After a month of content creation and curation, I am enthusiastic about this platform and excited about its future possibilities. Being a suspicious tinkerer on a homestead, this is actually my first robust exposure to social media in general and I want to share my modest experience with potential new users and other greenhorns.

Lessons learned

1. Make connections with people

Steem can be a lonely place if you are just putting out content and expecting it to catch fire. As I describe below, I have received encouragement from many people and two communities in particular but it takes two to have a relationship. Before publishing, I sought out communities of interest using tags and connected with them via my first use on Discord.

2. Don’t worry too much about the ecosystem: just interact like a normal person

I am new to crypto and had only a general sense of the reward and staking ecosystem. I didn’t concern myself with really analyzing it. Instead, I focused on producing original, unique content and upvoting posts I just plain liked regardless of the reward. I have picked up a lot of subsequent knowledge through experience.

3. Browse by new, not trending

I spend a lot of time finding the right tags relative to my niche and reading through posts sorted by new. This was a lot more fruitful than my initial focus on trending.

My vision

For hunter gatherers, the most valuable commodity was knowledge. When herds disappeared or the climate changed, a family had to know where else to travel and how to adapt to altered conditions with technology. Upon arriving to North America, clans would split up to gain more knowledge. They would meet in perhaps five or ten years at a rendezvous point where experiences would be shared, new families made, and goods traded.

I see Steem as the rendezvous point of our era. I never previously got excited about social media because I didn’t understand the economics of these platforms. Why should I provide my information for free for a large corporation to monetize?

I believe in Steem because it allows decentralized, peer-to-peer sharing of information across many people who have reunited after having many different experiences. This need to swap stories and experience is a primitive urge of humanity, and I believe Steem is positioned to be a gathering place in a world of increasing centralization and the fracturing of more local units of organization such as the small community or family.

The Lindenmeier site in CO where humans met at this prominent outcropping to share knowledge photo credit

Gathering steem

I had to learn to purchase BTC to purchase a small amount of Steem to power up to minnow level, which was very cheap at current prices. While my upvote is still very small, I now have enough RC to perform enough interactions to make new connections.

I am so grateful for everyone who has welcomed me, and, before the music starts and they pull me off the stage, I probably would not have made it a month if not for the encouragement of all the members in the @innerblocks and @homesteaderscoop communities. I also appreciate the early upvotes from @blocktrades, @gtg, and @ocd that kept me in the game. Thank you to everyone else who left helpful comments and curated my work.