A little help for the new people: Welcome to Steem! Here's some hints on how to get started.

Hi, I'm Aggroed. I'm a PhD chemist and former chemistry professor. I used to work for higher education companies in sales, but now I've quit my job because of Steem and am working around the clock to spread the values of Peace, Abundance, and Liberty, grow the Steem ecosystem, and train and retain minnows on the platform. I created and manage the community account @minnowsupport and founded the Minnow Support Project. We just crossed 8,000 members (though a quick prune of inactives will probably peel that back under 8k for a day or two). I'm working on building a youtube/film studio to pump more Steem out there as my next project.

Anyway, I've been here a while and have helped a lot of new users out, and since we're growing it's time to talk about getting started here again.

603k

We've passed the 600k accounts mark. I was 54,169 so we've literally more than 10Xed the number of accounts since I got here a year and a half ago. Yeah, a lot of them are bots, but we also have a lot of active users. If we continue at the pace we're going Steem will have 2-2.5M accounts by the end of the year. I think it's going to speed up even more than that, but either way it's a lot of new people. So, here's a quick welcome.

What is Steem?

You may have an account, but you're still trying to wrap your head around this place. WTF is Steem?

Steemit: A development company run by @ned that works to make the blockchain as good as possible.

Steemit.com: a website running a program called condenser that allows people to interact with the block chain.

Steem: The block chain and name of the community in general.

What does this thing do?

Steem is a fairly unique blockchain. We're a social media program with an embedded cryptocurrency. It's sorta like facebook and reddit had a baby and genetically enhanced that baby with some crypto DNA. Yeah, it might feel a little weird at first, but there's some power here. Every time you write a post and someone upvotes it you'll get some money. If they have a lot of Steem you'll get a lot of money. If they have a little Steem you'll only get a little bit of money. As you comment and post you're making money. Heck, even voting on this platform earns you money. So, it's like being on social media but now you're earning money!

How does it work?

Well, right now there are 260M Steem tokens. Investors purchase those tokens because they think it's a good investment. Steem tokens come in two flavors Steem Power and Steem. Steem is a fully fungible commodity meaning you can send it all over the world in 3 seconds and trade it for other coins on exchanges. Steem power isn't as fungible but it has a cool use. You can power up your Steem tokens into Steem Power and now you effectively own a portion of the blockchain.

Steem has platform inflation. There's a little less than 10% inflation on the system so this coming year a little less than 26M tokens will be created. These tokens are distributed on the platform primarily based on how individual Steem Power owners want them to be distributed, and they do this by upvoting content. Think of it this way. Think of Steem as a stock with a dividend, but instead of the dividend going back to you automatically instead you can assign that dividend to anything you want on the platform. It's generally discouraged to just send that back to yourself over and over especially on low value posts, but with that main exception you can support whatever you'd like here. You choose what you think is valuable and you help breathe financial life into it.

There's a second token called an SBD. There's some controvery around what an SBD is, but I tend to think it's a unique token that provides some risk mitigation, fast transactions, no cost, and serves to reward active users on the platform. The Steem blockchain guarentees that SBDs are worth a minimum of $1 of Steem because the program will allow users to convert SBD into $1 worth of Steem. The market values the currency higher than $1 right now and even though we guarentee it's worth at least $1 it's currently trading between $5-8.

What's the point of all this?

Look, the main thing is that it's social media, but this is social media that pays you too. You could do all of this on Reddit or Facebook, but those guys have some weird censorship going on, they don't pay users, and it's filled with basically endless flaming and just shitty people. So, here you can blog and use some other platforms like Discord to interact with one another, and while you're at it you can get paid in crypto.

I'm new... what should I write about?

Well, I have two answers to this. 1. If you're writing because you love it then just write about what you love. That's really all that matters. 2. If you're writing because you want to earn money here then a few things. You're going to have to be patient. It's hard to get noticed and build on the platform. If you're expecting a free Lambo tomorrow you're going to be disappointed. What I think works best is start by commenting a lot and only post short form content. You're 50 page expose on Obama's third vacation while out of office is going to have to wait. Comment on other posts and build up a following. The other best way to do that is network on Discord. I'm partial to the Peace, Abundance, and Liberty Network because I founded it and in there you'll find 8,000 people to interact with. There are other servers you can connect with once you find your way around. Once you have some buddies around there the resteems and upvotes will happen naturally.

How should I interact with other Steemians?

Here's a few quick don'ts:
asking for follow for follow
asking for vote for vote
asking for others to review your work
being rude

Here's some quick dos:
Make friends
Be kind
Offer your services for free while getting started
engage on others posts

Flags and Rep

Part of what keeps everyone nice around here are flags and rep. Rep is roughly how much you've earned from other people, but it scales depending on how the higher rep accounts interact with you. People are more comfortable providing stronger upvotes to larger accounts so you're going to want to work on getting your rep higher. Mostly that just happens over time as people upvote you, but you want to avoid flags.

Flags on the system reduce rewards and reduce your rep. If you're coming from other platforms you may not give a shit about those things yet, but you'll soon learn that protecting your rep and avoiding flags is pretty important. Especially because people can go back to all your posts within a 7 day window and flag all of them.

People flag for all kinds of reasons:
You were acting like an asshat on the blockchain
You were acting like an asshat off the blockchain
They disagree with your content
They disagree with how much your content was earning
Your content is a type of abuse where you're posting copyrighted material belonging to someone else
Your content is a shit post consisting of essentially 1 image/video that you didn't even make and no text just to give an opportunity to have it be upvoted (same goes for comment spam)

You should avoid picking fights or acting like a fool because it's going to hurt your rewards and experience here. Give it a few weeks before you explore that feature cause you're effectively picking a financial fight with someone else.

Well, that's essentially Minnow 101

As you progress there's more that you can do. I'll talk some more about this stuff later and maybe give a dolphin 101.