A Brief Introduction

Hello everyone!  Today I wanted to try and give an un-biased review of Steemit from my experiences, after becoming a user almost a month ago.  I've spent countless hours on here reading content from other writers and creators, as well as creating my own works to try and educate, inspire, and entertain.  I was trying to think of what to write about today, and I figured after all this time, why not give people a review to read if their new to Steemit or blogging in general?

Please keep in mind the following: I do not work for Steemit or any of it's affiliates or members.  I was not paid or endorsed by any party or individual for this review, it is solely from my own volition.

How did you get started?

My introduction to Steemit was a fairly simple one.  I had heard @klye mention it several time in the Just-Dice public chat, and for the first couple weeks I hadn't paid much heed to it, and then after I saw more and more people posting about it, I figured I'd give it a try myself and see what the fuss was about.

Steemit Community

I often wonder if judging a product or service's community is a valid subject to write about, because the product itself doesn't always have control over the community.  However, with a site like Steemit, the community is everything.  Ever since my first day here, I've never once had an issue with the community or anyone in it; pretty much everyone has been kind, helpful, and more than happy to provide feedback on my created content.  Maybe my experience has been perfect, but the realization that this isn't true for everyone is just as valid.  With any site you will always have posts like this and this, which can either be the result of a negative experience with the community or site, but also the "other side" of the story you might not want to hear.  I don't agree or disagree with either of those posts, I'm just saying that everyone will have a different opinion, not 100% of the people on Steemit will absolutely love it.

As you can see from the paragraph above, I've been overjoyed by my experiences with the community here at Steemit.  When I had first started, I wrote a post about the people that made the biggest differences for me in the first 3 days, and I've come a long way since then.  Just briefly, I'd like to give you the names of a few of the people then and since then that have made a difference, because it meant a lot to me when I was just getting started.

@klye / @reneenouveau / @venuspcs / @heretickitten / @sirwinchester / @jedau / @winstonwolfe / @piedpiper / @virtualgrowth / @berniesanders

If you don't know any of these people, I highly recommend giving their blogs some love and interacting with them, they are what made my experience with the Steemit community so great!  I will admit that I added @berniesanders last-second because he was one of the first big whales to upvote a post of mine, and the experience of having a post make it sort of big was super eye-opening for me, and certainly a fun event!

Community for me is a solid 9/10.

User Interface

Steemit's UI, arguably, isn't very original (looking at site designs like Reddit), however it still delivers a fast and efficient way for users to create, curate, and monitor content, and it certainly has improved over time.  In the last few weeks I've noticed considerable updates to the UI, one of the biggest ones being having the ability to view your Followed and Follower lists, which provides a much larger area of interaction between members and the people they follow.

One thing that is pretty cool that also recently was added is Steemit's reputation system, displayed in parenthesis beside your name.  This number is determined by the number of upvotes/downvotes you get from other users and their reputation, and it works on a sort of logarithmic scale like the Richter scale for earthquakes.  In other words, if you have a reputation of 50 and your friend's reputation is 60, his reputation is 10 times stronger than yours, or alternatively, yours is 10 times weaker.

Setting aside the updates for a minute, since Steemit is still in its infancy stages, I do wish the UI had more color.  Other than a bit of blue at the top and the thumbnail pictures for articles, everything is black and white.  It looks sort of.... dead, if you ask me.  A brilliant idea in my opinion would be to add themes users could activate to add color and variation to the UI, maybe even a night-mode for us Steemian owls that stay up reading until the crack-ass of dawn.

In terms of usability, the UI is great.  From my experience, there's no broken or non-functioning links, everything seems to work as designed, and it's super self-explanatory and easy to use.  It doesn't take a genius to figure out how to upvote or submit new content and the like.

The UI could use some lovin', in my opinion, I'd give it a 6-7/10.

Author and Curation Rewards System

The payout system for authoring and curating rewards is something I've never once had an issue with.  You're given 24 hours (recently up from 12 hours) since the creation of the post to accumulate upvotes and comments, and if the post becomes active, that can be extended.  Once the duration expires, 25% of the total rewards for the post go to the people who curated your content, and the other 75% go to the author, split 50/50 between Steem Dollars and Steem Power.  These payments as far as I can tell are instantly performed at the end of the post's time limit, and I've never experienced any kind of delay or error in the payout amounts.  From my point of view it's easy enough to understand once you've done a bit of research, and it's 100% efficient and accurate, which are two highly important things when it comes to paying people.  If you'd like to know more about the rewards and other features, @piedpiper makes some great videos breaking down Steemit's complexities into understandable material for everyone.

Rewards Systems easily 10/10 for me.  There's not anything I would suggest or change.

Creating Content

When you want to post something new to Steemit, it's easy enough.  You hit the little "Submit a Story" button, and boom, you're instantly brough to a page where you can use built-in tools to write your posts, add pictures, videos, and GIFs, as well as add formatting to the text itself like size options and italics.  This for me personally was a huge plus, because I hate writing content on sites that lack a built-in editor, so you end up with a big block of boring text that nobody wants to read.  I'm sure there's some people out there that would demand more features for the editor, but I'm perfectly fine with how it is now.  I haven't seen any glitches, except for the Insert command getting turned on somehow, which makes editing previously written things a pain unless you turn it off.  After you're done writing your piece you press submit and boom you're done, easy peasy.

Content Creation gets a 8/10 for me, wish the darn Insert command would go away and stay gone. :(

TL;DR

Overall Steemit is a fantastic way for you to create your own original content as well as experience the creations of others as well.  I've been thoroughly impressed with the site, and even though there's a few changes I'd personally make, it has still managed to keep my attention for almost a month now, and I'm assuming many months (years?) coming!  I'd highly recommend Steemit to anyone that uses any sort of social media, even something as simple as Twitter.  You never know what you'll stumble upon here, or where you'll find success with your own musings!

Overall Rating: 9 Devoted Steemit Users Writing Content at 4:00am out of 10.

Thanks for reading!  For more interesting content, be sure to Follow me @voltarius!