Welcome to steem, @piakamala! Great intro post, and fascinating reading. Yeah, the learning curve in crypto and then steem/steemit is steep, and you'll find contradictory information out there, and some information almost totally lacking. I think this is one of the biggest barriers to widespread adoption of something like steem. But like you, I was pretty blown away when I found out about the steem concept. It has such massive potential if done right.
As you say, the platform looks hokey, and it's hard to filter out the crud. But when you do managed to do it, you'll find some really great bloggers here to follow.
Regarding searching and filtering, I built a beta app 6 months ago or so, which worked quite well at finding better content, but it was widely held that around Christmas time (last Christmas) steemit would be updating their website significantly to include a number of features I had developed in a couple of my apps, so I didn't really continue on with it. Of course, no update came, and i still find myself wondering if I should restart some of the apps I put on hold. To be honest, I'm done with steem dev. Let others deal with all the roadblocks.
I'm giving serious thought to travel/photo blogging in India and Iran and (?), and surviving off steem income. In principle it sounds great, but I just don't know. But I love following some of the travel bloggers here to get inspiration and try and understand better the practicalities of living off crypto. That's why I'll be following you now. ;). Look forward to reading more of your thoughts.
Can I recommend @diabolika to you? She's a travel blogger who I think has a fantastic "stream of consciousness" style of writing, and she encompasses a lot of fascinating and even existential thoughts in her writing.
Cheers, and good luck here!
Ciao @revo! Many thanks for your reply and welcome! As a newcomer it's hard to ween myself off a beautiful instagame feed that is all GREAT, professional quality, easily curated, thoughtful photography and replace it with what I've found on steemit. Obviously there are great producers here but there's a lot of other, as you say "crud," to dig through to find and connect with curating a feed that's would truly inspire me and gain a commitment of my time. Given my current lifestyle, time on wifi can sometimes be too limited and therefore precious to get lost unfruitfully searching steemit and also hard to engage on discord. I also find it highly ironic that the search feature is google and has ads. The drop down menu below "all content" and "my feed" is extraordinarily random and devastatingly incomplete. Explaining and introducing steemit to others is really difficult when you scroll through the trending with them as an illustration and it's frankly hard to incite and capture someones attention to want to browse other than conversing about comparative social media quality while confusedly gawking at upvote values. I am however embracing the technological learning curve as the price of entry to be an early adopter and hope, despite your Christmas reference, that UX and UI will exponentially improve.
I honor and commend your work in building applications though! The most I can contribute is content. I've been asking/expecting from the universe "getting paid well to be me." Steeming my travel lifestyle is obviously idyllic and I really would like to ultimately master the dtube scene as well but I also wonder about the practicality until you have a devoted following which as illustrated above I find slightly difficult to attain.
As of today I've an offer after the Caribbean season descends into hurricanes (July) to go sailing in Fiji. I am desperate to go and will photo document as always my experiences and prod myself away from a trained presence and into a narrated blog but if I were to produce videos I literally might be months without wifi to upload, gain votes, and finance that or the next trip. I still am super optimistic I can make it work but a window of July and with my hope to still be sailing the Caribbeans until then, with more regular than the South Pacific, but still intermittent wifi, feels like just a dream today. But hey! I've only just introduced myself; I'm only getting started! And I BELIEVE so perhaps my dream will come true!
Be well; create a beautiful day!I genuinely appreciate the follow and @diabolika recommendation!
Stick with it. It takes a while to get noticed and get a following here. But the excellent work @theaustrianguy has done in the last few months with his @welcome thingy has been really good for helping obviously talented and interesting individuals to get off to a good start here. You've already got a level of following that it used to take most people months to get. So you are off to a flying start. :)