Steemit Succeeds if *We* Make it Succeed - Analysis to Help Yourself and Steemit Grow in Quality
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Do you want to succeed in a *quality* Steemit platform and community? Do you want Steemit to succeed in providing *quality* content to others? 

I will attempt to explain how to achieve success for yourself in Steemit by putting the *quality* success of the Steemit community first.

I emphasize *quality*, because this is also what I am interested in creating in terms of content, and I don't want low quality content to be populating the platform which removes visibility and exposure of higher quality content that has to compete for time and attention from human eyes and valuations to process. The more low quality content there is, the harder it is to find the higher quality content that appears among it.

- What are you ultimately doing on Steemit? 
- What is your goal being here?
- Is it about you improving your financial position?
- Is it about you and Steemit improving?
- Or is it about you, Steemit and the world improving?

Quality content matters.

I didn't read the whitepaper originally, as I thought it was technical information about how the crytocurrency worked, like Bitcoin's whitepaper. But it has other valuable information! Here are some excerpts from the [Steemit White Paper](https://steem.io/SteemWhitePaper.pdf) to help you understand some things.

> **Note**, you can go to the bottom for the **Summary Tips** if you don't want to read the longer explanatory part. Thank you.

Steem White Paper Excerpts and Commentary Tips:
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> "Steem is designed around a relatively simple concept: everyone’s meaningful contribution to the community should be recognized for the value it adds . When people are recognized for their meaningful contributions, they continue contributing and the community grows."
> ~ Steem WhitePaper, pg. 6

Meaningful contribution to **create quality content**. That is the purpose and goal, not to maximize how much you are going to get paid by posting content like the mainstream media provides to entertain people. If people create content of the usual kind that entertains most people in the world as we already have it, there is nothing really unique going on here other than you getting paid to create what I consider is low quality "trash" to fill people's consciousness with. We have enough of that on T.V., in the news, in magazines, etc. for people to lose themselves in and not *care about what is REALLY happening in the world*. 

My goal is to improve the *quality* and condition of our *way of living*, through having *quality* content being *learned* by many, and improving all of our *quality of thinking*. Quality content that provides *meaningful value* to help people understand more about the current condition of the world and themselves, and how to improve it. That is my goal to help Steemit's quality improve. 

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> "Voting input from community members is critical for Steem to accurately allocate payments to contributors. Voting can therefore be viewed as a crucial contribution and worthy of rewards on its own."
> ~ Steem WhitePaper, pg. 7

Your vote also **matters**! I repeat, your vote matters! You will understand more as we progress.

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> "In the cryptocurrency space, speculators jump from cryptocurrency to cryptocurrency based mostly on which one is expected to have short-term growth. Steem wants to build a community that is mostly owned and entirely controlled by those with a long-term perspective. ... SP is a requirement for voting for or against content. This means that SP is an access token that grants its holders exclusive powers within the Steem platform." 
> ~ Steem WhitePaper, pg. 9

You need to **care** about the *long-term* survival and progress of Steemit by primarily focusing on *meaningful, quality content* creation and upvoting, not by primarily focusing on creating wealth and money for yourself. That comes as a consequence of the quality of the platform and community. I'm not saying don't have generating wealth for your content as a goal, I'm saying don't have it as your primary goal. But you also do need to be able to create meaningful content if you plan on making money, keep that in mind. 

In the end, it's up to *everyone* here to choose what they value, for better or worse. To work to create content for that value and curate other people who create that value.

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> "In order to give everyone an equal opportunity to get involved and earn the currency people must be given an opportunity to work."
> ~ Steem WhitePaper, pg. 16

Yes, you need to **WORK** and **earn** the wealth generated by the Steemit platform and community. It will not likely comes to you by putting in little effort and posting low quality entertainment filler for people to absorb. Yes, you can make some money that way, and probably even by focusing on the lower consciousness filler of entertainment, the "bread and circus" to keep people engorged on distracting information, videos, pictures, etc. People will consume that material on Steemit, just as they do on other platforms like Facebook, the Internet as a whole, and the mainstream media. 

But again, the goal and purpose is to focus on meaningful *higher quality* content in order to *improve* the quality of the community itself. For me, which may differ from you, that is to focus on meaningful information about the state of our current condition in consciousness and the world, and ways to change it through empowering information. 

That is the higher quality information I am goal-oriented and focused towards providing and upvoting on Steemit. I want things to change in the world. What do you want to come about through using Steemit?

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> "The more competitive the market becomes, the more difficult (higher quality or quantity) it becomes to earn the same payout.... Every vesting user casts their votes on who did the best work and at the end of the day the available money for that day is divided proportional to the votes such that everyone with even one net positive vote gets something."
~ Steem WhitePaper, pg. 16

As more people join, and more people focus on higher quality content, then the focus is always on increasing the higher quality content everyone produces, while the lower quality content will be ignored and go nowhere. Hopefully, those people up their game and the quality of their content, or stop with their posting.

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> "the vast majority of the rewards will be distributed to the most popular content"
~ Steem WhitePaper, pg. 20

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> "Taking popularity as a rough measure of value, then the value of each individual item is given by Zipf’s Law. That is, if we have a million items, then the most popular 100 will contribute a third of the total value, the next 10,000 another third, and the remaining 989,900 the final third.... **The impact of this voting and payout distribution is to offer large bounties for good content while still rewarding smaller players for their long-tail contribution**." 
~ Steem WhitePaper, pg. 20

It's assumed that those posts that become popular are representative of the highest quality content, and they get the most payout, i.e. the top 100 get 1/3 of the daily Steem generated wealth.

Your *votes matter* in who becomes popular. If you want to join the "cult of personality" popularity band-wagon as popular personalities join Steemit, and upvote their content regardless of its quality content, because you think you can "cash-in" on the upvoting popularity and receive Steem Dollars and Steem Power for it, you don't understand how the platform is meant to function. 

This is the *wrong mindset* to have, as I have already explained. Don't focus on making money by attaching yourself to popular personalities in the hopes of getting rich by riding their wave of popularity. 

When you do that, what do you think happens to all there other non-100-top-posts? They get less votes. That content does not get as recognized, as the visibility and exposure is reduced due to most of the votes being given to the popular personalities. That content does not generate wealth for those people who put in the work to create it.

Those who are popular may be creating quality content, or not, but they have a large following of supporters who are going to vote for them anyways, simply because they are popular. 

So ask yourself, is their content the *most valuable*? Is it higher quality than other people's work who are less popular and less known? What if you were one of those people? How would you like it to have your high quality content ignored in favor of the more popular people getting most of the votes all the time simply because they are popular and people upvote based on that popularity? Do you upvote something popular simply because it's popular? Do you upvote the popular posts because you want to "cash-in" on the payout?

You need to think about these things. If you want more quality material to get upvoted, then you need to stop thinking in terms of popularity, and also stop thinking in terms of what you're going to get back from your upvotes in terms of Steem Dollars or Steem Power.

If people focus more on finding quality content and upvoting it, then they are going to help quality content creators become more popular by increasing their visibility and exposure. In turn, they will also be increasing their Steem Points and Dollars because they upvoted someone less popular and made their content popular. You will be doing the very *important work* of helping the Steem platform and community recognize and **reward quality** content creators which will increase the quality of Steemit itself, and you win as well! If hardly anyone functions like this, then the less popular quality content will not likely be recognized for what it is.

Rather than all the votes going to a few popular people who get all the payouts, and the other quality content being ignored, now the community will grow overall in greater numbers of quality content being recognized by more people and forcing more people to put more effort into creating quality content of their own! If you just vote for the popular personalities, even if they do have quality content, the rest of the community will NEVER grow.

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> "The economic effect of this is similar to a lottery where people over-estimate their probability of getting votes and thus **do more work than the expected value of their reward and thereby maximize the total amount of work performed in service of the community**. The fact that everyone “wins something” plays on the same psychology that casinos use to keep people gambling. In other words, small rewards help reinforce the idea that it is possible to earn bigger rewards."
 ~ Steem WhitePaper, pg. 20

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Your vote matters a lot! Even as a "minnow", this is the power you have to recognize quality content and improve the overall quality of the Steemit platform and community. Does that make sense? If you are, or are not, creating quality content of your own, it doesn't affect the *responsibility* you have to curate and upvote meaningful quality content that will *improve* the overall quality of the system you are a part of. And we all gain that way!

There are more low Steem Power users on Steemit, minnows, than there are dolphins or whales. The majority of people can set trends, and the higher Steem Power users, who are fewer in number, will recognize what the community is voting for and be influenced by this. That is how many of the bots work as well. 

In the end, the minnows have the ***power** to influence* who gets upvoted by the larger Steem Power players and set the trends for who gets more visibility and exposure to their content. If you vote for the same people, then only they climb, regardless of the quality of their content. If you focus on the quality content instead of the personality, then more quality content gets recognized and improves the overall quality of the Steemit community platform.

You will *gain* as well by upvoting quality content, even if it's only a small return before they get more recognition and upvotes. 

If you want to be a content creator, then you need to up your game, put up some *better quality* content, or stand aside and let others do it. Please do not simply post content to try to make money. I can't stress this enough. The goal Steemit has is to develop a community of meaningful quality content as created by you, me and everyone else! Monetary potential is part of the reward for creating quality content, it is secondary to the primary goal of quality content creation. 

You can tell some people are primarily focused on making money by the money-related posts that get upvoted, like "Steem Dollar", "$STEEM/BTC", "Bitcoin", and other analysis focused threads that get huge payouts simply by providing market analysis for people to make money. 

Ask yourself, is this the type of content that will raise the overall quality of Steemit as a platform to provide quality content for people on the Internet? As yourself, if everyone created content like this, how would the condition of the world improve? How can the world, Steemit, and yourself, benefit from upvoting certain content over other content? Think about this more deeply. This is why I emphasize upvoting quality content, and why I focus on a certain type of content that will **raise the quality of our consciousness, our thinking, and as a result the overall quality of the world as well.**

Please don't create content, or curate, based on thinking of making money, or by looking at what is "popular", or by giving people the usual low quality fodder they are accustomed to getting in the mainstream media or the Internet, that they have been conditioned to think they "want". 

**Deep down**, people are *yearning* for **quality truth** even if they don't know it yet. Quality truth is what will **enrich** the quality and condition of our **lives**! Truth is that **important**, yet many don't recognize it's *supreme value* and importance to *improve* all our lives. Please help people learn more quality information. Stop providing content based on people's conditioned desires for entertainment and other low quality information, simply because you want to make money or be "popular".

We are all in this together (just as the White Paper uses the crab bucket analogy). We either *raise all the higher quality content* together and profit (and not *only* focusing on repeated upvotes for certain people's content), or we raise the lower quality content together by posting mediocrity to drown out the quality content. It's up to each of us to *do the work* to make it happen!



Upvoting Power and Weight
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On the [Curation Reward](https://steem.io/getinvolved/paid-to-curate/) page it states: 
> ...users with small amounts of vesting STEEM should:
> - Vote on content others haven’t voted for, to maximize the percentage increase in voting
> - Vote on fewer posts, the more you vote the more diluted your STEEM Power.

It also says:
> "This means that being the first person to vote for a post gives you the greatest possible weight for your STEEM Power."

This is not exactly accurate. See [this post](https://steemit.com/steem/@steemitblog/latest-curation-reward-solution) which says: 

> ... The value of being first depends entirely upon the subjective estimate of the final value of the post.

> Our solution is to offer a reverse auction for curation rewards on votes cast within the first 30 minutes. The price starts out at 100% of your curation reward and falls toward 0% over 30 minutes using the curve (1-t2). The longer a bot waits to vote, the lower the fee will be. However, if someone else chooses to vote before you it would lower your potential absolute reward.

> When people vote early, the fee is given to the author. In all likelihood the reason people are willing to vote early is because the author has a solid reputation and the content is clearly valuable. If the content is less clearly valuable then it requires more effort on behalf of curators.

> Final outcome: those who vote early do so selflessly (rewarding the author), those who vote late are also doing so selflessly. Only those who vote in the critical window will earn high profits from curation and only if they correctly move first without moving too fast.

> It is our estimate that most people paying attention to new posts (curators) will naturally vote 10 to 30 minutes after a post is made. This allows time for review and variance in time of discovery. Those who vote naturally will on-average earn a meaningful amount from curation (relative to their Steem Power). There is very little incentive to vote instantly after a post is made unless you really want to reward the author.

Your time of voting after a post comes out, is correlated with a percentage of Curation Rewards you may potentially receive. See [The 10 Commandments of Upvoting on Steemit](https://steemit.com/steemit/@averagejoe/what-i-ve-learnt-about-upvoting-on-steemit-the-10-commandments-of-upvoting).

Also, [this post](https://steemit.com/steem-help/@pc101/steemit-0-12-0-an-up-to-date-guide-part-2-easy-money):

> Your vote begins to power down in percentage terms (have less influence) and drops of a cliff after approximately 20 votes


Summary Tips:
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- Don't upvote all the time. 20 times per 24 hours, maximum 30.
- Vote for quality content that matters, that you want to help reach more people, make popular and help grow the community, not on content you think will be popular. This only concentrates the votes into the popular content, regardless of quality, and ignores the other quality content that needs help to gain visibility, exposure and become more successful to help the overall community grow in quality.
- Don't upvote content you think will be popular simply in the hopes of making money or getting Steem Power. Vote for content you know is quality. I focus on things that matter.
- Take the time to read the content. Comment useful feedback, additions or corrections (even if the author might not want to hear it, truth and quality matters more than possibly getting people to dislike you).
- Vote after 15 minutes to get a possible 50% of the 25% payout that goes to curators. Vote after 30 minutes to get a possible 100% of the 25% payout that goes to curators. Possible, but unlikely, because there are other votes that the 25% curator payout is distributed towards as well.
- It takes [1 day to regain 20% of your voting power](https://steemit.com/steemit/@klye/how-to-avoid-weak-upvotes) you lose when you go over the 20 votes per day limit. Let it recharge fully to get the most out of your voting power weight. Check your Vote Count and Vote Power weight, by putting in your name [here](https://steemstats.com).
- In a payout, 75% goes to authors, and 25% goes to curators. 50% of the 75% is in Steam Dollars and 50% is in Steem Power.
- You can upvote your comments.
- Create networks with others based on common values, meaning, purpose, and goals on the content type you want to curate for on Steemit.

That's about it. 

Good luck fellow Steemians! Improve the Steemit community and improve your success as well!
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Thank you. Peace.

Personal Note:
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>- I have been in the Steemit community for a little more than two weeks (first post August 7th, 2016).
>- I purchased $150 of Bitcoin for the first time, for the sole purpose of buying STEEM tokens and converting it to Steem Power, on August 8th just after making my first post. I saw the potential of Steemit as revolutionary, even though my post only got $0.26 total.
>- I focus on creating high quality content that matters, to get people to understand how thinking functions, how to think better, how to understand reality and themselves better, and ultimately leading to how to change the world we live in for the better.
>- I re-invest all of my Steem Dollars into Steem Power for now (sell SBD for STEEM, then Power Up), so as to help my own ability to curate others and upvote quality content. This helps the overall quality of Steemit when I have more Steem Power to upvote quality content.
> - I still need to regenerate my Voting Power weight because I was voting poorly at first. I only recently learned how to do it better. Trial and error.
>- I mistakenly started off with highly detailed, complex, in depth articles about thinking, the Trivium Methodology, consciousness, logic, etc. People do not tend to like to read **that** much material. Keep the content short and simple, before you gain a following of people who will appreciate more complex and well thought out quality material. Especially when you are new, you get less exposure for that much work anyways.

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Author: [Kris Nelson](http://evolveconsciousness.org/) / @krnel

**Contact me for questions, networking, sharing ideas, etc.:**
**Email:** kris.b.nelson@gmail.com
**Facebook:** [Kris Nelson](https://www.facebook.com/kris.nelson.524596)

<img src="https://www.steemimg.com/images/2016/07/20/steem_coin830db.png" />
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Image source:  steemimg.com