First, I'll admit that when I joined the community it was to satisfy both, in equal parts, my curiosity with the technology platform and profit motive...
Okay, that's a lie.
As much as I do love to tinker with technology (IT professional and geek at heart), I didn't even read the FAQ... I was simply here to get paid and figured their were tons of other like minded people who were playing this social media game to get paid, too.
This is my forth active day on SteemIt and I am by no means an expert, but I have grown to appreciate this platform in more than one way. Here is my experience, as a n00b, and an admittedly weird n00b (in a good way).
I was first exposed to SteemIt through the cryptocurrency markets and a crazy bitcoin evangelist that is all over YouTube, 
Status: Intrigued
The first night I created an account, skipped through the FAQ (thinking it would likely be the last visit) and copied a few of my tweets from Twitter, where I'm already quite active, into SteemIt posts, upvoted 10-20 posts, and followed 20 or so people who had feeds that were interesting or I already knew of from other media sources. Then I logged off.
Status: Felt hopeful I would make some cash by the next AM!
The second night, I logged in and found that I had earned 1 to 5 cents on my posts. Wasn't overwhelming, but I was still determined. I started copying a few more of my tweets over, but this time, each one of these posts were generating 30 to 50 cents. I also upvoted another 30-40 posts and followed a bunch of new users who has posted interesting articles.
Status: I was up until 2am (logged in late, but still...)
The third day (notice we went from nights to full days now), I woke up and quickly replied to each reply I had received while in my slumber, generously upvoting everyone and anyone whom I ran across. Throughout the day, I was following people at random with expectations that if with only 15-20 followers I could make 40 cents, what could I do with 500 or 1000. I found every cool article I could find and shamefully copied them verbatim into my blog - I never claimed credit for anyone else's work and I did provide credit for the content to the real authors, photos, too - if that makes me look less like a putz, I'll let you be the judge. (I also did read them so I could respond to replys...I know, not helping much) The reality is that these articles generated nothing - $0. Nada... Not only that, but suddenly I ran out of steem power and was no longer able to upvote posts.
Status: Distraught...
Today, I woke up determined to build my influence through brute force. Where are my fellow profit driven compatriots who can help me get rich, I thought.
1st half of 4th day - Let's get posts resteemed, upvoted, and as many followers as possible. I pondered and came up with the idea to create a post to generate influence synthetically - "Follow Me and I'll Follow You". In the body of this experimental post, "resteem this post, I'll resteem your most popular". Wasn't quite sure what would happen, but figured it couldn't hurt. I've gained quite a few followers, and I've had that post resteemed all over god's green earth with quite a few upvotes but it only generated 6 cents. Are you kidding me, 6 darn cents.... Not only that, but I discovered I was the 1000th person with this idea this month... You will certainly generate followers, wowsers.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@xerxes612/follow-me-i-ll-follow-you
On this post, I also co-founded a FB group, where we quickly gained 15 members and start supporting each other. Pretty cool group.
All said, still earning nothing.
1st half of 4th day cont... - Started googling how this could possibly be that I have all these comments and upvotes but no earnings. I'll tell you, it's very difficult to figure it out on google, not a lot of good sources for truth... After reading countless posts that were not helpful and a few that were, I put together an understanding of how steem power was used in regards to voting power which ultimately affects the profit earnings on any given post. Even though I was working out the math, I had a ton of n00bs upvoting my post (Thanks fellow n00bs!! We'll be whales before you know it) with 0 whales which was why it was generating minimal profits, but I could not accept the reality that lot's of upvotes do not equate to profit.
Status: Humbled... But still doubting...
2nd half of the 4th day - Before heading off to play kickball with our neighborhood team (3-0 baby), I sent off a post simply asking if I was crazy or if indeed what i was thinking was true. Fully expecting to get nailed by trolls - there really is nothing like a troll to drive home a message, so I was ready for it. The responses from a couple whales...
-Be more genuine.
-Learn the technology.
-Recognize that this is a social media platform first, profit center second. People are not interested in a space full of people attempting to game the system and that behavior could potentially damage the platform.
The key is to be genuine and treat this platform like any other social media platform and it will lead to profitability. The reality is that this is no different then, say, Twitter for example. On Twitter if I wanted to have influence, I would/try to both compose posts with interesting content (insight/entertainment/etc) and behave and in way that would attract people to want to follow me and like the content I am posting. The same holds true with SteemIt.
If your primary motive is profit, it will be telling and will push whales from you and you'll never make real profits anyway. Beyond that, profit motive is really not what the community is actually trying to accomplish. I was, and still am, rather surprised by that. I had made some assumptions that profit would be the driving force, but it seems that is secondary (or less).
No trolling either... I can't say I don't enjoy a well placed and well delivered trolling comment. That said, it is refreshing to find a social media space that appears much more safe than others. Sure, you can prune your FB and Twitter feeds to remove the bad apples, but you remove many people with interesting things to say. Upvoting appears to moderate users and requires them to use good behavior.
Status: Recognizing that I really want to dig into the FAQ tomorrow and learn more about the platform and feeling like I'll be staying around in the SteemIt community for the foreseeable future.
And kind of sort of wishing I hadn't posted all those earlier posts since I can't ever delete them (at least I'm pretty sure, kind of the whole idea of a blockchain, right - but then again, I've not even read the FAQ!!!
