As someone who has been a professional writer for much of my adult life, one way or another, even when I wasn't pursuing it as a career, I feel comfortable in saying this without question:
When someone can pay me a predictable amount that I can count on in a reasonable manner, I write and deliver for them.
It is theoretically possible that you could drop $100 on five articles from decent writers that you found on the steem blockchain and maybe, if you got particularly lucky, turn it around and earn more than $100 in vote value. Maybe. Possibly. In a very narrow slice of possible content.
And that, really, is the problem.
I recognize that as a creator I could probably sink more time into this platform and make a few extra bucks – but I would have to write about cryptocurrency or, better, the steem blockchain itself, it couldn't be critical, and if I really wanted the big bucks I'd have to promise the moon and keep promising it every day.
You know what? I'm not interested in doing that. Very few writers or creators are interested in doing that.
And that's the problem, really. The social network aspect of the steem blockchain is monocultural; it cultivates one social niche, the crypto-cultist. Good luck trying to find and establish another community, another group, another topicality of larger than three or four other people, and none of those people are are going to be whales.
That's a problem. That is a serious problem. Once a creator comes to that conclusion, they recognize that they might as well just post their content someplace that supports the creation of that content, whether it be with a very pleasant editor and reading environment (Medium), or a site under their control where they direct traffic via popular social media platform (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram).
For creators, it's about content. Unfortunately, for the majority of people involved with the steem blockchain, content is a tertiary concern it most.
What do you write, and can I hire you?
Sorry, the old editor brain kicked in for a minute there. I don't actually have a publication at the moment.
Yep, and this pretty much kicks those of us who want it to be something else in the balls. Though, if there's anybody in these comments you don't already know, you might want to follow them. They're all people who are way more interesting than talk about crypto. (Or than I am lately. I kind of want to go back to being more interesting than that.)
Well, if you're looking for someone who can write about:
... then I'm your guy. Otherwise, probably not.
Be thankful you're not behind the wheel right now. It only leads to madness and shame, I'm informed.
Oh, I've found a few communities of some small-scale which cater to my particular niches here and there on the steem blockchain. I'm particularly fond of the #tabletop-rpg crowd – but it suffers from the fact that there are really only five or six people who are interesting and produce content on a regular basis, one of which I was for about eight months, and it's really hard to get traction.
It's an audience size problem. The way this social network is set up is specifically counterproductive for bringing new people into a community which is not already at least 50 to 75 people large. Until you have that large a group, the voting system means absolutely nothing for reasonable people with reasonable time on the platform.
The best thing to recommend it is the social media platform nature as a blogging platform, and let's be honest – even Steempeak, which I use preferentially and quite like, falls behind other blogging platforms for flexibility and usefulness, and sheer visual impact.
If I really want to write articles which look good, integrate graphics nicely, and have a reasonably good comment architecture, I go and post on Medium. Or my own Blogger sites. I'm just going to be pushing the links via Twitter, Facebook, and other social media networks anyway. It becomes hard to recommend the steem blockchain for anything other than wanking about crypto. Whether I wanted to or not.
For a while I was doing a fair amount of crypto wanking myself, diving into blockchain with SteamData, documenting the code in Python, and posting it through Utopian, but when the MongoDB interface went away it just wasn't as interesting to me to put up with wrestling SQL, so I shelved it.
I much, much, much prefer to write about games and game design. Not as profitable here, but less of a pain in my ass and a lot more enjoyable.