Super Duper Duper Simplified Steemit Intro for Newbs

I have a bunch of friends of all ages and talents (One is a pre-teen surfer and @Fathomer is a, well, a wizard in his 70's) that I've been urging to join this community. Some have accounts that are sitting empty where amazing goodness should be and I know it's because 1. It's hella confusing here and 2. I can't give the one on one in-depth help that I would like. So instead of writing you each a text or email here is the absolute bare bones that you need to know to start participating

PASSWORDS: I wrote a post here about how I got tricked and hacked and how to avoid it, read it for full explanation. What you need to do to start is this.

• Only Use Your Posting Key for your day to day. Posting your own posts and liking (or upvoting) other people's.
• That means as soon as you make you are logged into your account go to your wallet, check your Master password and take a picture or write it down or print it and keep it somewhere safe and don't use it unless you get hacked and need to reset. If you choose to save your password on your phone or laptop for ease, click on your posting private key, copy that and save that as your password. This way you can use Steemit as easily as other social media but will have protection.

UPVOTING: Your vote when you start is worth just around 0.01 sometimes less, it is considered dust. Do not vote on comments (yours or others) until you are a larger account. Just use your vote to upvote posts you like, so you r vote will count for payout and also to help good posts trend. Go ahead and upvote your own posts if you want, you worked hard on them.

TRENDING POSTS : Most trending posts here are highly paid for and do not necessarily mean they were well loved by the community. You will get quickly burned out and disappointed if you are searching for people to connect with, or for creators you will want to follow on the trending pages only. Search for some tags you like (poetry, Homesteading, etc) and look in both the new and Hot sections. Hot tends to be smaller creators, and many of them are mostly organic votes, meaning you will find some cool people doing cool stuff.

Look for a Contest: Some contests are just gambling things to try and give away money, you will not get rich and they are not fulfilling ( I say this because I know you guys and you are all really intelligent creative people). Find a contest that pushes you to write, or create some other type of art or join in a discussion. There are freewrites, community discussions and art challenges that will get you going and also help you meet some people in the community in a real way. Look under #contest to start, or ask me and I will give you some communities I really like (this post is brief so I will not list them here).

Comment: If you see something that really moves you , let them know. If people are having a discussion about a topic you are interested in- jump in. You are friends with me on Facebook so you see how we kind of all just jump in, and many people on my posts don't know each other. This is like that. The correct thing to assume is that the poster is looking for discussion or feeedback. Yes, some people here just want to hear themselves talk and be told how genius/amazing/thoughtful they are. If you love their work and just want to follow as a consumer, great. You will figure out which ones very quickly and you can decide. But, almost every one on here is working towards a better world/community in some way, and they are not only open too but desire collaboration. Get out of your shell and bring what you have to offer to the table, it will be appreciated.

POST PAYOUT: Once a post is past 7 days, any upvotes will not count. Once it is paid out it is 'dead' monetarily speaking. This means 1. If you like an authors older article, feel free to find a newer one and give them a vote. You can still comment on the old post, and join a discussion/compliment them (we can see comments on old posts just not get any more payment). This also means if you put up all of your life's work before anyone has connected with you, it will now be a repository (Looking at you @Fathomer ;) ). Pace yourself so you don't get burnout before you have any feedback or recognition from the community <3

Steemworld.org : This is a separate site that will show you in chronological order any new comments, replies or votes you have. You can see mine for an example https://Steemworld.org/@Kilbride. It shows your voting power, and how much your vote is worth. It also shows things like how much self voting you do and how many different people you've voted. To see yours just replace @Kilbride with @Yourname. Also, if you are curious about anyone else's stats just replace it with @Theirname. THIS WILL BE YOUR FAVORITE TOOL HERE START USING IT FROM DAY 1.

@SteemCleaners: This is a page and a group that helps stop plagiarism and spam. Get familiar with them and if you see someone plagiarizing or spamming comments then drop them a line or tag @cheetah. I included this because I know I was VERY frustrated when I first came here, and I suspect you will be too (@mayitabayita already brought it up, and it's only a matter of time for you all lol).