Ten Simple Rules for Steemit Happiness

Introduction

After about 16 months using the Steem platform, this year's Steemfest has made me introspective about how I make use of it. Here are my suggested Ten Simple rules for happiness in the Steemit ecosystem.

[Image Source: pixabay.com, License: CC0, Public Domain]

1.) An expectation is a resentment that's waiting to happen.

When most of us got here, we were looking for "Facebook that pays" or "Reddit that pays" or "Medium that pays". Those concepts are fine for an intuitive understanding of the platform, but they only carry a person so far, maybe for about an hour of real-world experience. Soon we start reading articles about producing quality posts and engaging in the comments as methods to earn rewards. Maybe, those suggestions work, but they also miss the point.

Because of the rewards mechanism, the Steem ecosystem is very different from platforms like Facebook, Reddit, and Medium, and worse - the Steem ecosystem is constantly changing. Don't get locked into a way of thinking about Steem because in the end, Steemit and other Steem-based platforms are exactly what the most influential stakeholders say they are. No more and no less. If your expectations are different from the so-called "whales", then you are bound to be disappointed.

It might surprise us, but we are not actually here to produce quality posts and we are not here to build an audience. As minnows, our job is to figure out what the influential stakeholders are looking for, and give it to them. Quality posts might be part of that. Building an audience might be part of that. But, if so, those factors are just means to an end, and as Steem changes hands, that end might well be different tomorrow than it was today.

If we don't like that arrangement, the only way to change it is to increase our influence by increasing our stake. Don't let your mind get trapped into thinking there's a "right" way to use the platform, and especially don't get emotionally invested in trying to "fix" it beyond what your own stake allows. At the risk of overusing a cliche, it is what it is.

2.) Steemit is the place to write about Steemit

Like it or not, articles about Steem and Steemit do better than articles about most other topics. It's understandable. With all the diversity on the platform, Steem is the one single thing that each and every person here has in common.

Unfortunately, that's not necessarily a healthy dynamic for recruiting new people (who typically don't care to read about Steem and Steemit), but refer back to rule #1. Steem and Steemit are also what the stakeholders vote for. (Did I just kill all chances for whale upvotes? Maybe. ;-)

I have #steem and #steemit categories blacklisted on my bots because I want my bots voting for things that attract new users, but as long as those influential stakeholders keep telling us minnows that they want more content about steemit, they're going to keep getting more content about steemit, so here I am writing about a topic that I won't let my bot vote for.

3.) Collect Steem and Steem Dollars, not real-world currency. Ignore your account value.

Market movements can't be controlled and before long, they dwarf the account value changes that we see from post and voting rewards. If you worry about the day to day value of your holdings, you're riding a totally unnecessary emotional roller coaster. Don't give yourself high blood pressure worrying about the value of your Steem, just keep collecting it and watching the numbers in your wallet inch along, one day at a time.

If you believe in Steem as a long term proposition, then rest assured that the value will take care of itself.

4.) Tune out the cheerleading

[Image Source: pixabay.com, License: CC0, Public Domain]

When prices go up, according to the articles people write, Steemit is the greatest thing since the printing press. Everyone has something to say about how great and innovative the platform is, and how fantastic the leaders are.

The reality is that there's a lot of truth to that. Steem is a revolutionary platform, but in the end, water is still wet and the Sun still rises in the east. Steem also has plenty of room for improvement. Don't set yourself up for a let-down when reality sets in.

5.) Tune out the whining

Just as sure as the positive sentiment when prices are up, low market value produces plenty of negative sentiment posts. As with the positive articles when prices are high, many of the criticisms are probably valid, but they get overblown during times of pricing pressure.

All of us are not platform designers. Let the people whose job it is worry about those posts. If you let these articles influence your perspective too much, you'll forget about Steem's many good attributes and depress yourself.

6.) Be at peace with the bots

Bots are an unavoidable fact of life here. Personally, I happen to think that's a good thing, but I also know that many people have a different opinion. If so, you don't need to like the bots, but you do need to accept them as part of the local reality.

Don't try to swim against a rip-tide.

7.) Do what you enjoy

There's no guarantee of payouts, so have fun doing whatever you're doing. This is one of the very few ecosystems on the Internet where you get paid anything at all for putting virtual pen to virtual paper. Presumably, you're doing the same thing for free on other platforms, so just do what you enjoy doing for as long as you enjoy doing it. If you find that rewards matter to you, just keep trying different things that you enjoy until you find something that you enjoy and also generates rewards.

That might mean: writing, music, photography, art, trading on the internal market, developing Steem-related web sites, coding bots, using steepshot, using dtube, using zappl, whatever. One thing that I'm sure of is that we have still only scratched the surface of what Steem will eventually become. So if you're not happy with the current state of affairs, then just keep exploring and experimenting. Right now, Steem is a journey, not a destination.

8.) Unless you're a whale, don't worry about voting power

[Image Source: pixabay.com, License: CC0, Public Domain]

I first read about it some time ago in a post about the curation rewards algorithm by @biophil. The math was there, but I still wasn't sure if I believed it, since it seemed to contradict the whitepaper, but now I have convinced myself that he was right. As long as you vote at some minimal level, and keep voting regularly, an account's remaining voting power really doesn't matter.

I've been running an experiment for about a month and a half with two accounts both powered with roughly the same amount of Steem Power that are voting on the same posts with different voting percentages. One has been keeping its voting power between 70 and 85%, the other has been keeping its voting power in the 20% range. The curation rewards that they have earned are largely indistinguishable, and in fact, the one running at 20% seems to do slightly better.

I think the key to understanding this, intuitively, is that the absolute "cost" of each vote (2% per vote) gets lower as your voting power gets lower (2% of 100 is 2, but 2% of 50 is only 1), but the absolute recharge rate (20% per day) is constant, no matter what your voting percentage. This means that each vote replenishes faster when you are voting at lower power.

If you want to vote 50 times per day at 100%, then go ahead and do it. The only way that your voting percentage seems to matter is as an expression of confidence in the likelihood of future votes to ratify your vote or as a way for a whale to control the size of a reward.

9.) Use "Mute" liberally

When I mute an account, it doesn't mean that I have anything against a particular author. It usually just means that they were showing up too much in my feed with content that didn't interest me after resteems by someone else. I didn't want to unfollow the resteeming person, because they also posted things that I wanted to see, so I muted the resteemed person.

The other case where I'm quick with the mute button are "follow for follow" spammy comments. I don't particularly care if those comments are there. Since they continue to appear, I suppose that some people must find value from them, but I don't want to see them, so I mute the authors.

Your steemit experience is yours, and you are under no obligation to view content that doesn't interest you. Until they give us a better filtering tool, I suggest using the "Mute" button freely. (Just don't mute me! ;-)

10.) Diversify and use dollar cost averaging, but also buy when there's blood in the streets

If you're reading this, you probably know that @cmp2020 is my 16 year old son. When we first joined, in July of 2016, he had a couple of "home runs" among his early posts, and he has followed that with a steady stream of decent payouts. We decided together that he should diversify some of those rewards into Bitcoin, and further diversify from there into some other crypto-holdings. That turned out to be a good thing, because the value of Steem dropped from like $3.50 per Steem to like $.08 per Steem. Around that time, he was able to move some of that Bitcoin back into Steem. Since his first diversification and his first "buy-back", Bitcoin and Steem (respectively) have increased by factors of 10.

I have followed a similar strategy with my own holdings, but since I have had less blogging success, my trading results have yielded less dramatic results than his.

In general, I'm a big fan of dollar cost averaging, but in the long term I am also a believer in Steem, so any time it feels like there's blood in the streets, we'll probably be moving some of our holdings back into Steem. Of course, your definition of "blood in the streets" will likely differ from mine, but if you believe in Steem as a long term asset, then it probably makes sense to buy when you see bleeding.

We also rebalance our cryptocurrency portfolios at regular intervals, in order to avoid being overexposed to price volatility.

Conclusion

So, for whatever they're worth, there you have my Steemfest triggered thoughts on Steemit happiness. Do you have any rules of your own? Please discuss!

As a general rule, I up-vote comments that demonstrate "proof of reading".

Thank you for your time and attention.

Steve Palmer is an IT professional with three decades of professional experience in data communications and information systems. He holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics, a master's degree in computer science, and a master's degree in information systems and technology management. He has been awarded 3 US patents.

Steve is a co-founder of the Steemit's Best Classical Music Facebook page, and the @classical-music steemit curation account.

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