Some thoughts after a year on Steemit

I had a notification that I'd reached my first year birthday here on Steemit. It seems to me like time has flown by during the crypto winter of 2018 and we might see green shoots in 2019.

Here are some musings on my time here so far...

• I need to say thank you to @apsu and @suesa who helped me immensely in the early days to understand the Steem economy and the Steemit community.

• I also need to thank @curie for picking up on a couple of my early posts and giving me to the impetus to take better photos and blog more.

• Steem is down 80% since I started, and down something like 87% from its 2018 peak. Thankfully I think we turned a corner some time between November and December and the bleeding has stopped for now at least. I did cash out a bit of my Curie earnings (which I regret tremendously) but I have taken advantage of the bear market and bought it all back. I will buy Steem whenever I can during 2019 and power up but I can't say the same thing about other coins.

• The low steem price seems to have had a postive effect on the quality of the posts I'm seeing - much less spam and lots of regular good quality posts from a range of dedicated Steemians. My feed is a great place to visit and I always upvote as many posts as I can from those I follow.

• Steemit still has work to do on the user interface - discovering good content is still hard despite the great efforts made by curators such as @photofeed, @photocircle and @photomag. I always check out their posts to see who is good to follow.

• A good alternative to Steemit seems to be @partiko but it is mobile only and formatting posts how I like them is quite hard.

• Steemworld.org is an essential tool - I use it all the time to manage my account so a big thanks to @steemchiller for all his hard work

Anyway thank you for the warm welcome and I hope to post some more photos soon!

My blog mostly features landscape and seascape photos from the UK and Portugal. If you like my work drop me a comment!