A year on Steemit. Where I have been, where I want to go.
Steemit is an amazing platform! After a year and a few days on the blockchain my blog has a lot of room for improvement. I am slowly becoming a better writer because of the people who read and support my writing on Steemit.
It is difficult to sum up a year of social media here on Steemit, especially since the majority of my social media activities are on the Zuckerberg of doom.
I have really enjoyed the community here on Steemit, and if I had to sum up the year in one word on Steemit that would be the word Community. Between the use of the Discord app, and the various initiatives the Steem blockchain is a place for genuine community building.The first community I joined and learned my way around, somewhat, was the Discord channel created and administered by the @minnowsupport project. I was quick to read the pinned information and too quick to delegate. I ended up giving my support before I had enough to offer. In my enthusiasm to be supportive of the work happening there I delegated 10 of my sp when I still only had 15. There were so many early challenges in being a part of this website; running out of bandwidth, writing and investing myself in a post only to get no votes or only bot votes, getting downvoted, and losing interest which led me back to the Zuckerberg of Doom.
On Facebook I have thousands of friends and followers, in the time since Standing Rock’s pipeline fight people have been joining my page to keep up on activists movements around the country. I keep pretty well connected with the goings on around all sorts of social movements. I believe in the information age it is up to each of us to keep our awareness levels up. It is better to know what is happening in the world around us, and to attempt to safeguard our communities the best we can through the understandings gained through the global information age.
For the first couple of whiles on Steemit my posts would bring a few cents, if that. It was very difficult to build enthusiasm around the work involved in creating a great post.
I also was a little hesitant because I really don’t know much about HTML or any markdown language for that matter. I also didn’t really enjoy that feeling of shouting into a vacuum again. I had finally began to build a following on Facebook and investing my time into Steemit where I felt like no one was listening was a real struggle. Still I persisted albeit slowly.The initial support I received really helped a lot! The people who dropped by my profile and left upvotes and meaningful comments helped to engage my heart in the Steemit community. I found that there were a few folks who really showed up for me in the early part of my time here. @amyf was the one who onboarded me, she showed me how I could be a value in a community outside of the facebook community I was already involved in. She showed me how a good post thoughtfully written could earn real world cash.
As I learned my way around and began to join some Discord channels I realized that I had followed way too many people in the first couple of weeks on Steemit.
I had followed thousands of people, many of them dead accounts. This was before I knew anything about the enormous number of people who create accounts only to abandon them. The end result has been that I have to sift through my feed to find information that I genuinely want to see. I also have been unfollowing the masses as I find time.I was still just beginning to build my wallet when the price of SBD and STEEM was spiking in December, I didn’t really understand cryptocurrency then, and I am still only beginning to understand the way these markets move. Investors buying coins causing the value to spike and all of that. Crypto is such a huge area of knowledge, and I know my awareness is limited. I did cash out some of my earnings when STEEM was near $6USD and used those funds to purchase silver wire, that wire I used to build a line of earrings, bracelets and necklaces which I crafted myself. Steemit as a blog has created real world wealth for me in terms of ounces of sterling silver. Cold hard currency as it were.
Steemit has been very inspirational over the past year. I have been typing more in the time since I joined Steemit than I have for the entire rest of my life combined.
Because of my background as a hippie I haven’t really had much time sitting in front of a computer screen, at least by comparison to the mainstream type person living in the rat race of babylon. I have enjoyed more of my life living in a tent, or traveling across the country. Because I was raised in a hippie commune my education was lacking in my early life, I wasn’t taught in the traditional ways associated with typical first world education. I had my time to use as I liked, and because I rather go fishing or day tripping through the Texas countryside I ended up missing out on a lot of grammar and spelling. I just didn’t take an active role in learning about the ins and outs of english. This lack of education makes me hesitant to type out posts on Steemit, I know that a huge part of what makes a post good on this platform is to do with the proper use of language, I also know that my skills are limited. Nonetheless this platform has given me courage and helped me to develop self worth where my writing is concerned. A couple of my posts were curated by groups on Steemit, this really uplifted my self worth. I looked at those posts as good enough, but had no idea that anything I put together would be worthy of such broad support from people who have refined taste. Having my posts curated brought a few SBD my way too!
Now as I move into my second year on Steemit I have set up a second account. The idea is to have one account to post video content and one for writing blog posts. I understand there may be some challenges and that I may dilute my following by spreading votes.
The idea is to offer consistency, that a person who enjoys my videos can easily find them, and that folks who like my writing can easily find it. I like the idea of using Steemit to document the ongoing slide into fascism in the USA. I also like the idea that Steemit is a better platform for activists than the more dictatorial social media sites which have high levels of censorship and algorithms which can hide information which runs counter to the state sponsored narrative. People like me are finding themselves in Facebook Jail or banned from Youtube and Twitter because their free speech is a threat to the societal norms the establishment media is pedaling. We are losing our ability to meaningfully express our discomfort with government and industry in the USA, the class war is quickly moving towards civil war and social media along with mainstream media are working hard to craft the sorts of mindsets which allow for ethnic cleansing and genocide.This is yet another reason why I love Steemit, the people who are being killed off by the USA’s military and industrial policy are able to eek out a small amount of money through the blockchain, people in places like Venezuela and the Philippines can make enough money through posting here to allow them to survive the IMF and WTO debt which is crushing societies and nations around the world.
During the past year I have watched as people used bid bots to amass huge wallets, I have also seen the flag wars destroy people who were otherwise just innocent bystanders. I have seen the witnesses jump ship, for the new up and coming cryptocurrency and I have been doing my best to onboard people from the Zuckerberg of Doom.
Just recently I even set up an account for my daughter, and for a friend. My hope has been to draw onto Steemit the people who I already enjoy sharing things with. Then we can engage in mutual aid and gift culture, supporting each other through the use of the blockchain. I genuinely hope that the next year is one of mass migration on to Steemit.Facebook and Youtube are hiding so much information. They are gatekeepers on activism and actively prop up hate speech and actual pedophiles. It’s sickening to think about the sorts of uses our data is monetized for as well. In the wake of the Cambridge analytica scandal we saw Mark Zuckerberg lying to the senate in an attempt to maintain his platform in a way which maintains the information based value system that has been so profitable for Facebook, and detrimental to entire races of people such as the Rohingya who suffered ethnic cleansing in the time after Facebook supported hate speech on it’s platform. White supremacists are creating so much hatred through Facebook, and the system is being used to push the people in the USA towards a civil war.
It is clear to me that the future of our planet is in compassion and understanding, mutual aid and gift culture. Not in the sort of values the consumers of mainstream USA are indulging in. This is why I need to make a more dedicated effort on Steemit. Because the values this platform represents are more in alignment with the needs of the future, this platform is dedicated to the people and our needs in a way that Facebook has no interest in.
Thanks for reading this far!
If you enjoyed this post you may like one of the other blogs I have written.
You can find them here, or here, or here.
Check out my other social media profiles.
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Great post @tawasi.
I've only been here a week but am loving it too so far. Hope my experience here continues to be as positive as yours has been this last year and that there is a mass migrate off the old social media monopolies to steemit.
Regarding getting people on board, you might be interested in this thing I wrote earlier today about #OccupySiliconValley this coming Monday?
Namaste
Funny.
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