Hi Jason it is a great piece and I can understand how a person could almost feel embarrassed coming back to the platform in a way after such a long time off but I look at it from a couple different angles. For starters it really depends on how much a person needed the money and the time in their everyday life. Personally I was spending so much time on Steemit last summer / fall that I needed the money that I was earning. I couldn't afford to spend that much time and not be able to pay bills. My expenses were high. I really put a lot into the platform. I ultimately had to power down my entire account. I never really earned that much. About $4,500 Steem power and I did pull out SBD from earnings earlier. I came back several months ago when things hadn't recovered and would do small posts just testing the waters. They would make $2 or $6 or low amounts like that. But then it started building.
I don't feel like what you did was bad. It would be like a miner shutting off his equipment if it wasn't profitable to mine. You actually held your position. Those who did that came out better than those of us who had to liquidate because of financial pressure. I was honestly only giving the platform a 20% chance to survive. It was very sad but things did not look good at all. Now things have totally turned around in an instant. It is nuts really but I'm not wasting the opportunity.
p.s. if you initially look at my last post it looks negative but it has an alternative ending. ;-)
Thanks for sharing your thoughts Brian. From a financial perspective I agree. I guess what struck me coming back was the relational element which I had missed to some degree previously.
I can't imagine what it must have been like for you and others when it did turn around.
Well it certainly would have helped for us to have never powered down but really when it boiled down to it there was really no choice for some of us. It really didn't seem like things were going well at all and so I made peace with the fact that it was going to be the decision I made at the time. Ultimately if I wouldn't have done it my account would have been worth around $10,000. Not life changing money but certainly could have helped. Luckily I was around enough during that down period writing comments and came back almost 4 months ago not from a blog post perspective that people remembered me and so now I have gotten to a point where I know I'm going to get a certain amount for my posts. Hopefully that continues for the time being.
The great thing is it's still early days for Steemit. There's still time to build up a sizeable balance of Steem.
Yeah I agree. And even if Steemit doesn't get super huge like Reddit size or Facebook size we can still make a lot of money.