**Can you believe it’s been three months already, since steemit showed its public face. …and what a ride it’s been.**
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We are still in beta but the platform has shown some incredible growth and some diverse evolutionary phases.

**Miners inner circle phase**
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From mid to late April the inner circle of team members and early miners with their large stakes were active. The Post $$ values were humungous. 

I mean absolutely HUGE….. 

I believe the first post or posts had a value in the region of $140 000. That’s unbelievably huge, but things dropped the moment there were more posts to balance things out.

The rest were still massive by comparison to what we see today. There were many posts that had dollar payout values of well over $10 000. 

From a social perspective everybody was very nice to one another… in less flattering terms it appeared to new entrants and outsiders like a "circle jerk".

**Author early adopter golden age phase**
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Late April and May saw the influx of more diverse authors, driven by the community actively promoting the site and crypto news coverage. 
Quickly some new authors emerged as very good writers.
 As a result we also saw the emergence of the famous/infamous bots and the bandwagon voting methodology. 

Many posts in the steem and other crypto categories were dominant. 
Some whales led the way to change by beginning to vote for the introduceyourself category. Thereafter the bots and bandwagoneers had to start splitting their votes. 
Some of the introductory post shared many personal and heartfelt details about members of the community. This led to other follow up posts along similar lines that were handsomely rewarded. Diversity blossomed as authors and curators explored new territories.   

For some it was a golden age... there were:
…new arriving authors, 
…a diversity of popular topics, 
…well formatted and written content was getting more and more vote love and appreciation. 

The phrase that best describes the sociality of this phase “everybody is patting each other on the back for steam dollars”

Then…

Along came the Author payout projections and a few bristles were raised and some greed glands were activated.

**4th July anticipation and curation rewards debate.**
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Late May saw the influx of many to the introduceyourself category with high earnings. This “virtual share-drop” to new members …balanced high earning posts from the previous months out and encourage non-bloggers to give writing and posting “a try”.

Curator payout projections were made and this really threw the cat among the pigeons.

Discussions about Bots were quickly dwarfed when changes to the curation reward algorithms was proposed. The most contentious of the issues was the proposal to make curation rewards retroactive.
All was no longer well, civility was trampled and there was no more “patting each other on the back for steam dollars”

First payouts euphoria... voting and posting mania... and the first major pump.
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The curation rewards debacle was “settled” just before the 4th of July. Once the actual numbers were out, the difference between the two algorithms was found to be insignificant. 

Relative peace descended upon the Steemit Whale community as the matter was laid to rest. 

The much awaited and anticipated 4th of July  dawned. This resulted in an absolute feeding frenzy, the skeptical were now becoming believers and preaching the gospel of steemit loud and clear. 

Activity on the site skyrocketed. We saw the beginning of introduceyourself spamming. 

Posts with previously high earnings dropped off there was now stiff competition for votes. We saw a drastic reduction in vote power. Power that earlier guaranteed 500 or 1000 dollars reduced to tens of dollars . A new class of “nouveau riche” and mini-whales emerged. 

The internal market was release along with liquidity reward- gaming of this reward system by bots has started a new debate.
Meanwhile on the site Steemit euphoria reigned supreme and this euphoria spread to the outside world.

Steem as a crypto currency came of age as it experienced its first speculative pump.



**What a ride it’s been… Who would have called all this months ago?**
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**Congratulations to the Team, Dan, Ned, Devs, the miners, the whales, the minnows, the early adopters, the authors, the curators, the experts and the noobs.**
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**An exciting and great 3 months it’s been so far. We all can’t wait to see what the future holds.**
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