1 Year On Steemit! What's Changed?

I remember in 2015, my father got me an antminer for Christmas. He told me that it was time I started mining bitcoin (As he'd been doing for almost a year), and I thought "Man! I don't want to get involved in cryptocurrency. I ran my antminer for about a year, keeping track of what I made. I was disappointed because after half a year of mining, I had only made about 30 dollars. Then my father told me to sign up for a new beta platform he'd found called Steemit.com. I resisted for about a week, and finally checked it out to end his constant persistence. I saw how people were making money, and thought what everyone thinks on first glance "This is too good to be true." So. . . I decided to test it, posting my introduceyourself article, and adding every single thing the comments told me to add. After no immediate success, I decided to post a little known fact about Bach's first invention, and my symphony (at the time). I remember going to bed and all of these articles being 10 cents or less. At around 1am, I woke up and went to our downstairs bathroom. I then went and checked the articles to see that each one had made over 500 dollars. My dad had told me to check them when he saw that I was up. My first thought was "This is some kind of prank, this guy @blocktrades is gonna come back right before the payout and remove his upvote. When that didn't happen, I was thrilled! I then sent the liquid portion of the money to bitcoin, bringing me closer to one bitcoin then six months of antmining combined! Over the next few months, the price of Steem went from 4 dollars to 3, 3 dollars to 2, 2 dollars to 1, and 1 dollar to 20 cents. Over this time, my father and I were mining, slowly increasing our amounts of Steem. As the price got lower, more and more users fled. I decided that I needed to post as much as I could at such a low price, to increase my amount of Steem for if it ever rose again. I began to power up 100% of my articles, and posting daily. This is where @curie really helped me. Every day I'd post, and almost every day, they'd upvote. My strategies for posting daily included starting a few series, here they are:

My Review of Sun Tsu's Art of War - Payout: $231.87 (About 1.5 thousand Steem)
My Weekly7 Series - Payout (So Far): $90.07 (About 257 Steem)
My Composer Birthday Series - Payout (So Far): $227.3 (About 428 Steem)

I have also made over 40 YouTube videos to post on this platform! This was the first one:

I remember a year ago when I first joined, payouts were 24 hours after the post, then 12, then back to 24. Now, payouts are over a 7 day period. I also remember that there was an active category, and a payout category that no longer exist. Also, at the time, there were no profile pictures, feeds, or resteems.

Steem and Steemit has given me the opportunity to invest large amounts of money into other crypto currencies (bitcoin, ethereum, golem, and b.a.t.), so for that, I am grateful. I have also learned a lot about investing, and "reading" the market. This year was fun, and I look forward to spending many more on this platform with this community!

Thanks for reading this! Let me know in the comments how long you've been on Steemit, and how you found the platform! Please remember to check back later!

Also remember to check for: My weekly 7 post, As Well As My Composer Birthday Posts
Come play on my minecraft server! The Ip is: SteemCraft.mcph.co

(Note) In order to encourage meaningful feedback on the platform, I will check comment trails of users who leave superficial comments (ie "Awesome post," or "Upvoted.") and will mute any users who exhibit a pattern of leaving "spammy" comments.