Steemstem is a scientific community actively promoting & supporting science since September of 2016. STEM stands for Science – Technology – Engineering and Mathematics and these are mainly the topics of steemian authors, who are writing under the #steemstem tag.

[Image source steemstem shared with permission]

The Management Team of Steemstem as well as the people who are assisting in posts’ curation are highly active members, devoting time to educate, promote, reward original and scientific content.

But to me at least, steemstem goes beyond rewards. It is an idea, a vision and sets an example to follow.

This post is not about numbers, but some numbers always provide an extra help in making a point!

For the past month, steemstem has voted 429 Votees with a 4.1% of self voting
source
I am not sure where I can find the exact amount rewarded by steemstem for the above timeframe, but we can see weekly totals steemocean.com report where it is clear that for the period 28/2/2018-07/3/2018, steemstem has upvoted 353 posts and the total value of Votes in SBD is $786.491!

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Do I have your attention now that I have mentioned the amount of $786.491 rewards for authors in just a week?

Now that I do have your attention, I need to change the subject and move to a different direction..

How I discovered @steemstem

Oh how I wish I know there was such a thing before, I would have joined steemit at least one year before.

However, I believe that it IS better late than never.

Thankfully when I joined steemit and got to know the @greek-trail community, I came across the interesting topics written by @ruth-gril, @trumpman, @filotasriza3 and I came by beautiful posts by many people that are easily found when you are following the steemstem tag!

Those nicely written, interesting posts motivated me to write about steemstem related articles (Secrets of the deep, Singularity etc).

Even though time is precious and sometimes in lack, I managed to write about 20 posts in the last 2 months and some of them were visited by steemstem!
The reason for not writing more steemstem posts?

I believe that a scientific article should be properly researched and that requires extra time. You have to make sure that you find trustworthy sources that you can cite and plenty of information in order to compose a thorough and compact blog post.

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What did SteemStem teach me?

Steemstem has provided useful guidelines for crafting a post and has set the writing standards in steemit at a very high level.

Please take the time to read the below posts about:

• Respect Images Copyrights
• Follow Writing Guidelines
• How to be a Community Member

In the above posts, steemstem highlights very important aspects of ethical writing that are actually a matter of etiquette and common sense.

According to the content guidelines posted

In short, a #steemstem post should:
• Follow a logical course, supported by arguments.
• Have proper syntax, grammar and spelling (poor language use often destroys the clarity a post describing a scientific concept should have).
• Be well-written in a clear way, no obscurities, misunderstandings or misinterpretations.
• Be well-formatted.
• Be well-researched.
• Not spread false information.
• Cite your sources and credit your images.

And beyond the above, what has been made clearer to me was that to craft a post I need to take under consideration a few factors such as:

What to write about

We can write about anything! We are human beings with experiences, knowledge, opinion. The fact that we get into the ‘trouble’ of writing means that we wish to share something with the world. As each one of us is special and unique, we are absolutely capable of finding many subjects to write about. Our style, personality, thoughts, are the ones that give the color, the character to our post. This is why every post we of us is unique / like us!

Structure – Quality of Writing

Posts are created for others to read. So their quality is a very important factor. If we do not take the time to proofread our blog posts, if we do not care about grammar and spelling, then nobody will bother to read them.

It is worth it to devote an extra half an hour (or a bit more) to make sure that what we have written makes sense when read

Community and New Friends

I never really believed in social media friendships. I never used social media for personal promotion, I always preferred the face-to-face communication.
But steemit & steemstem showed me that it is possible to make friends online.
It is easy to find friends with whom you share the same interests. It is easy to expand your knowledge and there are many posts that can ignite a flair to widen up your horizons!

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Did you know that steemstem is on a break?

Actually Steemstem has announced that they would take a break from curating and upvoting. This happened the day that I wrote my first math related article, a day before the pi day (and what came to be the day that Hawking passed away). To know more about the reasons why the team decided to stop for a while, I suggest that you read their post.

Will I continue writing steemstem related articles even if steemstem remains on a break?

Well of course yes! Steemstem is a very important part of steemit and I hope they will continue what they successfully are doing for the past years. But even if they stop rewarding the scientific related posts, this should not mean that we should stop writing about what we care about! Or that we should stop worrying about guidelines and copyrights!

How can I support steemstem?

I will tell you a few things that I do to support steemstem (plus any other good content comes my way on steemit) and of course I will be open to any additional comments or ideas you would like to share.

• I support by upvoting the steemstem accounts.
• I read every couple of days (at least) articles in the steemstem tag that I enjoy and upvote / comment on them.
• Whenever I am online on Discord I try to answer any questions I can answer to new members
• I try to follow the guidelines for all of my posts and try to educate people that are around me

My Conclusion

We can't just write a post and wait to be discovered! We need to get out there, discover and interact! We cannot complain without acting! We need to be the change we wish to see, improve ourselves and ultimately our micro-world.

We need to figure out the WHY we are here and the WHERE we wish to be in the near future. This will show us the way...

"Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge."

_{* by Carl Sagan (Nov 9 1934 – Dec 20 1996) American Astronomer, Cosmologist, Science communicator.*}

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Where can we find steemstem?

Join their vivid Discord or their steemit.chat channel. There are many interesting people, always eager to help out!

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Thank you for taking the time to read my post. This is an effort to gather & share with you my thoughts about @steemstem, content posted in general and what community & support is all about