I've been away for a bit since my last post. I've been meaning to get back sooner, but time is like that. I had some and then it was gone as other demands on my time appeared. As John Lennon has noticed, life is what happens to you when you're making other plans.
So I want to write a few of my thoughts on Steemit since my last post. I'm still blogging on Blogger at The Digital Firehose and the reason for that is that I, like many people, I tend to stick to what is familiar. I have a following that I've been cultivating with Blogger, Google+ and Facebook. I'm familiar with the editor on Blogger, too.
Oh yes, the editor. I must admit some confusion about the editor on Steemit, as I had thought I would need to learn Markdown and that meant I was going to spend a week making myself familiar with that again (I've edited in Markdown in a past job). So the last time I was here, I thought adding a hyperlink to a word or phrase would be complicated and not very elegant. But when I returned to the "Submit a Story" link again today, I noticed that there is an Editor, and there is Raw HTML. Today, I'm writing in the editor and as you can see above, I figured out that writing in the editor is not so hard and adding a link is not that much harder than in Blogger. Eventually, I'll figure out how to add other stuff, too - like videos, tweets and quoting text from sources that I rely upon.
One other thing that I've been thinking about is how this system generates value. I do find it remarkable that there exists a system that will take nearly every interaction in social media and find a way to monetize it for the benefit of the user, rather than just the owner of the system. From what I can see so far, value is generated by following, being followed, posting articles, posting comments, upvoting posts, comments and users. This to me is the most significant advance of Steemit and other sites like it, at least, I think there are others that are doing the same thing.
In other words, all of the computational effort generated by this article, the comments on it, the upvotes (a la Reddit and Slashdot) and other interactions between reader and writer, is converted into Steem (or something like it). Such a system has a democratizing effect on the propagation of information. The value conferred by the user is converted into value that all participating users alike can use later, for some other purpose, even to Re-Steem an article.
I find this advance truly fascinating and worthy of exploration with another post, like this one. I have also found that on this system value is generated at a much greater rate than on Blogger with AdSense. What took months to generate in Google's system, took just a few days on Steemit, and that is very motivating. Especially now that I've figured out a bit more about how this thing works. As like anything else, I must learn Steemit by using it.
I'm also slowly getting familiar with the culture, the territory, the audience and the feature set of Steemit. Since my first post some time ago, I've received a very warm welcome from those who did reply or respond to my post. To those who have interacted with me so far, your good tidings are welcome.
One other thing I like about this system is that it's permanent. Once something goes up on Steemit, it's not going away anytime soon. I don't have the sense that it will be censored, or that propagation will be limited by some invisible algorithm. It will just be and since it's built into a blockchain, a system maintained by many peers, as long as those peers exist, it's more or less permanent.
Now that I've figured out that I can use the editor or go nuts with the HTML editor, I can import a few of my favorite blog articles and put them here to give you, the reader, a better sense of what I like to write about. There are some articles I've done that need a more reliable home than Google+ or even Medium. Looks like this must be the place to post for posterity.
I look forward to further adventures on Steemit