Awesome story. I just recently joined. About two weeks ago. The first week was alright. During the second week I found that the way people were upvoting changed drastically. No longer people upvoted my posts or my comments... instead they mainly upvoted their own comments.
I hope this behavior gets addressed and fixed in some way. Helping each other by rewarding upvotes on good content or comments is what it's about in my opinion. The platform needs to grow still in the curation game. Guess that's why Steemit still is in beta.
Yes, it is a challenge as it is totally new. Nothing like it has ever existed before. This means it also has new problems. Those people self-up voting their own comments have been noticed. It will not go well for them in the long run if they keep at it. I'd not worry too much about them. Keep writing things you enjoy to write. Many of my early posts made $0. This was at a time when people getting over $10,000 for a post was not uncommon. I just kept writing. I stopped worrying about how to make money. I instead worried about what I wanted to write about next. I wrote about whatever inspired me, and if it made money great, if it didn't I still had something of me stored in the blockchain. Some of my personal favorite posts I wrote made almost nothing, and some of them did make nothing.
I have found an awesome community in my three weeks here. I'll follow you valderrama, and i'll upvote you if you write stuff I like.
My main social media platform until now has been Twitter, which is all like retweet like like, retweet like retweet.
I have found it a bit hard to acclimatise to Steemit, to be honest (see my post https://steemit.com/steemit/@drwom/original-content-vs-resteeming#@drwom/re-bulleth-re-drwom-original-content-vs-resteeming-20170706t205532872z for example!) but I'm trying a few things.
I really want to get 500 Steem in my power up, so I'll be able to better divide up my upvotes. At the moment, I can only upvote 10 things a day at my full 0.10 upvote - and if I upvote more than 10 things, my upvote power goes down ie to 0.03 or something. And then it takes days and days of being really frugal to get back to 100%.
With enough steem power behind me, I'll be able to better allocate my upvotes, because you can set the amount of upvote you want to give.
Anyways, hang in there. I look forward to reading something from you.
Oh I will continue doing exactly that. Writing about whatever comes to mind whenever I got the time for it. And I'm curious to find out how steemit will evolve. It's a lot of fun to be a part of it.
Thanks for your upvote, I appreciate it.
Sometimes too the votes just are worse for a week or two, due to bad luck or timing or whatever. I know of my posts earn way less than I expect, even after 6 months, but then others earn very well.