Community Building or S*****? | Happy Anniversary Steem Sri Lanka

Some History

When I first stepped into steemit, my purpose was writing for my own pleasure. I did it because I loved it and also I continued because I got motivated with impressive votes.

One day, steemitblog announced that they want country teams to play diary game season II. There were 3 more Sri Lankans but they were in different tracks. So I had to bring some friends inside. They are @dinoli, @randula99, @sandu, and @anusha96. We posted our diaries in hashtags and sometimes in other communities. We commented on each other because it was a must to win the contest.

Timely some of our other friends joined and it became about 10 members. At that time, country-based communities were becoming a trend. Best of India came out and the Steem Bangladesh came. So I made a community named Steem Sri Lanka so that we could post our diary posts there.

There were @sandupi, @madushanka, and @damithudaya too.

It was just a community in which we post our articles and then we comment and vote on each other. Were depend on steemcurator01 vote and steemcurator07 vote. Weekly picks attracted some larger votes to us. Then the era of community curator accounts dawn. On Oct 24, 2020 we enhanced our community activities with our community curator account @steem-sri.lanka. My partner and me prepared some rules and strategies to attract delegators. Also with members, we initialized different projects.

With this, the best time of the community came. There were around 20 members from Sri Lanka who make high-quality and meaningful posts. I remember the pending payouts passed 2000$ these days.

Then the country-based community spark was gone and something else came out. So the larger votes started to fly out from us but booming support remained. We had prepared for this situation early. We used different techniques to survive. Anyhow, we could manage to avoid members getting payouts less than 1$ .

One can't get this 1$ simply. They have to write meaningful articles, comment on others, vote others, delegate to curation account and more. My members and I built this community with lots of effort. We got nothing easily. We spent lots of time, we practiced a lot, we planned a lot and also we invested a lot of LKR to this community.

So we all like to see others work hard for the future. We like to see members contribute to the community with good intentions. Not because we vote for you. We came here after spending months of 0$ payouts.

There are about 40 Sri Lankan posters now. We manage with strict rules in order to manage the quality of content. Someone's experience can not be so sweet with rules. But no one worries if they understand the real pattern. I don't want to have an unbearable crowd here. I want a few crowd who works better.

I am so happy about where we are now.. Our economy doesn't allow us to do a huge STEEM purchase. But let's try to go for the maximum we can do. So don't forget to powerup and delegate your SP to @steem-sri.lanka

Happy Anniversary!