---

---

Our guest on the Humans Of Steemit today is @gregory-f who is an Original, he was one of the first people to signup for Steemit and he brings his own side of the story about Steemit early days.

Many people (I included) wish they discovered steemit earlier, and @gregory-f story will show you what the early days looked like

---

---

My name is Gregory. I’ve worked in IT for several years at several companies. Most recently, the last 17 years I’ve been working for a small engineering company that specializes in control and process automation.

Since we are small, I wear a lot of hats. I’m the IT department, Systems Engineering, web development, database administer and, when the bathroom is out of toilet paper, custodian.

I started mining bitcoin in 2014 and have been hooked on cryptocurrency ever since then. To me, cryptocurrency is freedom. A chance to work for myself, not someone else.

I stumbled upon Steem on Bitcointalk.org during the initial mining phase, before the actual launch of Steemit. At the time there was a lot of criticism being posted, claims of scams and cheating so I moved on and looked for other coins to mine.

But every few days I would come back to Steem and read a little more about it. Then a few weeks later, @joseph posted his Mining Steem for Dummies guide and I decided to give it a shot. With a little help from @pfunk, I got my miner working and soon the Steem was rolling in.

That’s when I first started looking into Steemit. I read about how you could make money for curating and thought, “I like to read, I can do this” so I signed up for a Steemit account.

The first few weeks were kinda wild. There were only a handful of users and just about every post was instantly worth $10,000. This was over a month before the initial July 4th 2016 payout.

As we got closer to the initial payout, there were a couple flare-ups in the community as they tried to iron out the rules to make everything fairer and evenly distributed.

I guess I had an advantage starting with Steemit so early. There was a constant stream of articles posted about how the Steemit Economy worked by the people who were designing and redesigning it. There was even a chance to voice an opinion and have it really heard by those in charge.

The biggest way Steemit has changed my life is it has exposed me to so many different people from all over the world. I’ve always been a bit of an introvert and have never got a chance to travel much outside of the USA.

But since joining Steemit, I have had the opportunity to experience different cultures both here and abroad from the eyes of a native. People I would have never had the courage to approach and interact with even if I had been able to travel to their homelands.

I guess the biggest thing I am doing to give back to the community, is I try to throw a few upvotes to new users every day. Regularly, I like to click the “new” option and scroll through the list looking for posts from people with low ratings and interesting subject.

Even if it’s not the most elaborate post I’ll throw it an upvote to help encourage the new users to persevere so they will keep coming back.

In addition to @joseph and @pfunk who helped get me into Steemit through mining, @benjojo was one of the first authors I started reading. Along the way he helped draw me deeper into Steemit as a participant instead of just an observer with the art contests held to illustrate the characters from the sci-fi novel he was writing.

Of course, I like so many others on Steemit, have been immensely influenced and aided by @papa-pepper. It seems like every time I would start to get discouraged with Steemit due to raging flag wars or petty bickering, @papa-pepper would post an article or hold a contest and remind me of the positive aspects of Steemit.

There are many others like @provider with whom I am channeling the spirits of Bo and Luke Duke (I’m Luke, he’s Bo, the tall, blonde, handsome one) in the last two seasons of Steem-pocalypse. Also, there is @fingersik, who is running a Dungeon and Steem RPG that I really enjoy being part of.

My advice to new steemians is to Read. Read and upvote. If you like it, upvote it. Upvote your fellow minnows, then upvote some more minnows. Go to the Contest topic and enter some contests. And of course post. But only post what you would enjoy reading. The most important piece of advice, don’t get discouraged.

---

---

If you know any Minnow currently struggling please direct him or her to this post. The purpose of Humans Of Steemit is to provide a source of strenght and encouragement to Steemians who are currently struggling to find ground on Steemit

This post is 100% Resteemable

---

If you are a Minnow and you need help with anything. Join The Humans Of Steemit Discord Server

---

Thanks for Reading

Follow @ogochukwu