Go, go, go Nikola – It’s your Steemit birthday

We gonna party like it’s your Steemit Birthday

We gonna sip Bacardi like it’s your Steemit birthday

And you know we don’t give a f on the first place

Let’s put aside all bad thoughts and forecasts about crypto and Steem, all worries about what’s going on behind scenes and some bad mood on the platform, I want today only good vibes, because...

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...I’m thrilled to announce that today is my first anniversary since I signed up on this weird place. I never thought that Steemit will become part of my daily routine and that one day I’ll be spending more time on this platform than on Facebook, and that I’ll get to know some new and interesting people, which is in fact the real idea of social networks – to be social.

How it all started?

We Serbs have one special term called “bleja” and it looks like that all genius ideas come from bleja with your friends and if there’s also some alcohol near – that idea must work!

Sometimes life can throw you away from some people and you just can’t see them for a very long time. That was the case with me, when fast living in this city led me to not seeing @milosm2302 for some time, even though he lives a few blocks away from me, until we’ve met one day by accident and agreed to soon have couple of drinks on “bleja”.

He is actually the one who introduced this network to me, talked about ability to earn some money while blogging, talked about @curie and the way how it works and how he met a lot of new people there and started learning about photography in order to have good blog and I was like – maaaaaan are you serious??

I always wanted to write a blog and to have somewhere someone who is maybe interested in things that I have to say, and this thing came right at me at the right moment.

As someone who is constantly interested into new technologies, I heard about Bitcoin and crypto really, really long time ago, but – and that is maybe one of my bigger mistakes – I never sat down at my computer and tried to find some more info about the topic. I thought that Bitcoin is just something similar to e-banking and that it’s about 1:1 ratio to dollar.

When Milos told me that 1 BTC was at that moment about 9k $, I almost passed out.

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After talk about Steemit, I went home and for next two days I tried to find, read and learn every information about cryptoworld. I mean, literally, I was googling and reading for whole days.

It’s not all about the money – I was stunned how revolutionary this idea about blockchain is and I saw the potential of the social network in cryptoworld.

After registration and my intro post, I was thrilled with the positive energy and welcomingness which hooked me to continue writing. If I knew how important will be that intro post, I would insert some better picture lol.

I was so hooked that I used to spend all night reading and commenting other articles and I started to observe statistics about tags and people on Steemit and to study time zones in order to find perfect parameters like tags and time for posting my articles to get better visibility.

Maybe that’s funny to you, if you are newbie, but back in the days Steemit was a pretty crowded place, so your article would be covered with other articles and completely disappear from the list just about half an hour after publishing. So I just had that engineering approach and tried to be smart. Looks like I’m just a nerd at the end, I guess.

But, here’s one secret, which I discovered:

-It was impossible, literally impossible, to beat the system by that way.

So there is only one secret recipe to succeed and it’s the least popular way.

Do you know what it is?

It’s so simple.

You just need to write quality content.

Everything will come to the right place after that. Yes, you can earn some money using bots but at the same time, you are tearing down the quality of the network and you will never have the respect from the real Steemians.

So, you started writing quality articles, then what?

We are coming up to the one big importance for keeping the community alive and rewarding quality content and that is the curation effort. As we all know that whales are too busy licking... ups, I mean liking or upvoting each other and abusing reward pool, there was certain demand for structures which will secure rewards for authors who deserve it. And that’s how I learned about importance of the communities. One of the best examples is @curie, a group of people who are doing great job.

I remember when I got my first Curie upvote, and that was a few articles after my introduction to the network, while I was still “a newbie”. I can’t describe that state of euphoria which I had! That feeling when you suddenly see the number of about 70$ for the first time under your article and when you’re right after that skyrocketed to the number one place in trending and when bunch of people start visiting your blog and actually reading and commenting your article is the feeling like you are the part of something much bigger than you.

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And I can tell you that euphoria lasted about two days after upvote, so I was constantly coming back to article and answering to readers’ comments and accumulated energy to keep writing, because there is someone who is appreciating what you do.

Things like that are the real stimulus for young authors, connection between platform and content creator, to see that Steemit is not just the ‘’hit n run’’ place where people just care how much they could earn, but to actually read and learn something new and connect with other people. Those ones who are just caring about their reward at all costs, are planktons and will stay as planktons forever, believe me (unfortunately, I don’t count witnesses and whales here, they are from another story).

And that is the real strength of people and communities on this network.

At that moment, one other community started to rise and that is @teamserbia. It’s interesting to be there since day one to see something formed out of nowhere and still working pretty good. The community gathered about hundred top quality Serbian authors and gave us the platform to get to know each other and it supported our work since day one. As time was passing by, some people were giving up from their blogs, because of the low prices and weak feedback from others on the network, but today there is a still strong core of people in this community which are doing great things. In order to see some great articles from this community, I suggest to sneak through @teamserbia blog and to check out weekly author promotions with picked articles since its beginning to this day, or some competitions for photography and short stories.

They were always open to support my articles and I’m really grateful for that.

Day by day, month by month, great depression started showing up on the network, because nobody expected bear market to last such long, so the only true fans stayed here to wait that famous Hard Fork 20 to rocket STEEM “to the Mooooon baby”. I was still considering what I really want from Steemit and about what should I write. I wrote everything – reviews for some of the movies I watched or for some good albums I listened, or just some of my random thoughts, but one day I got an idea to start writing about something which is tightly connected with the things that I study on my college – that’s the moment when I started to write about artificial intelligence, machine learning and such cool stuff.

My first post on that topic got another Curie reward and I was amazed with positive feedback from the people, which are actually regular people and not scientists.

I continued writing my AI series and soon discovered that there is a whole community that can be interested in those things, called @steemstem! From that moment, I knew about what I will write in the future and that I’ll be STEM author. I was thrilled to see that there is someone who knows to appreciate my work and that there are people who really read those things.

A breaking point was when I slided in @alexs1320's DM, out of nowhere, to ask him about some STEM info. Following the saying that real recognize real, we soon found common language and I got all needed wind in my back. Then I just needed right guidance for my writing and that’s how I “met” someone who can be described by two words - science and angel. Of course, If you succeed to break through @scienceangel's million protective layers of sarcasm and caution. Maybe I was just lucky or it was my Balkan charm, but she agreed to be my STEM mentor and had a big impact on my work ethics and changed the way where I am going on this network.

Article by article, one group of Serbian STEM authors strengthened their relations and stood up and formed Serbian team for translations inside the Da Vinci translation project. We started translating many documents of open source project into Serbian language in order to introduce them and bring closer to future Serbian users and that’s the thing that still drives me and I’m doing it to this day, which you maybe noticed on my blog.

All that translation thing grew up to be more than just a job, below you can see the picture where we chilling in Belgrade, in a cool pub:

Here are Svemirac, Alex, Science Angel and I

@hidden84 is just... hidden somewhere and missing here, but he will probably show up on some pictures in the future.

Where are we going now?

A lot of things are going on now:

@hidden84 formed one new community which grows quickly and gathered some pretty interesting people. I’m talking about @crowdmind, a project which is here to empower the strength of a crowd and which has great potential to be in the future one of those strong connections between authors and the network, about which I talked earlier. You can
check out their blog, site, or just land on their Discord server here.

@svemirac set in motion a witness which is tightly connected to @crowdmind and other communities, called @crowdwitness and if you haven’t voted yet for his witness, I strongly recommend you to do that, because you can be sure that your vote is in safe hands.

@alexs1320 and I brainstormed a little bit and came to an idea to... oh wait this is an exclusive... are you ready?

Taadaaa

... to build one new decentralized app on Steem! I can’t tell you nothing more, but you can consider this as a small teaser, only for VIP Steemians and those are the ones who are reading this or following my blog. We gathered talented team and are trying to build something interesting, so we will see where is this going to take us.

After all, I can say that passed year was a great and unexpected journey and to be honest, I’m curious as fuck to see what will happen here during the next year.

Stay tuned!

Wish you all the best,

Nikola