An introduction to Steemit when you're used to Reddit
If you're reading this from Steemit, send your redditor friends here.
Steemit is a social media platform centered on individual original content. It is democratic, decentralized, and motivational. It exists on a blockchain, which means that no central authority governs its systems and anyone can create an app utilizing it.
You may have heard of Steemit, where you get paid to post. That is true. You get paid STEEM to post articles. This is currency generated by the blockchain. If you don't know what a blockchain is, or how it works, click here. When people upvote your article, you gain currency that can be traded like real money and sold for real money.
So it's like Reddit, but you get paid instead of just getting karma?
Pretty much, although there are nuances to Steemit that are different from Reddit.
On Reddit, you can share an article on a subreddit, and so long as nobody else has posted it, it'll get popular. But the difference is that Steemit rewards you for putting the effort in to write good articles. So most people will only upvote you for original content they deem meaningful. Now, that doesn't mean you shouldn't share articles, but at least offer some of your own insight.
You can also get paid for upvoting
If you spend a lot of your time searching through the "new" section and upvote deserving articles that then become popular, you get a cut of the earnings that article will make as a "curator's reward".
What's that about it being decentralized?
Steemit exists on a distributed blockchain. So there's no censorship, central servers, or other governing body. In other words, you can't get banned from Steemit. You can, however, be flagged. And if enough people flag your articles, you will lose reputation, and your articles are much less likely to be "trending" or "hot".
Why don't we just upvote everything and everybody gets paid?
Because each person only has a certain amount of invisible voting power per day, and that power is divided among their upvotes for the day. So if you upvote 100 things, each one will only get 1% of your total daily power. Also, each vote can consist of no more than 5% of your daily power, so there is motivation to upvote at least 20 things per day for the most utilization of your power.
Are there sub-steemits?
Sort-of. You can go to the home page to see a rundown of the tags on the left side. Those are the sections of Steemit. You can have up to 5 tags when you publish an article, and the first tag will be which category your article is posted under.
How much do we get paid?
It depends on how many upvotes you get. Most articles don't earn more than $5, but a good amount earn more than $25, and once you gain a lot of followers and lots of people are voting for you, you can make upwards of $1000 in one post. If you put in the effort, and don't mind making less than $10-20 per week for a while, you can get a following and start making more.
How do I get this STEEM currency back out to USD?
In short:
- Sign up for Coinbase
- Use Shapeshift to turn your STEEM into Bitcoin and transfer it to Coinbase
- Sell the Bitcoin for USD that is deposited into your bank.
I will be writing an article later on how to do this in more detail.
How should I get started?
You should do the following:
- Sign up for steemit
- Wait for the invite email
- Save your password somewhere you can retrieve it (you cannot change your password to something you can remember)
The reason for this is: a blockchain requires a hashed key to unlock your account. - Make a post with the tag "introduceyourself" and try writing your first article.
Thanks for reading
This has been Alavan, remember to click that little blue up arrow at the bottom.
Hope you've enjoyed
