Welcome aboard the Steemit Express. Oh, you're brand new here? That seems to be happening a lot right now! Let me give you the tour!
Steemit is a blogging platform that has it's own currency attached to it . The currency is not backed by a federal government. It's backed by users like you and traders that see value in the token. Yes, there are lots of traders. In fact Steemit has recently surpassed bitcoin in terms of numbers of transactions per day.
Right now you're reading a blog post by @aggroed. He's one of around 6000 active users that posts, reads, and votes on the site. The number next to his name "66" is a reputation score. It's an indirect measurement of your level of participation with the community. You start at 25. If you make posts and people upvote and interact with them positively your score will go up. If you aggrevate a bunch of community members you'll catch a flag (aka downvote). It will kill some of the rewards on teh post, possibly hide the post, and if the person had a higher rep then yours then it could negatively impact your rep score.
On the left under the steemit logo you see "home." That shows you your feed of stories from the folks you are following. "New" will show you stories from everyone out there in chronological order. "Hot" are stories that have a lot of people interacting with them. "Trending" are posts worth a lot. "Promoted" are posts that someone has paid SBD to keep on that promoted tab. I promoted this post... maybe that's how you saw it! The more you pay the higher on the list you get to be. (Try not to overpay though, look at what spot you're willing to pay to have on the list and then check how much the person below that paid. Then just add $0.01 to what they spent. PIP!)
Now, I mentioned SBD. That's one of three tokens of value on the platform. The first is steem. The second is Steem Backed Dollars or SBD and the third is Steem Power. Steem is a token that stores value. You can trade it back and forth with other steemers. You can convert it into steem power by "powering up." Steem backed dollars are a peg to steem worth approximately 1 dollar worth of steem. Both of these values flucuate. You can trade SBD like you can steem. You can also spend SBD to promote a post on steemit. Lastly, there is steem power. Steem power is how much strength your vote has. A little steem power and an up or down vote doesn't do much. If you have a lot of steem power your one vote could drop $50 or more on a single post. If you have steem power and want to sell it you can do so by "powering down." Powering down is a 3 month process whereby the steem power you power down converts to steem.
Steem currency is generated in 3 ways. Mining, witnessing, and posting. Mining is when you use a computer to solve an algorythm which simultaneously helps put more data into the block chain. The block chain stores all of the data that has been input into steem including balances, reputation, words, and images that users have stored here. Witnesses are servers that verify transactions. Rather than having a single machine process all these transactions the whole network does it. Witnesses get paid for their service and many use funds to work on steemit related projects to improve the user experience and increase the function. Lastly you can generated currency from posting, which can happen both in the comments and by "submitting a story."
If you've collected a lot of steem currencies you are called a whale. If you have a moderate amount you are a dolphin. If you have very little you are called a minnow. If you catch a whale upvote you're in for a treat. If you catch 100 minnow upvotes it's good for your rep but won't help your wallet much. There are also curation teams on here. Curators seek out content to upvote. Then "bots" will "follow" the curator's account and also upvote the content. A bot is a program that votes based on a set of rules. Two common bots are steemvoter.com and steemian. Steemvoter votes on people that like. Steemian followers other votes
So, there's your primer! You're ready to go out there and start blogging for dollars! Toss me an upvote and a follow if you found this helpful. You can also resteem it so that all of the people following you will see this post on their wall too!
Welcome aboard and happy steeming!
Very nicely done.
Thanks!
Which reminds me oh person of many followers -- Can you please put a post out sometime remind folks to vote in that twitter troll poll. With such a great community there should be more votes!!!
yes I will. I'll wait until Monday as I think weekdays have heavier turnout here.
Thank you ... sorry for the bot coming in :)
@Twitterbot is welcome here!
Hell, I like this place more and more every moment.
Disclaimer: I am just a bot trying to be helpful.
Just got started here myself and this was a good read...thanks. :)
@aggroed, this is awesomely explained! Someone saw this posts and posted it thats how I got to it. I am glad I saw it! Followed!
Glad to have you here! Thanks for coming!
very nicely explained...thank you.....gathering more infos as a newbie.....
I have been recruiting close to two dozen people to the site to play my game for Steem. By far yours has been the simplest and the most efficient explanation I have found. Definitely sending this around. Resteemed and followed.
Fine work sir.
Many thanks sir. In fact. You now have a permit to kill dragons for Steem
Good Job, nice guide
classic! :'D
Thanks for sharing. I just joined Steemit about 2 hours ago! Also love the doggie at the end.
Also shared your content and followed you cuz you are awesome! :)
Appreciate what you just did @aggroed. Its not often to see a post about things around in steemit nowadays compared before. Now that the influx of new users is coming so fast, we need this to guide. Also, steemit changes a lot and not all of those changes were clearly explain.
Thanks for the kind words!
Fantastic information!!
Upvoted, already following!
Well done, well done. Clap Clap Clap.
Resteemed fur sure. And thanks for being here. I like this post -- need that horse pic. Where did I misplace it to? Neigh clue.
Thanks very much
"Asks t o explain to him like he's five...
posts an image of a newborn...lol
I just have one critique! When you say:
"Steem currency is generated in 3 ways. Mining, witnessing, and posting. " No I am pretty sure you don't "generate" any steem crypto currency by"posting" no you can EARN it though! The ONLY way to GENERATE or MAKE Steem is by MINING/Witnessing " Am i wrong? And even "witnesses" arent actually mining they are just collecing transaction fees paid like miner fees are paid to miners via
Oh ad if you watch tgis realtime visualizer, it shos wen the whales are around, and you can time your posts to make sure they are created right when a steemit whale with lots of steempower is around! Its almost like a videogame! OMG can you IMAGINE the videogames we will be able to play inside steemit?!?! If someone makes an RPG type game where you can use your steem, or some sort of game plugin, oh man its over!
WOAH look what swolesome51 just said · 3 hours ago
"I have been recruiting close to two dozen people to the site to play my game for Steem. By far yours has been the simplest and the most efficient explanation I have found. Definitely sending this around. Resteemed and followed." WOAh so there is already a steemit RPG! ccan we make a 3d version tthat can be played in the steemit website somehow like a plugin window!!?! something in a little box in the very right hand or top pf the website? or maybe we click a link in the very side bar and go find the game area! OMG a REAL video game where you use our steemit account THAT wiill be LEGEDARY
wy cant we have something like that?
can someone explain what is stopping us from having a type of Gaming in browser like Facebook started with the whole FarmVille game that you could play in your browser.....
WHy cant we create something very basic, or maybe like a type of simple 3d rpg engine where you can walk around and buy stuff with steem or SBD...win steem or SBD in tournaments, etc battles, EVEn just the ability to play POKER would be cool! Actually if we all played poker in a post, we could have people raise bets by comment, and we have a dealer DEAL cards by sending like them emails, or something like that! and we all make bets by sending them to a DEALER steemit account! OMG that would be AMAZIING! We couold totally turn steemit inti a Premiere Online Gambling website! We can have that too! we can have So many things! and noone can stop us were ALL THE WAY powered UP!
Great primer. Thank you for sharing. I will have to read it again when my coffee kicks in! haha
Followed.
This is great...even for this 51-year-old minnow. Thank you!
WoOT!
congratulation...
Thank you for this! Upvoted and resteemed. :-)
Thanks bud! Glad you liked it!
A very good teacher! I esteemed it! Thank you so much for your explanation!
Great, simple explanation for new users like myself. Thanks a lot buddy!
Resteemed and followed. Thanks for the helpful info.
Good information for new users like myself. I do have a question. When I resteem like I just did for yours, why does it ask if I'm sure? BTW, I upvoted, resteemed and I'm following you.
Dottie! You're awesome, I like you, and thanks! The resteem kinda looks like the reply. I think it's a catch before you accidentally resteem when you meant to make a comment.
one happy new five yo old over here...haha...thanks for the info
Welcome aboard Skye!
Great guide for those of us that don't know the ins and outs of climbing up the steemit yet! Thanks!
thanks bud!
This was some help thank you.
Cool! Glad to be of service!
he he good one. I am 10 in this things of crypto..... wtf...???
Thanks for the explanation. I still don't understand but I will just plug along and see if it begins to make more sense. A friend of mine took a Facebook class and still has no clue what its for or what to do about it. We must be brave and go forth boldly.
Write a story. Include links to pictures. You'll do great!
Thanks for sharing! Helped this newbie a lot :-)
That's great!
Whenever I tried to explain steemit to my peers who are not familiar about cryptocurrencies I always made it hard for them to understand. You made it possible explaining it in simple words. Thanks!
Well, I've taught for a decade. It helps! And thanks!
Only a teacher can do it so well :)
A post that i ACTUALLY read all the way through!! Well done! I'm new to steemit as of last week and have already posted a few articles. Nothing to brag about, but it's definitely fun to get noticed for your writing...or basically whatever comes to mind that you decide to blurt out on screen. SOOOOO much better than the other social media platforms thus far! I followed you, hope you'll read what i have and return the favor. Keep steemin!
What did you find helpful about it? Why'd you like it?
Thank you! That was more helpful thean I expected.
Glad to surpass your low expectations :)
I was going to follow you because of the information you post, but this comment sealed the deal!! LOLOL!!
very nice post... now i finaly get what this is all about :$
Very helpful. Could you write a post about how the payments are made/sent to accounts and why there is a delay. I am new here and I wasn't given any sign up bonus steem like others were. Some of my posts have earned rewards but in my wallet it still says 0.00 across the board. I'm confused by that.
Do I need to pay for steem to get started?
Great job! Nicely written. This will definitely come to good use when I attempt to explain Steemit to my friends :p
@things @nadejdaalienor @juliapdm
clearly written, thanks!!!
That's super helpful for newbies, thank you so much!
What seemed to help the most?
For me personally, I didn't know about the promotion thing and I didn't know the difference between hot and trending. Other newbies will find pretty much everything useful, from the basic navigation to the explanation of whales, dolphins etc.
What I'm missing (maybe that would be a "next steps" post :)) is if there is a strategic way to manage the three "currencies". If it's good to have a lot of steempower and I don't want to invest my own money - what's the best way to get more steempower (besides posting a lot)? Should I just convert all my earnings into Steempower in the beginning, when I'm getting started to increase future earnings, or is that a bad idea/not necessary? Also I'm wondering why my wallet shows two amounts (one in brackets) under steempower. So those are the things I still have difficulty understanding :) Maybe fodder for your next artice :)
I'm guessing that the amounts in brackets are the expected additions to the account (since it only pays out weekly). In other words, it is an estimate of what will be added to the account at the end of the week. But perhaps someone can verify this because I'm a real noob here. In fact, so new that I don't know how to use those 4 keys shown in our accounts. I tried using the post key to log in and post and I got a message saying something about that being a public key and I needed a different key. Perhaps someone can answer that question too?
Yeah dude! For Sure! I'll see what I can do with this!
Thank you @aggroed for clearing all the doubts
Good one. keep it up.
Thanks, will be using this as "the standard intro" for folks going forward.
Hi praise! Thanks!
Excellent post, any chance the next one can be with crayons for 2 year old's like me. :-)
What do you still need to know that isn't clear? I'll wok on it!
Great post, this is going to be my "GoTo" post when I try and explain to new recruits. UV'd and thanks @aggroed
Awesome post. This will come in handy for someone like me. I've only been on here for less than 24 hours.
I just joined Steemit a few days ago and am still trying to figure it out. Your information has helped me a lot. Thank-you for making this more understandable for me.
that's awesome @cabbagepatch ! Thanks for commenting!
Thanks this answered a lot of my questions all in one spot.
I confess to being a slow learner. I will revisit this post, probably more than once, as my experience with Steemit grows, and the concepts begin to make sense.
Thanks!
Great. I am only four, but I still got it.
This was very helpful! Thanks a lot for taking the time to explain and write this article.
Hopefully this media will help all of us to prosper in whatever ways we aim for.
Cheers!
and Upvote of course :)
Cute :)
What did you like most?
nicely Explained. But i dont understand what is the meaning of :
when i write a story?.. Can you explain please? @aggroed
I read a post about this a few days ago. Using 100% of your power gives maximum benefit to the upvote. Those with lots of power can choose to reduce the effect of their votes (I read there is a slider) or split it in half (50/50). They can also choose to decline to receive any benefit and donate their reward back to the system of steem.
I hope I got that correct. Please do correct me if I'm wrong.
thanks for replying... but i am still not able to understand how the shares are split between creator and curator and what are the three options really for @happyme. Looking forward to thank u again..
I don't remember the details of how shares are split between creator and curator and I believe it is quite a complicated calculation. As for the 3 options: I think you may be asking about the options available when writing a post? If that is the case, then there seems to be a choice of allocating ALL of your earnings to Steem Power, allocating your earnings 50/50 between Steem Power and steem (the default setting), and not taking any earnings at all.
This video is rather old and some things have changed, but it does a decent job of explaining things:
Thanks, now i get it...thanks again
Thank you for posting. This certainly a help to beginners. Upvoted, followed and resteemed.
Instructions were not clear. Got my dick stuck in a ceiling fan...
Happens
I don't think you're doing it right then... Call customer support.
well done guys