I've been on Steemit for a few months now and I want to share with you some thoughts. I will leave monetary considerations to other users as I guess that's all they talk about when talking about steemit, in this post I will focus on everything else.
So we have been spending hours or days on this platform, this means that everyday we have to withdraw a very precious currency from our account: time. Once you spend it you can't get it back, are we spending our time wisely? Let's see what I received back in return for my time.
Better writing: Since we spend most of our time here writing I guess the first perk is to improve our writing. This may not be a big deal for native English speakers but it is for me since I'm italian. Not only I feel my writing is improving every week but also my writing speed is increased. Now it takes me much less time to construct sentences and it feels more natural and less awkward.
Interact with people: Steemit lacks a messaging system so users have to rely on other services to keep in touch. One popular option for community is to gather in discord servers. Compared to other chats, usually I find community-based servers to be somewhat more focused topic-wise. Ideas flow, you get to discover new users and learn about their personality and sometimes when reading their posts you can almost imagine a distintive voice in your mind. The funny thing is that when you then happen to be in a vocal chat with these users you realize you got their voice completely wrong in your mind, but that's ok, conversation is the gateway for connection and because of steemit we can connect with many people.
A window into human psychology: Let me tell you, everyday I am learning a lot about human behavior on this platform. Maybe it's because of the monetary reward of the posts but users are very emotional. I lost interest in other platforms like facebook because users expose the fake side of their life, they go out of their way to show that everything is awesome and if an alien was to try to learn something about the human race just by looking at out facebook posts they would conclude that we are a dumb race. On steemit is different, at least in some cases, some users try to write interesting content. The initial motivation to write was surely the monetary reward but if I can twist a bit Picasso's words: "if you want to know what you are going to write you have to begin to write". Especially if you happen to be inside a steemit community you soon can learn what motivates people, what bothers them and when they get greedy. Learning how to engange is challenging, hopefully one day we will learn to struck the right chord.
Learning: this one is obvious. I am a curator for 
Organize my thoughts: Sometimes we have our thoughts swarming in our head like bees around a hive. When I write I have to organize my thoughts, give them structure and this is also helping me in my real life, especially about thinking more clearly, elaborate and convey ideas in a more effective way. More knowledge + better thoughts organization = you become more interesting as a person. At least you will always have something interesting to say and you will instictively try to provide value also in your real-life conversations.
See myself in others: We all have stumbled upon users that really annoy us. Initially I was letting the emotional part of my brain to take over and ruin my day, now I try to rationalize more and when I meet such individuals the first thing I ask myself is: what about myself? Do I behave like that? Sometimes you will find out you would be extremely annoyed if you were to meet another copy of yourself :)
Life is not fair: That's the first lesson that users like me had to learn on steemit from day one. I started by having zero contacts in here and I grew on my own before joining other communities. I used to get mad when I was seeing users writing idiotic post and making hundreds of $ while my posts were making cents. You learn to let go as every thought is like a seed. If you plant the negatives ones soon weed (not "that weed") will fester in your mind.
Overall these are some quite valuable things so yes, I think my time here was well spent. If you then add also monetary rewards and some great connections I made I think it was definitely worth it.
And what was your experience on steemit? Please share it with us and feel free to leave a comment
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