Hello Steemians! When I look at this community, I'm amazed because of the way it is constructed.
A flock of new Steemians come every day. With big ambitions, and with no visions how to make them reality, they start posting. A month passes, no major payouts, the majority of them leaves. That is the standard human behaviour, we want things quick, we want them right now! We don't want to put too much effort into something and get little or nothing in return!
That is completely natural, it's an evolutionary mechanism. In the past, it served a simple purpose, it prevented people from wasting calories and time on minimally yielding activities. That's the reason why we stopped foraging for berries and started growing them in our gardens... We made food closer to us and easier to pick. Later on, people developed grain crops that made us even lazier. We were able to grow a field of food, harvest it all at the same time and storage it for years! Not only that, but the carbs from the grain last longer as a form of energy compared to fruit sugar. Slowly but surely, we made our existance free of existential fear.
Or did we?
Nowadays, it's not the food anymore. Money is what worries people. We need money to survive.
Or do we?
A universal representation of value, it sounds very useful compared to the trade in goods. The reason is simple, I can't trade my tomatoes for your wheat if you don't want the tomatoes. That's where money comes in, everyone wants money!
"Cash rules everything around me, CREAM get the money, dollar dollar bill ya'll!" - Wu Tang Clan
On here, it's the crypto that rules everything around us... Whales make this system what it is. Whoever has STEEM POWER, he has power in the community. He chooses what will be on the trending page, who will get rewarded and ultimately, he gets way more attention from minnows.
If we imagine STEEM is life, the easiest way to stay alive is to appeal to the whales.
To understand how to do that, we have to understand the way a whale thinks.
Whales are infact investors. They want a return on the money they have locked in the STEEM POWER. As opposed to other cryptocurrencies, STEEM is not a passive income. The investors on here have to put in some kind of effort to make their investment grow (unless other people do that). Some do that by simply posting and upvoting their own posts.
That strategy is highly uneffective. Let's not forget - this is a social media platform! We need positive social interactions to make it work... If you're a whale and you upvote only yourself, you create an atmosphere of selfishness and shy off new users and investors.
Most whales grow their investment with curation - they make sure quality content is visible on trending and hot pages and the author is incentivized to continue doing whatever it is that he's doing. In some way, life on STEEM is different than pure survival - the best route to take is not the easiest one, but the one that provides most benefit to the WHOLE community.
Let's summarize this - if you want to make money on STEEM, consistently post quality content, be a positive member of the community and interact with other people. All of these things bring up your probability to get voted by high-stake users (whales)!
To end, I'll quote Apache Indian since the song inspired me for this article:
"Nothing good in life comes easy,
nothing good in life comes quick,
the best things in life
you have to work for my friend"
