In a couple of weeks or so it will be a year since I joined Steemit. Overall, I feel like I've had a pretty good experience so far and wanted to do a little retrospective (giveaway further down below for the impatient ones).
I first learned about Steemit thanks to @DavidPakman, who talked about it on his show. "What? A social network where the likes/upvotes translate into actual currency?" seemed pretty cool. In the beginning my philosophy was to simply write for myself and hopefully slowly build an audience if my content was good and interesting, but I admit that, even as I was still learning how the Steemit ecosystem worked, I almost immediately started to haphazardly try bots out to see if I could expand my reach. While the idea of Steemit is indeed pretty cool, the incentive structure creates a lot of issues (Perhaps I'll talk about it at a later time.)
One of the first great moments on the platform for me came when I won second place in the @steemitboard World Cup contest. That was a really fun ride. In the end, @bidbots won first place and @chehkuna secured the third position. But probably the biggest change for me was finding the @steemstem community, it did wonders to promote my science posts and finding other like-minded individuals who post high quality content.
In all, I made 41 posts on varying topics:
Climate change and other ecology news
New satellite data study finds oceans rising at an accelerating rate
Climate Change Update - Ocean Edition
55-73% of oceanic surface is being fished, and that is not completely bad news
Greenhouse gases could skyrocket as developing nations increase air conditioning usage
2017-2018 winter Arctic sea ice extension revealed to be second lowest on record
Scientists engineer a better "plastic-eating" enzyme
Global warming spells great trouble for coral reefs
"Dams have had their day in Europe" ecologist claim as dismantling of river barriers ramps up
Remote coral sites around Samoa found to be a virtual "graveyard"
As the Arctic warms many marine mammal species will become vulnerable to human activity
Largest king penguin population has been devastated in the last 30 years
New study maps the causes behind deforestation around the world
Banned more than a decade ago, polychlorinated biphenyls are still set to destroy orca whale populations
New study warns Bitcoin could become major climate change driver
New report shows vertebrate biodiversity is plummeting worldwide
Other science topics
New study confirms previous results: happiness increases with income up to around 75k-100k per annum
Biggest family tree goes back eleven generations and holds 13 million people
Stephen Hawking had completed new multiverse theory just before dying
Amazing video showcases anglerfish mating
Stem cell trial successfully restores sight to patients with macular degeneration
Newly discovered family of genes played key role in human brain evolution
On the origin of life
Scientists engineer optimized version of previously useless class of antibiotics
Ancient viral infection linked to modern human drug addiction
Pooping: you are (probably) doing it wrong
Trump administration would like to pretend some LGBT+ people don't exist, let's look at the facts
Sexual development of the brain
Recording of Carl Sagan's 'Age of Exploration' 1994 lecture has been found
Political news, usually with some commentary
Joe Biden brags about having engaged in mafia diplomacy in Ukraine
Trump expands world's largest terror program
UN efforts see release of more than 300 child soldiers in South Sudan
Democrats still would rather lose to a Republican than win with a true progressive
Ireland repeals abortion ban in landslide referendum
'Rational National' breaks down how the mainstream media is purposefully clueless toward progressives
Is the USA preparing to bomb Iran before 2018 is through?
EU approves problematic copyright reform directive
Weirdo leftist posts
Noam Chomsky Day
Why automation could be a good thing
Is "nerve stapling" next?
"Capitalism breeds innovation"
Culture news
Peter Jackson restored and colourized hours of WW1 footage for new documentary
This means I made one post every nine days or so. 36.6% of the posts were on climate change, 31.7% on other science topics, 19.5% on political news, 9.8% were weirdo leftist posts and 2.4% related to culture news.
Looking back I'm, not completely proud, there’re some half-baked posts and some that could have used more structure editing time (not to mention typos!). But overall I'm quite satisfied with the quality I have produced, especially considering one can only devote so much time to this what with work and other real life things.
SHUT UP AND GIVE ME THE BLOODY GIVEAWAY ALREADY
OK, OK... sheesh. Here's the deal, I'll be giving away 6 Steem Basic Income (SBI) sponsorships. Specifically, 3 lucky winners will get 2 SBI shares each. If you don't know what SBI is, basically, the project upvotes yours posts and the value of the upvote is proportional to the number of shares you have. In the past I was lucky to be sponsored myself, so I thought this would be a nice way of giving back to the community. According to @steembasicincome:
Steem Basic Income is a social experiment to bring a basic income to as many Steemians as possible. Members join by sponsoring others into the program. Steem Basic Income is delivered through providing regular upvotes to member content.
To have a chance to win all you have to do is leave a comment. In seven days all comments will be assigned a number according to the date of posting and the Random Gods will decide the three winners. Feel free to upvote and resteem of course! If enough people participate I will increase the number of winners (and if I think not enough people joined I may extend the giveaway for another week, but I'm confident that won't be necessary).
Good luck!
EDIT:
It's now a little over 12 hours till the giveaway is over (ie. in around 12 hours it'll be 7 days since posting). I count 25 entries so far which seems like a good number so I won't be extending the deadline to enter the giveaway. If you made an entry, you should check back shortly after the 7 days are past to find out who are the three lucky winners. I will place a comment to this post detailing all entries and winners. Immediately after that I will send the sponsorships to @stemmbasicincome, so anyone will be able to see the transaction in my wallet history. Good luck!