How you imagined Steem would be

If you're reading this, you're clearly familiar with what Steem is. You get some money for posting interesting content. "Great!" you think, "I just need to make one amazing blog post and I'll make $30,000!"

Likely, you started by posting on #introduceyourself. People seem nice and you make like $200. "This is easy!" you think. "Just wait until I write other stuff".

The trough of disillusionment

OK, so you continue posting. And posting. And posting. Except the whales don't seem to notice, let alone like any of your stuff. "But why isn't the funny video I found on youtube.com getting any upvotes?" "But my post is way better than that stupid makeup tutorial!"

Votes! Where are the votes? See, friend, this isn't reddit. The people with Steem aren't just going to give away their votes. The votes that matter want content. Original content. They demand real, not fake, work. That's why there's a bunch of bots going around detecting plagiarism.

Everyone that has a lot of Steem has a lot of incentive for the platform to succeed and they want original content and the burden of proof is on you. You see, the reason the makeup tutorial got $30,000 is not because it was so very useful to the whales (many are male and frankly don't need the makeup advice). The reason they upvoted that post is because of the clear amount of effort that went into creating it with this community in mind.

In other words, create some original content that's provably yours

See, it's very difficult to tell whether an article was actually written by you. The life-advice post you made actually may have taken you 5 hours to produce, or it may be copied from a defunct blog. It's impossible to tell. A video produced for this website, on the other hand, is very hard to fake. A website that does something new with Steem is also hard to fake.

The Steemit community is smart. They're demanding not just content, but content that required effort on your part. We can call it human proof-of-work. And much like the peacock picture above, the actual product of that work isn't that important. It's that the effort required to produce it is what's being rewarded.

So what do I do now?

Easy, prove the content is yours. The obvious consequence of this is that you need to spend some time not just creating content, but proving that you produced it. How do you prove that you produced it? The obvious way would be to create something that's not likely to have been produced before. For example, you can make a "trick shot" video that uses balls marked with the Steem logo and show that at the beginning of each trick shot. You code up a new service that does something interesting with the Steem blockchain. Your blog post can incorporate some sort of proof that it was written for Steem, by including Steem-related content. You can also be very clever and have sentences in there that spell STEEMIT if you take the first letter of every word.

Everyone can, and should be, clever with their proof-of-work. I propose a hashtag #ProofOfWork as a way to include some proof at the end of your post showing that you actually wrote it.

My post here is done. Here is my #proofofwork. The first letter of every paragraph (not the titles) spell I LOVE STEEM.