So I've been here on Steemit for just about 2 months and I thought I would share my thoughts with my fellow Steemians about some of the things that I've learned here so far and why I think that Steemit has so much potential. I used the word potential because I still think the platform has to improve in a few different ways, but that's also something that I want to talk about.
Community
Now I'll start off with the subject of the community and what I think makes it so different to all other social media platforms. First of all everyone who is on this platform are all so friendly and helpful. That is something that I've noticed right off the bat, whenever I needed some help I found people who were willing to comment and go that extra mile with explaining the how and why of this or that. Not necessarily on posts that I wrote about, but posts made by others, and any time that I had a question then there was always someone there to lend a helping hand.
I also found that the community was extremely respectful of peoples thoughts and if they did disagree with something that was posted, unless of course in the rare circumstance that the post was slagging someone who is on the platform off, or someone had generally done something frowned upon and just wrong like copying someone else's material, then the debate, or rather should I say discussion as it's less aggressive sounding, was very amicable and interesting which had helped the discussion move forward instead of talking down and name calling etc.
I think with the fact that people are here to earn money on posts and discussions, that there is a sense that people are more respectful to each others views, as they possibly look on the other side of it and think to themselves that they want to gain followers and rewards for their posts and comments, because if they resorted to name calling and heated arguments then they would quickly lose respect and possibly people who already followed them.
Someone who can have a very sensible debate without all of the nonsense is a man that you should follow 
Moving Steemit Forward
I think there is most definitely room for improvement with the platform in terms of giving more visibility to minnows who are joining Steemit in the hope of making some money.
I agree that we all have to earn respect and consistently post quality pieces to gain the followers who will in turn upvote your posts, but I think we need to improve on it by possibly setting up an option of selecting posts by reputation score, which will hopefully allow us all to search for new, interesting people to the platform, which would allow minnows who post to have their posts stay in the eye of many for longer instead of being pushed down the list, for only but a handful of views.
This would also be extremely good if we could have something similar to the 'hot' and 'trending' tabs where the most popular and usually more respected authors are more likely to be found, where people under a certain reputation score would be separated from the people who may be considered whales.
Of course this would just be a filter option as this could be unfair to whales, who have put in many, many hours into the platform and contributed a lot more than most, be it with investing their own money or the countless hours of writing fantastic posts for us all.
As the platform is still very young I can see many more experimental phases and more hard forks in the future, but it's better to do it now than when there are millions of users on Steemit. Millions of users on Steemit...Sounds more fitting I think.
Learned
I think I have learned quite a lot so far about Steemit, the way the reward system works, how to improve writing, where to find help with many different apps like Discord where you can chat online with fellow Steemians, how to find yourself in terms of what you want to write about and how to keep viewers, who followed you because they like what you wrote previously on a particular topic, plus much, much more.
I've learned to also try and help newbies and minnows alike in learning more about the ways of the platform and advice on some things, which I think we all have a responsibility in doing.
I've also learned that following people for the sake of an extra digit on your followers list in return, doesn't really make sense at all either, because what's the point if you never upvote and support each other?
Money
I think the platform's future is bright, very bright actually, I've seen people flock over to Steemit from platforms like YouTube where they didn't earn much, but who have joined Steemit and have seen themselves take a massive pay rise each month.
I've read posts about people who have quit their day job because they are now earning a fairly decent wage in blogging, and this can only be a totally awesome thing for developing nations, which can hopefully motivate people to join here, not only to earn so much more money than what they earn at the moment, but to also discover what I have discovered, and that is the simple fact that I found that I love to write (or type), just writing in general is actually very enjoyable.
I was told by someone who has been very helpful to myself and many others here, who goes by the name 
I do believe that the price of STEEM will rise in the next year or 2, not sure where it will head but I think it will be a substantial jump, but I won't get too carried away because I think it will be quite some time before it comes anywhere close to the price of say Facebook, but we can all dream can't we? Let's hope that it turns into reality.
So there you have it, my planned short post has went on and on and turned into something of a short book, but I'm sure those of you who like a good read appreciate longer posts and at the end of the day, we are all here to write and read...AND to make money of course!