This week marks my three month anniversary here within the community. Three months worth of blunders and learning, as well as meeting some really interesting individuals.
I am actually writing this up a few days early, as I need to tell those who follow me why I won't be upvoting your comments anymore. It's nothing you did, I assure you. It has more to do with the fact you won't receive anything for it, despite my recent SP delegation I purchased. It appears that if your voting power is less than .03, if no one else upvotes atop to bring it to .03 it vanishes. Which gives more distribution to those receiving more than .03 if you think about it as their slice of the inflation is actually larger than the crumbs (what the below .03 votes are called) suggest.
So, please know that if I find your comment adding to the topic, instead of voting for the comment, I will instead upvote your latest post in an effort to ensure you at least get the benefit of my .02 upvote. My apologies that I misunderstood based on initial posts claiming it was at .02. I spent what little SBD I had to rent delegation so I could reward you on your comments. Once my vote becomes more than a micro crumb, I will revisit the idea of upvoting your comments in my thread. If it appears to better serve you by my voting on your posts though I may continue that. My goal if we connect is to help you make as much as is within my power to do so. Because that is the key to success here, helping those in your community build a stronger platform. Everything else will fall into place. So please understand that for now, my wallet is filled with dust that can only benefit you if I vote on your posts that have other votes.
So, on to some more of the things I have learned in my three months:
Unless you bring a following here, house odds are your posts will not make you anything. Zero. Squat. Even if you posted a mathematical formula that solved every problem in the world. Chances are no one will see it, and in the rare case some do it will be either other new people trying to build their tribe, or you lucked out and found one of the people here that actually understand the continued success of the platform rests on new people coming and STAYING. There are plenty of these kind hearted/future visioned people here. The problem is that they can only spread themselves so thin.
Bidbots are not the answer, in my opinion. I can't rule them out completely for visibility, but unless you are willing to shell out hundreds of dollars my experience when I first got here with them is you will lose money without getting any new eyes on your posts. The success of the site rests on eyes seeing posts, not bots. Your growth here depends on forging real relationships, not making whales richer. So my advice is invest that money into yourself and the relationships you are building here and not a whales growing assets.
This applies to the above segment on bidbots, but is getting its own segment. There is another avenue that many on here do not consider a bot. It is called Smartsteem, and they use a system called Smartmarket. In my experience testing them, they are the same as the bots. Even though your votes are coming from real people, these people are voting on your post from within the website of Smartsteem, and they are not reading your posts. Once again, I would advise to invest that money into yourself and those you are building your community with.
There is a growing split here regarding the use of bidbots, which brings me to the next thing I have learned and would recommend to all newcomers. There are many personality conflicts that takes place here, none of which is conducive to building a lasting structure to get involved with. All of us are entitled to our opinions, but think carefully if you are here to grow with a tribe that will reward you long term with not only connections with others, but an opportunity for financial growth. Or are you here to create enemies and have others gunning for your account? I can argue with plenty of people in my real life, so I have no need to collect enemies here is what I have come up with for myself.
So, after the initial non growing pains of few seeing my work, paying bots at a loss after my first initial failures to be seen, what happened to keep me here? Well, as I waited impatiently for my posts to receive accolades and powerful upvotes that would let me retire, I began surfing around the place to keep my sanity. And in the process began finding some really cool people. Smart people who could show me things I haven't seen before. Kind people who had patience and made gestures with me. And so slowly I didn't notice it at first, I began becoming part of some of the tribes around here. Discovering/interacting with not only those posting, but those commenting on those posts. And suddenly what seemed impossible (getting eyes on my posts) now is not so impossible. So for those of you newer here whose posts disappear into oblivion, don't give up hope. Your community is here, just waiting for you to find them.
This post is already long winded, so will begin wrapping it up. There are so many of you who have shown me kindness, engaged with me in discussions that I have learnt from. Too many to thank personally. I am grateful for so many of you, and hope that someday others will have this same gratefulness for me. Thank you for making my first three months possible.
Great post! Once again, you display your patience and well thought out answers to the great questions of Steemit while I barrel through them like a bull in a China shop. So glad that I met you on here because your perspective truly helps me stay somewhat grounded instead of totally flying off the reservation.
I know you and disagree on the bot issue, but we certainly agree on the relationship building aspect of the platform. Most likely we agree on about 95% of everything we discuss, but I'm not as good at articulating it in a non-polarizing fashion like you.
Needless to say, I am extremely happy that you stuck it out. Also, I have a solution for you if you want to keep upvoting people's comments. This is important because I get better engagement on my posts BECAUSE I upvote their comments. I don't want you to go backward on this.
The solution is that you tell me how much SP you need to get you over the hump on upvotes to your commenters and I will figure out how to get you that delegation if it isn't incredibly expensive. My only request is that you keep supporting minnows in our #payitforward contest.
Let me know if we have a deal.
Thanks for the kind words.
Thanks for the kind offer. I am not sure how much I would need honestly. I used the calculator that is on Steem Now the other day to figure what I needed to get to .02 (although I ended up throwing more at it, lol) but right now it still thinks Steem is worth 4.10 and it has fallen to 3.69 and continues to fall. I appreciate your offer, my main concern would be that the cycle is going to continue downwards which would quickly pull the vote back out of .03. I have actually been waiting for the coming downturn as these things cycle, before doing another position trade. I also figure (in case you have some money at the exchange to invest) that the G20 meeting is coming in July so by next month the FUD cycle will begin again driving prices down, a perfect time to invest in crypto.
While I will gratefully accept delegation, I will continue to participate in the #payitforward contest without it being tied to your offer. But I don't know what I would need to get there as I see people using algebra looking math and talking of vests and such and I just nod politely as though I understand any of it.
I knew you would stay with #payitforward. lol Let's try to come up with a decent number in the next day or so when we see where Steem settles. Then we will act on it with some SP.
Huh. I had not been aware of the $0.03 payout minimum. This is what you are saying, right? Do you have a source for that or is this just your observation?
I think one thing you are missing concerning the value of upvotes on replies to your posts is your ability to influence the order of what others see under your posts. Having high-value replies as the top response to your post could be a good thing. Maybe not.
As posts go, this one is not very long winded ;-) Thanks for writing.
No "dust" for you. Thanks for commenting. all the best.
Here is the latest post I read on the payout minimums.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@thedarkhorse/your-2-cent-vote-is-worthless-the-real-deal-on-dust-votes
Thanks for reading. I hear what you are saying with the top comments being the best replies. But I really want to reward those who interact with me as well. When I read initially they were saying it was .02, I bought as much SP through delegation as I could. I really want those who engage with me to really be paid as it suggests they are when I upvote. Then found out the next day it is still not enough, lol. So for now I am going to give it in a way that they can still receive it. It occurred to me as I was writing this it may be that one last vote they need to get higher on a list for visibility.
I have been having problems figuring out voting. About a week and a half ago I was continuously at about 45-50% of my voting power and stepped away for long periods of time to get it back up. I figure i will fine tune it as I go along.
Thanks for the links. As I said I had not heard of the dust rule before, as the site makes no explicit mention of it. I understand why you've changed your voting strategy; it'll change mine too, because I only have dust power as well.
Here is another post I just came across:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@spiritualmax/today-i-found-out-a-small-post-with-big-implications
Thanks for sharing this post.
Amazing idea of the post
Please Stop
In your your last 100 comments you used 41 phrases considered to be spam. You've received 1 flags and you may see more on comments like these. These comments are the reason why your Steem Sincerity API classification scores are Spam: 84.20% and Bot: 4.90%
Please stop making comments like this and read the ways to avoid @pleasestop and earn the support of the community.
"my advice is invest that money into yourself and the relationships you are building here and not a whales growing assets". Golden advice
Congratulations on a wonderful time here
technically joined steemit December but I've only been active for 2 months now. May the steem community favor us.
Thank you
I'm happy to read you survived the first three months. :) I'm only a month ahead of you, and while the climb is still steep, it is getting a little easier.
I'm not sure what it is that makes us all think we're going to have instant success when we get here. It's probably due to a lack of information about how this platform really is, and that might be purposeful since we might have not joined had we known what we found out within our first few weeks.
The mere idea that some potential reward can be affixed to our posts and comments makes this place unique in the blogging/commenting world. The fact that it is based on a cryptocurrency, which is primarily the domain of investors right now, makes the combination an odd mix, and not at all what I thought it would be.
Trying to figure out a way to help those who are here to invest and those who are here to create and engage is going to be the ongoing issue, especially when people see those two sides (and either other you could add in) working at cross purposes. I'm hoping, though, there's a place somewhere in the middle where we can all meet.
Thank you
For me it was watching YouTube videos by one of the witnesses pretending it was simple to make hundreds per post, lol. There is a lot of misinformation being purposely pushed by those who should know better. I am guessing some of the retention issues Steemit has is due to those videos that brought people here.
I believe there is, and my growth on here seems to be a testament to that. Despite getting discouraged (which I didn't touch a lot on in my initial post) and not posting for awhile, I continued to engage with others on their posts and my account grew. After enough growth I finally had my aha moment and saw the solution to the visibility issue.
This made me laugh. I am that guy you wouldn't have expected here. I was ignorant of crypto at the beginning of the year, skeptical of it in fact. It was this platform that pulled me into testing the waters. Thanks for reading my post and sharing your thoughts. Hoping the next quarter will see great growth for the both of us.
May it be so!
And skeptical is a good way of describing me when I initially heard about STEEM, or I might have joined when I first heard about it back in July of 2016.
I really don't know why people feel the need to sensationalize these things. Well, actually, I do. They're hoping to make quick money. Which is too bad. Because they could make long term, long lasting money if they chose to educate people instead of find ways to grab money first.
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