Community post

Call Me Stellar Stella!

Hello beloved Steemians!

My name is Stella but you can call me stellar Stellar. Just so you know, stellar means exceptional or outstanding and i intend to be just that in this community, with your support and encouragement of course. I am very excited to be on this awesome platform and I am looking forward to relating with friends I have every intention of making here.

Here are bits I think you should know about me:

I love to write; short stories, poetry, plays, articles and whatever else that comes to mind.
I love memes, so you should expect to see some every once in a while.
I am a mum to a cute little boy.
I am currently rounding up my masters degree...
I am a Nigerian.

Well, enough said.

I hope to discover more of my abilities in this community as I pledge to contribute to its growth and obey the rules.

Be assured, I love originality, so plagiarism? Not from this end.

Perhaps my next introductory post will show you the face behind this blog.

I am pleased to meet you all. Could you introduce yourself too?

Replies (10)

Welcome to steemit, @stellarr!

I love to write too!

My profile is @flashfiction and i would like to present you some links i found really useful when i first signed up here. They will make you start with the right foot on Steemit!

These links will all open on the SAME TAB (Yeah, i know...), so i recommend opening them with "right click->open in a new tab".

Link	Check	Description
Growing Fast	Top	You HAVE to register here, if you want to build an audience FAST. It's a free service for boosting exposure, upvotes and followers. You just have to click on "login". Have your key at hand (That awfully long number you got when you signed up on Steemit). The tutorials are easy to follow.
All about steem coins	Top	There are three coins of use on Steemit, and understanding them is critical for your success. This is a short explaining video, the very best i've found.
Markdown	Top	Even if you can use some basic HTML on your posts, the correct way to format them is NOT HTML. You use a marking ruleset called, yeah, "Markdown". Have this as a complete reference.
Posting	Medium	The top activities on this site are posting, upvoting and commenting. This is an excellent tutorial about making your posts look great. Don't miss it!
Upvoting	Medium	Yeah, you tought upvoting was just a matter of machine-gunning your clicks and make easy bucks. Nah. It is actually a little more complicated than that. All you need to know is here.
Better interface	Medium	Let's face it: The interface on Steemit is pretty basic. "Busy" is an alternate interface you can use, more polished and easy to navigate. Both of them can be used simultaneously. Again, you just have to login.
Using Bots	Medium	There are a lot of things to learn about this platform, and understanding bots is one of the most important. They are little different services you can access for a fee. I found this tutorial extremely useful.
Trevon James	Medium	I know, i know... there are lots and lots of GREAT steemians here for picking one to recommend, but i just love Trevon's style. He explains EVERYTHING you need to know about Steemit (and crypto) in a funny, accesible way. Check him out.
@flashfiction	Awesome	Well, duh. My profile! ;) I write short fiction and tutorials on creative writing. I would be honored if you'd follow me.

Anything i cand help you with, i'm at your service!

See you around!

Hi stellar @Stellarr nice to meet you. I am a human and not a bot, the alien eyeball poking out of me belongs to @carlgnash. What field is your Masters study in?

I have to give an "opposing view" to a few of the suggestions made by senor @flashfiction below RE ways to get started on the right foot here.

First I wouldn't recommend using SteemFollower, which is the first link he provides ("GrowingFast"). First that is a referral link, meaning if you clicked through with that link and signed up for the service, he would get a benefit. Typically it is best practice to disclose that a link is a REF link, and it also makes you question why he is telling you about the service - is it because the service is actually good for you to use, or is it so he can gain a benefit? I will tell you from my experience the service is a terrible idea. It is very hard to search for posts on Steem. The best way for you to keep in contact with the posts being made by the friends you make here is to only follow real people who you care about. If you use the SteemFollower service you will end up following a ton of people you don't actually know, and moreso, a ton of them will be spammers/scammers. Your "feed", the place where you can see the posts of people you follow, will become choked with crap if you use SteemFollower. Keep your feed clean by only following genuine people who you have had a real human interaction with.

Second I do not recommend using any of the variations of pay-for -vote bots, several of which are referenced in the "Using Bots" link he provides. There are many reasons you should not pay for upvotes. First and most obviously - doesn't that very concept sound terrible? Why should you have to pay to receive an upvote when the entire system is built around upvotes being given freely? If the use of paid upvote bots becomes so common that a new user who comes on platform and does not want to pay to promote their own content finds their content buried behind a bunch of posts with paid upvotes... doesn't that seem like a bad look for the platform? I will tell you the way this whole dirty enterprise works. "Whales", who are the major investors in the platform holding hundreds of thousands of Steem Power, lease a portion of their Steem power to the upvote bot services. The upvote bot services make a small amount of profit, the upvotes given out may indeed give a small amount of profit to the users who pay for them (although less than you might think - remember that authors only get around 75%-85% of the total post payout, the rest going to curators who upvoted the post - so you have to factor that in when figuring if you made any money from a paid upvote), BUT the majority of the money gets filtered up to the pockets of the whales. Remember I said they lease the steem power? The majority of the profits generated by selling/purchasing upvotes end up in the pockets of the whales in the form of payments on the Steem power lease.

The short version of all that? Using paid upvote services increases the already staggering wealth inequality here on STEEM. More and more of the total Steem power is being concentrated in the pockets of a handful of the wealthiest investors. That is actually not a good thing for the long term health of this platform. Much better to take any money you earn here and either invest it in yourself in the form of Steem power purchase and power up, or even just take advantage of this as a gateway to the cryptocurrency world and take your earnings here to an exchange and turn them into Bitcoin and other cryptos as an investment.

Anyway - sorry to write a novel! But it really bugged me to see this user coming here and dropping this comment. I don't think these are good pieces of advice and I felt like you should hear another point of view.

Cheers - Carl "Totally Not A Bot" Gnash