I often make the comparison to Bitcoin mining when it comes to earning rewards on Steemit.
If you look at earning rewards as mining a lot becomes clear.
With Bitcoin, you can basically mine more bitcoin when you add more computer power to the network.
Now, after 9 years of bitcoin mining, you will have to compete with huge mining farms in China as an individual. Impossible.
It's also complex to set up a miner as a normal human being because you need technical knowledge.
This is where the Steem blockchain made a genius move. Instead of mining with computer power, you can mine by creating content.
Anyone can make an account on the blockchain and start mining. It's super simple to start.
Now, if you use this platform as a place to share your stories with others and keep them on the blockchain forever you are done. You found your place. You will build connections and friends here. It happened to me. It will happen to you. And that's cool because we have a great community here.
But it's not simple to mine (get rewards). This is a huge difference with the above.
Why?
Because you need Steempower to mine and at the start, and you don't have any.
So you need to get the attention of people that have steempower to direct their mining effort onto you.
You can create the best content in the world, but if nobody knows it exists, that's a problem.
It takes a lot of effort to get yourself known.
This is the process I call the 'the grind' and it gets harder the older the blockchain gets.
The fact that you can still earn Steem with blogging today should tell you are still early.
I talk about it more in my vlog.
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Love your vlogs every morning, and appreciate your perspective, especially having been a part of this platform for quite a while now.
That said, I do think your perspective on popular creators coming onto the platform misses a few crucial points. The analogy that "they are bringing their massive computer" to mine is honestly an incorrect analogy. In reality, the value that they are brining is future growth potential.
A better analogy would be giving IBM or Google massive amounts of Bitcoin on a promise that they will dedicate an entire data center to mining in the future.
I can't speak for the sincerity of their actions, but giving them the benefit of the doubt is a fair assumption, that they are genuine in their interest of the Steem Blockchain, and growing the community here. But the literal "mining" is other whales upvoting their content on the promise of future growth. They see efficiency in backing popular creators now for the potential that they bring to growth of the platform, and thus increased value of STEEM.
But everyone I hear from on this platform jumps to the conclusion that these Youtubers are bringing massive fanbases on Steemit/DTube/etc. Where is the evidence for this? None of these platforms have viable analytics associated with user growth and it's source. The signup process is currently broken with regard to massive user growth (which HF20 will hopefully solve).
My concern is really around the rhetoric that these creators are bringing their fans over. I truly believe that only a negligible portion of their audience has even signed up at the moment, and an even smaller amount actively uses it. Not to mention the fact that all those new users have effectively zero Steem Power with which to reward the creators. In reality they are bringing very large chassis for computers to the table, with the hope of getting the internal components later.
I don't disagree necessarily with rewarding them in an outsize manner in order to drive further interest and adoption. To my point above, that might be a great strategy for efficient mining by others. But I don't think the frustration that many others express is entirely off-base either. A handful of whales are picking the winners/losers of a brand new paradigm, and that feels frustrating to those who are trying to start off now, regardless of whether or not it is deserved.