I joined Steem just a few days ago last year, and wow has it been quite a journey.
I had heard about Steem for a few weeks from 
I did this writing challenge for many weeks until around May when I was being discouraged by the lack of engagement in my posts even though I had 300+ followers the rampant bidbots and fake accounts, and more. I then left Steem for a long time...
And came back! Throughout the time I was away I had checked in every once in a while but didn’t really interact. But when I watched Steemit Inc’s interview with 
And wow, was I met with so much more engagement, votes, and resteems by doing development on Steem. If I was to say the biggest things that stopped my progress before it would be a) not going on Discord or steem.chat and b) not doing development. Especially with 
I started by working on a turn-based game with Steem, but then realized that I had brought way too much complexity into the project and that in fact it would be better to make a tool that did the things that I had already made: being able to stream transactions and have them trigger events to update the state. This tool became steem-state, which reused a lot of the code and knowledge from the turn-based game project. So far steem-state has been utilized in DLUX (
After bringing steem-state into a usable and useful state with the ability to build essentially any DApp on Steem I moved on to work on more projects utilizing this package. That’s where I started Stratos which has become a Communities implementation. I believe communities are essential to solving the many problems which plagued me during my first try at Steem when I first joined. They can be used in multiple ways: as publications like on Medium or more like subreddits (or I guess substeemits).
They allow moderation of posts and easier group curation (if in substeemit form) while also keeping posts immutable and secure on the Steem blockchain. Communities are ways for communities of shared interests to join together in one place rather than the ambiguous boundaries that are tags.
They can be used as publications, or group curated collections of similarly interested posters. On sites like Medium publications such as The Atlantic, Hackernoon, The Mission, The Startup, The Economist, and FreeCodeCamp have grown to become full-scale companies and each one has hundreds of thousands of subscribers, some over half a million, with many more daily readers that have not already subscribed. Hackernoon itself is wanting to set up a Steem-like cryptocurrency of its own in the future based around its publication.
I believe my experience, and others’ too, would be wholly better than before once communities have been implemented.
In the next year on Steem, I hope to improve the quality of the ecosystem as a whole, become a large minnow and maybe even a dolphin, and continue development with Stratos to maybe even use Stratos to link Stratos and Steem with a multitude of blockchains such as EOS, BitShares, Ethereum, and other Steem forks such as WhaleShares.