If you've been here for a while, you most likely know how hard it is to get noticed, let alone make some decent profits. I'm sure you'd love to get that beefy upvote on your posts and comments. I know I would.
In most cases, though, that's just not going to happen. It's because the perception of value is different for each one of us. Also, nobody is really obliged to do shit. Me, you, or anyone else. Certainly no whale. And that's okay. They came early and are now harvesting their yield.
As for us plankton and minnows, we just have to bite down and grind through it. There's no way around it. Keep in mind, though, that even though there are over 1 million accounts on the Steem blockchain, there is only about 60k concurrent user at any given moment. Many accounts are either bots or dead (those people might still come back).
We are still in the very early stages of Steem development. There will be more people coming, I'm sure of that. Look at Reddit, for example. Steemit has many similarities with it.
How many unique visitors does Reddit have?
"This statistic presents the number of unique visitors to Reddit.com from April 2017 to March 2018. It was measured that almost 1.69 billion users had accessed the site in the most recent period."
source
For more comparison, the /r/bitcoin subreddit has about 841k subscribers compared to Steem's 3.3k.
Now imagine if half of the /r/bitcoin population decided to move to Steemit/Busy. If you wanted to be really fancy, you could even take half of the entire Reddit's population. Those tiny bits of Steem and SBD you gained today for your comments and posts will have much higher value when that happens. It won't happen overnight, though. You have to be patient.
You have to be patient and grow this community organically, though. This can be done by engaging, submitting valuable content and curating. I'm saying this because it seems to me that not many people understand it properly and that it needs to be repeated as much as possible in order to be seen as much as possible.
You might be thinking - he's all words, but what does he actually do to achieve what he says?
Well, I try my best. I try my best to upvote genuine content and engage in meaningful conversations with people. I've even tried to police some people about non-relevant content. To no success, unfortunately, yet expectedly. I also try to promote Steem blockchain among my friends. What I don't do, is upvote comments. Well, most of the times.
Why?
Because my vote value is so low ($0,01 USD currently) that if I were the only one to upvote that particular comment, the payout would just get returned back to the reward pool and I don't want that.
It wouldn't be me, though, if I didn't try to do anything about it. I've recently been introduced to the @dustsweeper. Courtesy of @glenalbrethsen. I know that he told me about it in some comment, I just didn't pay much attention to it at that time. Well, the refer-a-friend rewards aren't that big, anyway.
Dustsweeper is a service that makes sure your small upvotes get paid out.
This post has been created as a part of @dragosroua's May 30 Days Writing Challenge. If you don't know what it's all about, I suggest you go check it out. I've already learned so much thanks to this challenge.
My previous posts in the challenge
Day #26: My Favourite Steem Tool
Day #25: The Horrendous Non-Homogeneousness Of Open Source Development
Day #24: 3 Useful Blogs On Steemit
Day #22: Here Are 4 Quick Tips To Instantly Make Your Posts Better
Day #21: So Far, The Worst Thing That Happened To Me Because Of Steemit Is Today
Day #20: Who Did I Follow First?
Day #19: What Are My Top 3 Movies?
Day #17: Would I Still Be Here If There Was No Money To Earn?
Day #16: Where Do You Want To Be In 5 Years?
Day #15: How Many Posts Per Day Do I Write?
Day #12: What Is The One Crypto That Will Rule The Market In 5 Years?
Day #10: H20, My Favourite Morning Drink
Day #8: May 30 Days Writing Challenge - Day Eight: What’s Your Most Consistent Hobby For The Last 5 Years?
Day #6: You Wouldn't Guess What My Reason To Staying On Steemit Is
Day #5: Do you know the difference between investing and speculation?
Day #4: What Are My Top 5 (More Like 3) Witnesses On Steemit And Why Should You Care?
Day #3: What’s The Best Thing That Happened To You Thanks To Steemit?
Day #2: May 30 Days Writing Challenge - Day Two: If You Had 1000 STEEM, What Would You Do With It?
Finally catching up to this.
We've definitely got a great many mindsets running on this platform, and one of them is waiting for an upvote from a whale or being discouraged when one isn't received. It seems to be a perpetual cycle of overly high expectations turning to disappointment and disillusionment.
And I agree that while there are a million users on this site, the 60,000 or so using the site on any given day is the tale of the tape. It's true, we're still in the early days here, and yet, it doesn't seem like development is as fast as it could be. I think that's partly due to the world we live in and how quickly and how often things change. I also, though, think that it's true—HF 19 was months ago (and yet there were 18 before it in what amounted to just over a year).
I can't blame you at all for not upvoting comments. I'm actually considering refusing upvotes on my comments and no longer upvoting anyone else's, unless it's truly warranted. I'm wondering what people might think about that. I feel a post coming on, so maybe I should save my thoughts for it. :)
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