How to think about Steemit.com and navigate it...Lessons from "New rules for the new economy by Kevin Kelly"

WIN 5 SBD for the best comment on this post! Kevin Kelly is a guy you want to pay attention to if you are at all interested in the future.
He has been around since the earliest days of bulletin boards and has been thinking about cyber culture for probably the longest time possible. In China he has cult status as the most important futurist. (He himself says that is hugely exaggerated)
Check out his site http://kk.org/ (yes he got his initials as a website address, that's how long he's been around)

I especially like his latest book which has several concepts in it that helped me understand the potential of Steemit.com
It is called "The Inevitable" http://kk.org/books/the-inevitable/ and shows you what he thinks is coming down the line.
As he says, the internet is only at the beginning of its beginning. The most popular websites of 2030 have probably not invented yet. (Well steemit.com did not exist when he wrote it, so...)

I stumbled on a fairly old article related to an older book that sounded familiar when looking at Steemit.com and how things work here: If you start to look at it, there is some great advice to navigate and use Steemit.com too:

New Rules for the New Economy
The whole book is available here: http://kk.org/mt-files/books-mt/KevinKelly-NewRules-withads.pdf
Titles in bold are from his post on http://kk.org/newrules/ added my own commentary below each title.

Now for the new rules for the new economy :

1) Embrace the Swarm. The Power of Decentralization.
As power flows away from the center, the competitive advantage belongs to those who learn how to embrace decentralized points of control.

Sound familiar? The centralised control from the Unicorn companies is probably an intermediate step, the decentralised model of networks like steemit.com and it's ecology make it much more resilient.
Like the internet itself the decentralised nature of it makes it impossible to censor or delete.

2) Increasing Returns. As the number of connections between people and things add up, the consequences of those connections multiply out even faster, so that initial successes aren't self-limiting, but self-feeding.

See the upvoting system of steemit.com ? See how it is below 200K user accounts? See how it is adding about 5% a WEEK Check my article here to see what that really means
Well that is an excellent argument for getting in now and stake your claim. Initial success here no matter how small, will start to multiply and feed on itself.
Unless you play a short game and engage in spammy behaviour, there is no way to "tap out" steemit.com's potential.
A growing reputation will beget more followers, get more weight, more influence more followers and more earning potential in a virtuous feedback loop.

3) Plentitude, Not Scarcity. As manufacturing techniques perfect the art of making copies plentiful, value is carried by abundance, rather than scarcity, inverting traditional business propositions.

As I explained in my article on ABUNDANCE. The explosive (exponential) growth is making scarce things abundant, and that changes some fundamental assumptions we have on value.

4) Follow the Free. As resource scarcity gives way to abundance, generosity begets wealth. Following the free rehearses the inevitable fall of prices, and takes advantage of the only true scarcity: human attention. Why the Net Rewards Generosity.

Sound familiar?
People are weary about steemit.com because they think "Get money for posting? Sounds like money for nothing! Suspicious!"
They have not changed their mental model yet.
In a world where everything is constantly losing value because of technological progress, one of the few things that will remain valuable is human attention.
That has driven the growth of Facebook, Google and others and will distinguish cryptocurrency like STEEM from say BITCOIN, which is designed to solve a different problem.
That is what the STEEM currency is about, if I understand it correctly. Through being backed by a social network ecology, the true underlying value of STEEM is that it is indirectly based on human attention.

Some more quotes from the book:
Pinpoint where value is being given out for free now, and then follow
up. The next Netscape, the next Yahoo, the next Microsoft is already up
and running, and they are giving their stuff away for free. Find them,
and hitch your wagon to their star. Look for the following tricks: charges
only for ancillaries, as-if-free behavior, memberships, and outright generosity.
If they are using the free to play off network effects, they are the
real McCoys.

5) Feed the Web First. As networks entangle all commerce, a firm's primary focus shifts from maximizing the firm's value to maximizing the network's value. Unless the net survives, the firm perishes.

Great advice here: Think about yourself as a firm.

Before thinking about your personal value, what are you doing about increasing Steemit.com networks value? As Steemit.com rises in value your personal account will inevitably too (if you are serious about it).

6) Let Go at the Top. As innovation accelerates, abandoning the highly successful in order to escape from its eventual obsolescence becomes the most difficult and yet most essential task.

A warning for the future, and what I am writing about in my articles about ASSUMPTIONS and IDEA ECONOMY
The short version: knowledge economy professionals that currently are making a decent to excellent income might find themselves soon obsolete. Lawyers, doctors, accountants, (certain) programmers and web developers, professional drivers, blue collar workers, HR staff, middle management,... all of these professions will feel the hot breath of technological progress
in their neck. Relying on specialised skills or scarce information, is not a guarantee of a decent income anymore.
It takes courage to let go of something that seems to work for the moment, but be late to adapting yourself might mean you never catch up!

7) From Places to Spaces. As physical proximity (place) is replaced by multiple interactions with anything, anytime, anywhere (space), the opportunities for intermediaries, middlemen, and mid-size niches expand greatly.

“Geography is dead!” with the efforts going on to connect the whole world to the internet, the opportunities will expand exponentially! Your next customer might just as well be from Vietnam, Australia or Brazil (happened to me).

8) No Harmony, All Flux. As turbulence and instability become the norm in business, the most effective survival stance is a constant but highly selective disruption that we call innovation.
Following from the previous point: People from all over the world also might compete with you!
So if you are a generic professional, someone who has a lot lower cost base in another country can start to offer the same services as you do to your client. Become unique and creative and impossible to copy!
Have original contributions! Post commodity material and you become a commodity yourself, i.e. not valuable at all...

9) Relationship Tech. As the soft trumps the hard, the most powerful technologies are those that enhance, amplify, extend, augment, distill, recall, expand, and develop soft relationships of all types.
Start with Technology, End with Trust
Because communication—which in the end is what the digital technology and media are all about—is not just a sector of the economy. Communication is the economy
See also the next point!

10) Opportunities Before Efficiencies. As fortunes are made by training machines to be ever more efficient, there is yet far greater wealth to be had by unleashing the inefficient discovery and creation of new opportunities.
Start with Technology, End with Trust

Connect customers to customers. this is one of the strategies detailed for firms but I imagine it is also an excellent strategy
I'd change it to "Connect Steemians to other Steemians"
Strategy for your Steemit.com career:
Become what Malcolm Gladwell calls a "maven"
Mavens make change happen through information and ideas. These are the people you ask whenever you want to know something about anything – they’re always the people in the know. They’re builders, engineers, process folks, and system folks. It’s all about the ideas and the information.

You might be a maven if:

You often feel overwhelmed because you have so many big ideas to unpack.
You’re often frustrated by how “thin” a lot of information seems.
You can get lost for days working on one idea, or spend months happily exploring the depths of one idea.
Your expression is largely about ideas and information, rather than about people or sizzle.

That describes me to a T and I think that is the strategy I will follow on steemit.com
It is an advanced form of curation. Go the extra mile, instead of an upvote leave a comment pointing out to the authors any interesting articles you think are in thesame idea space that the author might appreciated. It takes some investment, but I'd follow any competent maven!