Figuring out Steemit - My experience over this one month

Hello fellow steemitians!

I want to share my experience with you. I joined Steemit at the end of July, and I managed to post my introduction post in August. Now I updated the steemit picture I made back then to a new level! Scroll down to read about my experience...

So what is my experience?

I googled how the voting system works and learned about voting power. At the same time I learned how the rewarding system works. I had to google that as well. I googled about the payout system and after that I felt more like home here. I learned about the difference between steemdollars and steem power and steem and all these powerups and powerdowns and... you name it.

but...

I soon learned many things.

• I need to get followers so that my posts would be seen by people.

So I found this neat trick: I just follow everyone and some of them will follow me back. Actually about 10% of the people I followed, followed me back in about a months time. That's how I got over a thousand followers in a month!

...and I soon found out that all those hours I spent clicking "follow" were wasted. My upvote rates didn't increase. All these followers were like "empty followers", just following me because I follow them. They didn't really care about my posts.

• So I figured out I need to make more quality content!

I spent many hours writing a nice thorough article about the tobacco and it's occult herbology. Really cool and interesting stuff in my opinion.

...it wasn't any more successful than my other posts. It was quite bad actually. I guess the people here don't give a damn about topics like that. This really discouraged me to write deep articles about anything. I try to give my heart and soul to something and it turns out shite. Yes I know you gotta work hard on steemit to get reputation and audience. I agree. I have been here only a little over a month so I am in no place to complain. And I won't complain! This is my learning curve and I want to improve.

...I soon noticed that maybe one of the reasons for this poor success was the fact that all my posts quickly get lost in the endless flood of new posts in Steemit. The first 30 minutes are crucial and after that it's almost nothing unless you have really loyal followers.

• I had to choose the correct timing!

Yes! I found out that if I post in the evening, posts get lost faster than in the day time. Of course, if I post when there is no one online, posts get lost also. So I had to find a nice middle time to post my stuff. I found out that morning and daytime are good. Evenings like this are risky! But I'm trying my luck with this post.

...I don't know if it works or if I am just delusional... Maybe it is just pure luck if people see and like my post.
Recently I've been posting a lot of photographs from our travels with my wife and some of them get liked while others don't...
and even though all of the posts have a lot more value and content than most of the posts I see here on steemit (In my opinion!), they just don't get seen by people. Maybe I am just a shitty blogger/photographer and I just don't know it.
Or maybe it's because no one knows me here. :D I just gotta get more audience and socialize!

So yeah... steemit is hard.
It works like real world.

If you got money (steempower) people like you because they want your upvotes.
If you want money, you gotta get the big guys to like your content because their upvotes really mean value.

But hey, those last too sentences were just pure greed aye?
Yup. Many greedy people here...

I came here to first share my paintings with people.
But I rarely finish any paintings, and people would probably get bored if I make progress posts about the same painting every day.
So I figured out I could give a lot more to this community. Photographs and articles.
Then I started to enjoy blogging.
And now I'm doing it.

I'm not here to get rich, I just play this gamified social media because I find it fun.
It would be fun to really get rewarded for true effort, but I guess I gotta try something else than just boring occultherbology articles.

A random image of a deathly shroom...

School has started, so I'm busy calculating the trajectories of charged particles in magnetic fields and the reactions between weird organic molecules... But I'll try to figure out something worth posting here!

Soon...
...I will post music. Maybe I will sing for you... or maybe I will compose for you!
We'll see... ;)

Thank you for reading!

Riku Salomäki