What Eleven Days of A Thirty Day Posting Challenge On Steemit Has Shown Me So Far - Steemit is Community Creation

Today is my 11th of 30 in the #challeng30days challenge. I've been posting about CodeMash over the past 4 days, but tonight I want to take a break from that. I want to talk about the 30 day challenge again after 10 full days. I've officially posted for ⅓ of the way through the challenge and I've learned some things about Steemit and writing content.

Writing Content is Easy, Writing Good Content is Hard Work

First, writing great content is hard work. That is a no brainer. It takes some serious time and effort to write content that will connect with and help people in some meaningful way. I've simply not made time for that today and I will probably be lacking in time tomorrow as well. I feel like I'm just trying to fill the page to get the post in for the challenge, and frankly that doesn't fit well with me. I'm still going to post this anyway because I made a promise to myself to finish this challenge and give it a good solid try.

Second, when I do my next series (in the version of a 30 day challenge), I'm not going to make it one where I post everyday for 30 days. I will probably challenge myself to work on it every single day in some way. Perhaps that will be in the form of research and notes. This goes back to the last paragraph.

Third, and this one is another obvious one that should have jumped out at me upfront, finding something you are totally passionate about and working through that in a well thought out way is probably the way to go. Saying I'm just going to write for 30 days without a real focus is probably setting myself up for failure. Not failure in that I wouldn't be able to get something out each day, but instead a failure to use the platform in the way I'd hope to see it used.

Four, writing content for the sake of writing content is probably a good way to turn your posts into noise that the community will find easier and easier to ignore. In fact the reputation should probably be diminished if this continued for too long. Perhaps that is how it works. I have not been here long enough to know. I know there is the concept of flags for bad posts or bad behavior. Votes and flags become community governance tools, not necessarily curation tools.

Steemit is More than Content Creation; It's Community Creation

Something I'm also realizing is that Steemit isn't focused solely, or even primarily on making sure good content is created and exposed to the world. The way I'm seeing it used, is a tool for building communities of like minded people. So let's do some "what if" thinking. What if you had a system where you could write everyday and mark some post for serious consideration for curation, while having others just as content for yourself, and those who might be interested in reading about the mundane whims of someone they follow. This is kind of what Facebook and Twitter are. Just trying to understand and brainstorm a bit here. What if Steemit was able to be more like a community platform. I see a lot of folks joining up and building organic communities outside of Steemit. They use other tools like Discord to really communicate. Then they support each others posts inside Steemit. I think this is cool, but also I think Steemit is missing out on evolving to make use of some interesting emergent behavior. What was meant for blogging or content creation, has become a community creation tool.

I'm going to think a lot more on this and also re-evaluate tomorrow and try to think about what exactly I want to finish this challenge out with. For now I'm going to finish this out with a feeling of unease and maybe a bit of hope for the future.