In my short time on the Steem blockchain, there is an undeniable sense of déjà vu, as if I have already been swimming in the ocean of steemit.com in a previous life.
Why do I say this? Because I have spent the last four years and eight months on a site called UX StackExchange (hopefully you'll know what this is if you are a UX designer), which is part of the StackExchange network of sites. This is me here (the avatar is a picture of a plushzilla):
By the way, I have also set one up for Steem that I hope people will support,
you can read the post here:
https://busy.org/stackexchange/@plushzilla/the-steem-stackexchange-site-has-been-proposed-on-area-51
In short it is like Quora for special interest groups. And as you can see I am ranked at #26, out of some 80 thousand users now (of course not all of them are active):
So if for argument sake at least 25% of those 80k users are active (could be more or less), there are still 20k users and that puts it close to the figure of the number of active users of Steemit according to @penguinpablo's recent post:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@penguinpablo/daily-steem-stats-report-tuesday-november-07-2017
Okay, so what's my point here? Well, if you consider that there is a similar number of active users on Steemit as there is on UXSE, and that I am ranked in the top 30 then you can argue that I may have a similar status on that site as what the top 30 witnesses might have on Steemit. Except that on UXSE your currency is reputation (much like Reddit) and that all we really do is ask and answer questions.
How many questions and answers you ask? Well 786 in total, 569 of those answers and 217 of them questions. That's not including the number of comments made but I won't go into those details.
And if you are wondering how someone managed to get into the top 30 of a site like this, here is a history of my activity over those 4 years:
So every time you ask a question or provide an answer for someone else in the community, they can give you an upvote that is roughly equivalent to 10 reputation points, so I hope my 12,000+ reputation points wasn't earned by answering questions that didn't help anyone or asking questions that no one thought was important or useful.
Compared this to my relatively short stint of 27 days on Steemit:
And they have something on the StackExchange websites called bounties, where you offer some of your reputation points as rewards for people answering certain questions. In Steemit we only have competitions, but I am thinking of creating some bounties myself to encourage a different type of interaction among steemit users. If you think this is a good idea let me know and I'll see what I can do about it. So I have offered this much bounty in my time at UXSE because I like to ask tough questions and see if we can all improve a little bit more by thinking about what we are actually doing here:
Those extra 2300 reputation points might very well put me just inside the top 20 users, but I would like to think that most of the time the bounty went to deserving people that put some time and effort to consider my questions like these:
Sure, not many people look at the questions or care about the answers, but I would like to think that this is my way of contributing to the community in my unique way.
In the profession of UX design (as with many other professions), a unicorn is someone who possesses the impossible set of skills that makes them an expert in all four of these areas: Research, Design, Prototyping and Testing. I see myself as a narwhal because unlike unicorns they exist and are very real (hopefully @trumpman will write a post about them soon).
So I find myself swimming from one big ocean to another another in search of questions, answers as if I have been there and done it all, except this time the patch of water is much bigger and filled with many more interesting creatures...
And that, should have been my #introduceyourself post :)
Here's the link again if you are interested in supporting a Steem StackExhange site: https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/114570/steem