Yesterday I got the badge reminding me that my full first year passed here on Steemit. It is just one year but I feel like it exists forever. I still remember the first weeks and months, how exciting it was to be part of this project. I was on holidays a few days after I started my account. It was so new and revolutionary, I could not put my phone away. My friends were laughing at me when I was showing them that my comments were getting a few cents. They were joking that next year holidays are on me because I am getting so rich :)
I spent first months learning about the platform from posts here and from youtube. 
Hive account@jerrybanfield was the loudest there and with a huge collection of tutorials. He was so enthusiastic and creating the impression that everybody can succeed on this platform. I started believing because look at his high paid posts and poor quality of the videos when compared to my previous benchmark, smartpassiveincome.com. He looked like wannabe Pat Flynn minus talent and charisma but still very successful on this still growing platform. I don't feel supertalented either so starting early would give me an advantage in my field :) I started showing my toys and figurines and imagined great future where I can supplement my income from writing about the process of making them. I quickly started discovering that the posts are not seen by many people. I explained to myself that I don't have followers. So I started using promotional services, mostly 
Hive account@minnowbooster to put my post in front of peoples eyes. It helped a little, back then there was this small icon of an eye showing how many people opened my post. Later it was removed, probably because it could show that you could get a hundred upvotes while just 10 people opened the post. I had my ups and downs but I started investing my own hard earned cash to gain some influence here and make my upvotes matter. Then there was this huge ride up and it looked I will be able to fund next holidays with my posts. Especially after one of them was discovered by a curator from 
Hive account@curie and gained some bucks. I added another thousand euro to the pot and continued writing. The numbers of followers were growing but my posts were still seen but just a few people. I started getting few small auto votes and understood, that the successful writers get them too, but from more powerful friends who they probably met during one of the steemfest events. It is great and bad at the same time. It gives higher payment but still is not a sign that the post is good quality or it matters to anybody. I read many posts from the top of the trending list and most of them was the waste of time but they were promoted by a growing number of bots. It must be a great business in delegating the power or selling votes so I tried it too with the quite small SP I was buying for cash at 3 and even 4usd levels. Then comes the crash what made me approx 3500 euro poorer than a year ago plus hundreds of hours invested in this platform at this stage.
I will hold my Steem Power for longer, at this stage, it does not make sense to sell it anyways. I see the enthusiasm of developers and real believers on the stage of Steemfest. I hope they are right and this is just the early stage of development of something new and revolutionary. I wish the improvements were implemented much faster but also understand that it is harder than I can imagine. I wish I was programer and help with this development but I am just an artist trying to work on my craft and sometimes sharing it with the world. Will be trying it here, with the hope that someday the system will start showing it to the people interested in this subject. If not, my website http://themodelmaker.net/ is always active and possible to find on google. I don't care about this SMT until the trending is broken. Please fix it first before spending resources on another way of creating fake money and fake value. Let the quality win, change incentives that we don't need to post crap to upvote it with bots to be successful here and we can find value in just watching like everywhere else. I want to see well-known artists posting here instead of Instagram. They will not come here if their work just disappears among quick napkin sketches. That's my birthday wish :)
