One of Steemit's unique selling propositions is the remuneration of appreciated content. This drove the exponential growth of its user base and is fueling thousands of new users joining every day.

When every steemian (or steemer) is born, there's a high probability s/he's like this:

but that is just wrong and not something Steemit was built for

I said it before and I'm saying it again: I just graduated my first week on Steemit. I feel like turning into an adult.
It's been a fire and trial week for me with few hours slept and many money making attempts. Yes, I admit that i followed the money mirage. I tried to be smart, get into the brain of the whales and write what i though they wanted to see which would ultimately get me upvoted...oh and yes, more importantly: get me rich!

As days passed by I got slapped and slapped again by my feeble attempts at scoring the next 10k post. Only a handful of users were upvoting me, most of which were just as frustrated as I was in my posts, none of the whales voted and I was barely reaching the Hot page.

> Towards the end of the first week I have thought many times to quit. Get back to my day job which I was ignoring and from which I almost got fired on missing deadlines for spending all my time on Steemit. LOL. I was dead tired, sleep depraved and at the end of my wits.

But what happened next was the magic of Steemit. As I started crawling around more and more, reading article after article i realized that there are other people like me, frustrated on how can heiditravel, or a makeup video, or pics of marijuana could get more attention than the very important information I posted (yeah, it was important - i posted a bug that logged me out every time I got to the post page and about over 10 typos on the steem.io website)?

It became clear that I'm not the only one with frustrations around. After reading @cryptogee's post on the minnows' whining I decided that I need to stand out of this crowd and I decided I don't want to focus primarily on making money off Steemit, off my posts.

I decided I need to get my brains right first so on Sunday night I slept 8h. Starting the week with a more refreshed neuronal pathway I decided I want to really give my best at helping Steemit and its users. That I don't want to post stuff around with the purpose of making money. Everything I would post will add value to people here.

• I started writing about news (the news article I posted got an official response from Dan. To the publication obviously, not to my post which got barely a few votes but I didn't care about that).
• I drew attention to the engagement needed on the platform, that all of us should comment more and express their opinions, solutions
• Stayed mostly on the New page to upvote posts I liked and encourage the authors
• And I also started posting comments on the posts I liked, where I had an opinion that I wanted to share

Here's the thing: Commenting is the new posting

Commenting brings the community engagement one step closed to each other. I absolutely love posts where comments go crazy and they're a better read sometimes than the post itself. See this one and this one for ex.

And I started commenting around, trying to add value to people's posts. If you look at my steemd page: https://steemd.com/@anduweb and do a search for anduweb replied you will see at least 63 finds. Yes some of them are edits but I think I've commented at least 50 times in the past 2 days and they were on topic and good comments. I must have done something right because not only I didn't get down voted (in the steemd page search for downvoted and you will see 3 curation entries only and the keyword in a post's title), I actually gotten rewarded for my involvement way more than from my best posts so far:

>>It was mindblowing and a confirmation of my recent decision to contribute rather than to be contributed to.

My conclusion for you:

• If you're thinking about joining Steemit, of just did, take my advice: Take a week off if you have any current engagement. Steemit will eat all your time including your sleeping time. It will make you laugh and cry altogether. You needn't be in an office when that happens :)
• Don't participate in Steemit thinking primarily about the money. In due time, money will follow. Right now, Steemit needs you for who you are and for the contribution you can bring. We're ~35k at the moment and the devs and the founders are solely focusing on security and platform stability. At this early stage it's up to us to govern ourselves and make Steemit a better place until they finish what's on their plate to come back and add clear guidelines and resolutions
• Do participate in Steemit with your upvotes, downvotes and comments. You will not always be right, you might say the wrong thing at times, but everyone learns their lesson and the end outcome will put Steemit above all other Social Media platforms. I am convinced.
• Don't give up. One of the links I shared above is a clear demonstration of what Steemit is all about. @masteryoda's post about giving up really brought the best out of the entire community and despite 46 (hater)downvotes he still got one of the best support initiatives out there and an army behind him, supporting him further. This is who Steemit is. This is who we are. This is who you have to be!

Yours truly,
Anduweb

PS. I'd be a big hypocrite if I didn't say that all the stress from last week did birth one of the greatest ideas of my life and gift to this community: steem.ly - Which I believe to be one of the neatest ways of sharing links around here by shorting them. The steem.ly announcement post was the only one that got attention form a whale and was pivotal in my continuation with Steemit. Dan, if it weren't for your vote supporting the steem.ly launch, I think I would have given up along time ago. I bow to you!