I noticed this morning that my follower count was: 6,011.

Thank you all for reading and commenting and sharing your ideas with me. I am sorry if I did not comment back, as I am not perfect in this anymore! I once was, but now I do find myself getting too busy with various Steemit related projects, as well as running a crypto class in my city.

THANK YOU SO MUCH! I really owe everything to my readers and supporters. Thanks also to all the whales of Steem who have supported me over the course of a year. I owe special thanks to Hive account@sweetsssj and Hive account@teamsteem because they consistently support me. THANK YOU.

I am really appreciating this generosity, and now that I have been lifted out of the jaws of poverty, I am ready to help others find their purpose and figure out how best to create massive changes.....Steem makes this possible.

Imagine what the world would be like if everyone could wake up and do what they are good at and loved to do?

This is my driving force these days, so that's why I am giving away two trips to Steemfest2. Changemakers are among us, and I am about to find them through Steemit. This site is the ultimate way to find out the true nature of an individual. The tools we have at our disposal are revolutionary. Most of us don't even have barely a fraction of understanding how to use these tools. But I can tell you one thing, now and moving into the future,

Reputation will mean everything.

Think about this for a second: if you lose all your money and you have a shitty reputation, guess what, you won't get your money regenerated. If you have a stellar reputation and you lose all your money, you can regenerate your money. Choose wisely. Which one would you rather have? This will only increase in the future, as transparent blockchains bring this attribute with them.

If you're someone who is operating a self-upvote ring, thereby destroying your reputation, let me tell you something: you are wasting your time. You may think you're clever by getting this "free" money, but you're eroding any respect that people have for you. Once you're caught, well, all I can say is that people won't care to be friends with you. You will probably end up creating a different account and starting over. You don't realize this, but those of us who have been on the platform the longest, are being actively degraded by your actions. You see, you give Steemit a bad name by doing that worthless crap. Then, people who find out about your activities think less of Steemit, thereby driving the price of Steem down. Do you think us investors (yes, Steem turned me from a blogger into an investor) like what you are doing and are just going sit idly by as you drive down the integrity of this place I worked day and night to build up?

Uh, no.

If anything, more people will join Hive account@spaminators and continue to flush out worthless crap from our environment. I am not talking about memes here, I am talking about a voting ring that upvotes a comment that says, "oh". Come on. You're better than that. Steemit is the first place where you can earn for actually being yourself. This is revolutionary. Value is created by you, inside of you......do you need concrete examples of people who are doing it right? People who started with nothing? People who began here without friends or money? I am that person. I didn't have money, but I was idea rich. Steemit is a place where you can mine Steem money with your mind. Pulling stupid stunts is not mining with your mind. It's just being stupid.

If you were really smart you'd stop your bullshit, write an in-depth post about how you set it up, then just come clean. Or better yet, you'd devise solutions to problems that still plague a lot of people in here. You're wasting my time, but I will not ignore your bullshit. More and more are not going to sit by, for I think they realize that by being actively aware, and full of action, we can change the world, and it starts by not looking the other way when stupid shit passes by.

There are so many creative ideas that have yet to be hatched on Steemit, it's mind-boggling. Speaking of mind-boggling, I want to highlight a newbie who I found extremely entertaining and wonderfully absurd, his name is Hive account@stevenalexander and here is the video that provided me with endless entertainment the other night. We need more of this, and less of the bullshit zero value upvote comment rings:

You can vote for his original post here because it's only 3 days old: https://steemit.com/music/@stevenalexander/i-tried-to-be-creative-things-got-weird-lol

That's creativity. That's originality. For me, that is what I'd like to see more of: going for it, and going all in.

HOW WILL YOU GO ALL IN TODAY?

I probably need to start another contest....first I have to figure out who will win 2 trips to Steemfest2!

Carry on and thank you for giving a crap about what I have to say,
Stellabelle