Celebrating my 500th follower I will give away 2 SBD by random to one of my followers that comments and upvotes this post related to it's content and with constructive meaning.

Here is what this post is about:

• I am looking back on my time I had here on steemit in general.
• I will do that by taking a critical perspective, because the steemit platform has somehow the face of Janus.
• In my thoughts I will especially consider openmic, a contest that is hosted by a steemian who calls himself @luzcypher. This contest offers a 300 Steem Prizepool and for me as a musician this appeared to be very interesting.
• I will underline my thoughts by embed the related content. I appreciate if you watch or listen to it, especially my music:)

But let's begin with my first steps on steemit:

I started with some Introduction and stuff I already had in my portfolio, like Filmmusic that I had once produced:

I gained a few bucks by upvotes and that was a nice experience because I never earned anything for that kind of music before, although I think that I've done very impressive on those, here is one more:

This was the first time that I realized that steemit is somehow a lottery. Of course not everything gets rewarded the way you expect it to be, but as far as I value the quality of my posts the quality aspect is absolutely unrelated to the results they get in upvotes. The first composition above was 10x worth in upvotes as those afterwards. If you listen to the music, you absolutely can not imagine, why the first one should be ten times worth as much as the other.

How I met Openmic

While posting stuff using the music-tag, I looked at the listings in new, hot and trending category. The Trending Category was never in my consideration at this time. But I was happy to see my stuff in „hot“ or „new“ category listed somehow on top.
When I thought about it a little more, I began to look how trending steemit posts were tagged.
That's where I came into contact with the tag „openmic“. I began to do research about it and finally came to the posts of @luzcyhper, who hosted a contest called „Steemit Openmic“. In that contest steemians all around the world can upload live performances which are judged by some other steemians and at least there are three performances rewarded with up to 150 Steem.

I was catched by this idea and of course there was some hope to win the contest some day.
To say it right away: I have not won the contest so far. But yet, I began to gain much Steem by taking part in the contest, upload my weekly performances and have them upvoted by the community.

See this one here, it was my first entry for the contest.

I went to bed, it had about 12 cents in upvotes, I expected it to be around 5-10 Dollars in the morning with a bit of luck.

Well, I was shocked:

412 SBD in Upvotes and top listed in trending category!!

(Unforunetely steem price fell around 60 cents this week, so I earned „only“ around 200 SBD in the end. But hey, that was huge!)

I already was doing the math on my weekly earnings because the quality of the performance is easy to reach for me as a musician.

So I did a next one:

Don't laugh at me: I remember it hit around 4 Dollars. Not to mention that I was very disappointed on that one.

I asked myself why the first post got so much attention while the next one, that was not much worse, only gained 2% of it in upvotes.

I came to the conclusion that some whales, by chance, hit the upvote button. And I considered it to be just luck, a lottery, like I just predicted in the beginning of this post.

But I went on doing weekly performances and indeed: I had two more entrys in a row together with my friend @finkenchris that earned around 100 bucks, each!

Well, by now I was thinking the truth about it has to be the other way around: The entry with only 4 bucks in upvotes was just bad luck.
However, I now had about 400 Steem in my wallet and that was a nice experience after only a few weeks on the platform.

And I really invested some money in my equipment to make my music performances and especially the quality of my recordings much more appealing to the audience.

I wrote an own song with my buddy @brudaj who is a member of steemit too, and we were very excited about it, because we found that this was one of the best songs we did on steemit so far.

We even build in nice Songwriting skills, so when the text says „moving up or fallin' down low“ the melody moves up and falls down, as does it in the following piano solo:

But it didn't move up depending on the rewards aspect, it only fell down low and earned almost nothing. And from this day, I never had that nice income on my posts again.

I was very disappointed.

I tried my best with really advanced stuff on the piano...

...and even some splitscreen stuff that I wrote on my own...

...but it didn't give me the rewards I had in the first posts.
On top came the fact, that steemit was suffering from DDOS a lot and was absolutely slow and lagging.

This is something still not improved!

Then I hit rock bottom with this entry:

Although I never in all my life was able to play this (not as easy) piece of music that well, I had the worst income that I ever had on openmic and I am close to give up on the contest, because effort and reward is absolutely not related in a reasonable way at the moment.
The price of steem dropped to it's deepest low since I am a member on the platform and as time goes by I am really understanding that this is not for speculation purposes, but for the value of the whole system which (to be honest) is absolutely not sustainable and stable, at least at the moment.

What is my opinion after my personal history as an active member on steemit?

Well, it appears to really be a lottery which rewards you get.
It seems to me that upvotes are based on how people place them tactical to maximise the curation rewards more than on valuing the quality of posts. This way trending posts are boosted even more and most of the time you see all the old faces around when you look at the trending list.

I am really wondering, if this way steem is just a ponzi-scheme that has to attract more and more new members that will make it possible to make curation rewards out of the posts as long as the attraction level is high.

On the one hand this system will collaps when a few earned much and many got nothing. At this point I have to admit that I am one of those that were able to profit at least with a small amount of money.

On the other hand I have to admit that I am one of those that were able to profit at least with a small amount of money. Imagine that: I made 80 bucks on Youtube in two years and about 500 here in just a few month although I am not performing like in the prescribed scenario. That's pretty much ok to be honest.

I think I will stay here, because there are some things, that give me hope that it is not only a ponzi scheme. For example the steemsilvergold community, who's members designed and minted a really nice steem silver round.

I am proud that I was able to gather even some of thouse coins at myplace:

I don't know how I will deal with that stuff here, but I will definitely take my time to think about things I want to put my time and effort to.

And Steemit was a very attracting place to be, but it is really loosing some of it's attraction. When I tell friends about it and they try to use it, there is no good feedback about it at the moment, whereas in previous days people became almost enthusiastic about it. But now it is really just some lagging slow buggy site.

Although it gains some real value out of quality posts on the platform, it is really questionable how sustainable it's upvotestructure and first of all it's stability will perform in the future.

But let's wait and see.

Thank you for your time visiting and reading this post and for your active support, means a lot to me,
Best wishes,
@senzenfrenz