I registered for free and got an account in 2017.
Things have CHANGED since 2017. You got in early enough. Those coming in NOW are under a whole new rule-set. Resource credits changed everything, so you can't compare yourself with new users. Go start a new account now and see how much you can do on here without some help.
@happyme, yes, resource credits can be tough to gather at first, the smaller you are. It is like a snowball effect. So, it depends on how much RC one might start with. Compared to whales, even after two years, my account is still pretty small.
New users, now, have to be very patient at first.
Exactly. And who has patience these days? And for what? To earn dust votes that get burned because they are too small to register? Why would anyone want to get on board a sinking ship?
I'm not saying that Steem is actually sinking, but to outsiders looking in I would think it surely looks that way. Bitcoin has doubled in value and Steem is still going down despite most other crypto's following bitcoin. Heck, some insiders might even be convinced that Steem is sinking.
I think it is extremely important at this point in time that Steem presents a good face to the general public. The sad part is that it still seems like Steemit is driven by techno-geeks rather than people who study human nature and know how to design appealing user interfaces and reward systems.
If people don't like it, they could try Gab.com or Minds.com or maybe others. People could try websites like Weku and Bear Shares and Smoke.io and others who try to copy the format of Steem.
If Steem does not get it's act together, then a competitor system might be able to go main stream before Steem does. I was developing a website called Mea Omnia in 2011 and it was supposed to be like Steemit in some ways and this was before I knew anything about Steemit. But our MeaOmnia.com project died. But I would be tempted to try again and compete with Steem. I am a bit of a web designer but I'm not a programmer. I don't know a lot of code.
But people can try to make Steem better. We can try to push them to improve Steem. People can and should also, at the same time, try to push other people to build competitors to Steem. If Steem continues to lose, then we jump ship to better platforms. I copy and paste my Steemit articles to Weku, Bear Shares, Serey, Dream Real, and sometimes Smoke. These are 5 alternatives to Steem.
The loyalty is waning.