RE: Which came first, the Engagement or the Reward?
I'm going to completely scrap any focus on maximizing curation reward, and instead focus on rewarding under-valued, quality content, and spreading smaller rewards to more deserving users, since it is now feasible to do so!
The community must be educated to vote on great, undiscovered content and promote them.
Many good points on this comment @liberosist. I've been observing this phenomenon that you point out from the first day. I've been here on steemit basically around the same time as you and @anyx (11 months ago) however, look the distinct results in the value of my account and wallet.
I am stuck with a Rep53.. well, since ever. And my SP does not even reach the 100 mark so far after 11 months of engagement. Consequently, I have not yet even been able to earn me the vote slider either. So go figure!!
I've already published a good lot of posts specifically addressed to this pernicious problem of blind upvoters & mindless bots. Just the same as with the curators who simply vote for their own interests and gains without first reading the content from top to bottom on the posts they are voting up.
I've been waiting patiently backstage for some logical and positive changes on this platform in order to improve and enhance true live engagement and solidarity between steemians. Where the sense of creating community, collaboration and healthy common growth be the first goal and slogan. But I think that there are still many others hard forks and changes ahead to reach that point. Unfortunately!!
Finally, and to make this comment short. I would like to shamelessly draw your attention towards an article that I would appreciate some support, diffusion and promotion by both of you. I think this is for a good cause that unfortunately gone undiscovered & unnoticed by the community and also highly underrated and under-valued.
I invite you to read the post and hopefully both of you feel gratified with the probable curation rewards from this post and also look gorgeous inside and out for the next steemit's photography.
Cheers! :)
You joined at the same time as us, sure, but it looks like you only started being active when the price and subsequently blogging difficulty went us. Many of us have stuck with Steem and believed in it through the hard times. When the price hit $0.10 virtually everyone left. There were only a few hundred of us who stuck around, and we gained large followers and were rewarded a significant portion of the reward pool. That went on for nearly 6 months before Steem started growing again. The reward pool is the same in terms of Steem Power rewarded, and it was really easy to get to the Trending page. Now the blogging difficulty and competition is way up, it's much harder to get the same kind of attention.
It's the same as mining difficulty, really. Those who were early to Bitcoin and Ethereum mining could make accumulate thousands of coins. At they time they were worthless, but if you were patient, you would be a millionaire now.
The lesson to learn is - Be patient, be persistent, be early. Keep engaging with the community, if your content is good you'll eventually get some attention. All the best!
its also about finding it early which can be done to luck and then taking action