Shameless self-promotion

With the new influx of users and influence switching hands I've seen quite a few witnesses and authors promote themselves lately and rightfully so. I can't remember last time I did a milestone post or anything similar.

This will be sort of my self-promotion post, I'll try not to make it too boring.

Some history.

I signed up to Steemit on the 24th of May 2016 with user ID: 9,562, exactly 2 months after @steem was created and on the same day as my Reddit Cakeday! Good thing I didn't spend most time on Reddit that day cashing in karma for my cakeday but stumbled upon Steem instead!

Having been a "curator" and content creator + commenter on Reddit for so long but at the same time involved in blockchain, Steem was like a dream come true and felt like something I've been waiting in forever - I'm sure many others feel the same way!

When Streemian came online I was one of the first to set up a curation trail and have been running it ever since by only voting manually. Thanks to all accounts and users that have followed my votes since then and helped distribute Steem Power to so many. Currently at ~42,000 manual upvotes.

Before delegation came around I had managed to earn ~550 SP in curation rewards for over 6 months of manual voting which at the time were worth about 60$. Now I'm at 24k SP in curation rewards and have only powered down 3-4k SP in 20 moons!

I've been a firm believer of the platform and currency and knew ever since I joined that it will become really big, even when prices were going under 10 cents I spent a lot of time marketing the platform in my own little ways and encourage users to stay active when most others were leaving. Unfortunately this took a lot of time out of my day, so much so that I didn't find the time to post actively and earn that cheap SP at the time, but I always found the time to curate either on my PC or my Phone!

I've been involved with a lot of projects in and out of the platform and spend most of my waking hours on it. If I'm not posting or curating I can be found on steemit.chat, discord and slack. I try my best to give everyone some time and a chance to curate them, even if this often leads to a lot of spam from users - I know what it felt like when you first started out on Steemit.

One of the creations I'm mostly proud of is @ocd. All team members share the want to help out newcomers and spread distribution evenly among them and help retention, for no initial cost to the authors. ;)

Currently I'm planning a few projects for Steem on the sideline and waiting for SMT's to be launched and I'm hoping the community will find them as exciting as I currently do.

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Why should you vote on my posts or place me on an autovoter

I spend a lot of my time on Steem daily, even if my posts may not be top-notch quality I appreciate the votes and I'm sure many reward me for all the time I spend outside of the platform for the currency. Such as having to stay active on obsolete sites like Reddit to help out newcomers stumbling on Steem and stay up to date by reading through the several discord servers, steemit.chat channels and projects coming to life on the platform.

I try my best no to vote-trade. Although sometimes I do vote on "the usuals" and people that support me, I focus most of my daily voting power on @ocd nominations. Its a bit disappointing the amount of messages I get from rather influential users asking to vote me for witness (I don't have a witness account) or vote on my posts if I'm willing to do the same and I tell them that I can't cause its going to undervalued posts of newcomers often leading to them not supporting me back.

I self-vote pretty often after the 30 minute mark, giving manual and autovoters a chance to increase their curation rewards. I am fine with not always hitting the "hot list" and making 75% in post rewards instead of higher and I hope the time will come when more users decide to do this instead of instantly self-voting and discouraging users from earning curation rewards.

I've never really used vote-buying bots except @randowhale a few times, but since its becoming a more normal thing lately I might consider doing it on posts that are a few days old to increase the curation rewards of my followers.

I also sacrifice a lot of my potential curation rewards by encouraging manual curators to vote on the @ocd compilation posts and their nominations since I vote on them often a day later thus giving you time to place your votes before mine and knowing they are going to undervalued and vetted newcomers.

You can rest assured that I'll be around the platform and working towards it for a long time in the future and that the SP I gather will be used well. Currently I have 95% of my own SP delegated further and I plan on keeping that up by growing the curation team of @ocd.

To not make this too long I think I'll stop here and want to thank you for reading and considering my self-promotion. :)

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It would be really awesome if you could comment in this post if you've had any past run ins with me on the platform or what your oldest memory is for some nostalgic effect. Thank you to everyone, old and young accounts that are here often and making the platform as great as it is!

As some of you know I don't usually add "follow me" or "upvote me" at the end of posts or in the footer, but if you could resteem this post it would be highly appreciated. :)

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