Right, so for the past two months I've been trying out this social network called "Steemit". For those of you that have never heard of it Steemit is a social news service which runs a blogging and social networking website on top of a blockchain database, known as Steem. The service produces STEEM and Steem Dollars which are tradeable tokens users obtain for posting, discovering, and commenting on interesting content.
The general concept is similar to other blogging websites or social news websites like Reddit, but the text content is saved in a blockchain. Using a blockchain enables rewarding comments and posts with secure tokens of value.
I'm going to be reviewing this site from the perspective of a content creator since that is why someone recommended I try the site in the face of youtube demonetization and censorship on other sites.
So onboarding to Steemit is pretty easy, like any other site you create a log in and a password. The password is unique and you will probably want to save it, it is also used to access some other features of steemit like chat, dtube,(their version of youtube) and dsound,(their version of soundcloud).
From there you can write you're blog in a WYSIWYG editor. Not quite as full featured and robust as Wordpress or Medium's but it will get the job done. A lot of time is spent looking at the markdown styling guide or manually writing in links with parenthesis and brackets rather than simply highlighting text then right clicking, or clicking a link button.
Every once in a while that editor might eat your post so you'll want to have it saved somewhere else before submitting. Images can be uploaded, youtube videos can be embedded but only youtube videos. If your story has videos from another source, or social media links those cannot be embedded.
Once you've completed your post and title you'll want to pick five relevant tags for it.
These tags are important because they are a way to fight what is Steems biggest problem. Discovery and curation.
At the beginning don't expect anyone to even see your posts. I'm not sure if anyone on Steemit will actually read this one.
It wasn't until @maxabit picked up some of my posts I started to get a couple of followers, views and votes. Which amounted to $.50 cent. For a review of a $5000 laptop.
Ultimately if your work takes time and investment, as well as you spending the time to focus on keywords and analytics I couldn't recommend Steemit as a platform. Sure you could bring in fans from somewhere else but that would require getting THEM onboard with buying Steem to use as currency to vote. That's because the "worth" of ones vote is tied to how much Steem they have so ultimately you're at the mercy of whether a whale is online and liked your post before you start earning anything substantial at all.
There’s lots of old posts about there being a “gold rush” but that time is over and I’d doubt there’s 100 people on the site at peak hours.
Some have called Steem a ponzi scheme that exists to perpetuate itself then to collapse in value. I'm not reviewing steem as an investment today but Steemit as a site.
Out of 230 articles roughly 5 had any noteworthy returns, none of which offset the cost to write them. They also have a shelf life as long as a tweet.
As for Dsound you'll either figure any exposure is better than no exposure or skip the whole affair and stick to your bandcamp/soundcloud. Even with the adpocalypse I wouldn't call Steemit competitive with youtube.
Ultimately right now, 2017 I'm going to have to give Steemit a "D" for content creators. There's a lot more you could accomplish on your own site in less time, other platforms are more robust with stronger monetization, stronger tools, more resources for those new to the community.
Steemit is kind of like gambling with your content. There's definitely people there winning big. But don't expect it to pay your bills.
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