until they automatically gets hidden due to low ratings. But real Steemians click on "Show post" anyways :-)

The STEEM project is HUGE!

There are so many crypto currencies out there nowadays. Most of them does not even have a real use case. Some of them have a theoretically use case that does not get realized - others has a practically use case that does not gets used or does not solve any problem.
STEEM is the farther of use cases. I think I don't know any other blockchain that has such an efficient use case as STEEM does. You can transfer money within seconds, share your thoughts to the world (and get paid for it), support good quality content or even just surf around and look out for information. People in not well educated countrys have the ability to search for information or even create their own! And the best thing: They can transfer and earn money without needing any 3rd party such as a bank. This is a huge step in the right direction!