1. This is not facebook, twitter or Instagram.
And that’s a good thing. You’re more likely to get support from strangers on this platform, and less likely to get trolled or abused. It’s nice! The system largely works in terms of self regulating. I’m finding it more interesting, and more fun than the other platforms, and most of the time I get paid a little Steem Dollars & Steem Power for my blog posts.
2. Content is king.
Quality content gets upvotes. It might be slow in terms of people finding you when you’re starting out, but the more you interact on Steemit, the more you find people with common interests and you start to share their journey and vice versa. But keep posting quality content, “build it and they will come”.
3. There are interconnected websites that are useful on the Steemit platform.
Two that I’ve found useful are steemd.com & steemauto.com. On Steemd.com if you enter your username (Eg. https://steemd.com/@positiveninja) you can see a bunch of information that’s useful – your voting power and bandwidth, what authorities are given for your account, and who is voting for you & how. (I might write more on this another day, but there are some good posts already on this like https://steemit.com/steem/@pfunk/secrets-of-the-blogchain-a-guide-to-using-steemd-com). For steemauto.com, you can set up curation trails to upvote for other content creators in a similar way to curation groups, like curie. You can also set up an automated upvote for people whose content you love, so you don’t miss an upvote.
4. Reputation is meaningful.
You start with a reputation of 25, and if you use the platform the way it is intended, you go up from there. If you abuse it, you can possibly go down. So a quick check on how a user is operating on Steemit is their reputation score. It’s also a logarithmic scale, so someone with a reputation of 10 points higher, is actually 100x higher.
5. Steempower = influence.
The higher your Steem Power, the higher the rate of your upvote, the more influence you have on the platform. Steem Power is a long term investment in the future of Steemit as well, as you can only withdraw it by powering down over 24 months. You can also delegate some of your Steem Power to others like the Australian curation bot @mrsquiggle to support new users onto Steemit.
So that’s 5 things I’ve learnt. I’ve had a heap of fun learning about this platform and each day I am happily surprised about something new, like the interaction on one of my blog posts, or the support for each other in this community. Yay Steemit :-)
