Tokens and Tribes - Playing with the Many Facets of Steem
It's been more than three months now since SteemEngine came out, and innumerable new tokens have been created since. At first I decided to approach getting to know them slowly, as I was not too interested in investing into new projects, especially in things that I didn't know anything about. Besides, looking at the tokens available did not fill me with too much enthusiasm. Like shit token... really? Or meep... where the only info I managed to get about it was that it only said meep. All rightey then! But then came the PAL airdrop, and I found myself neck deep in trading.
Trading, Just in the Old Days
Starting out on SteemEngine felt a lot like when I first got into crypto trading in 2017. Lots of coins, most of which I had no clue about, but by buying and selling them I ended up making a bit of a gain... or a loss. Unfortunately SteemEngine doesn't offer charts, to see how the price has changed in the past, but other than that I had a very similar experience. It was fun for a while, then I lost interest. However the coins kept coming. It may have been my staked PAL that caused it, but I got one airdrop after the other. JAHM Token, Good Game Token, Media Officials Token, STEM, MEME, PORN, CAPTCHA
Most of these I took straight to the market, putting some shameless sell orders for, as well as even more shameless buy orders, in case the price went down. Then I leaned back to watch what happened. Some of these tokens, like STEEMSPEAK I managed to sell all right, and I suppose it's been climbing even higher since. Others, like FUTURE I got like a 1000 for literally fractions of peanuts, and I've been trying to get rid of since. But it took me a while to understand the actual point behind all these tokens.
Tribes, Where Specialized Steemians Can Do Their Own Special Things
Once I got fed up with trading, I left SteemEngine for a while. It was more fun to write posts, or upvote and comment on those of others. But then I kept coming across posts discussing tribes, and the tokens associated with them. Just like how PAL gave you some of their tokens only for using the tag #palnet, you could get LEO tokens for tagging your post with #steemleo. At this point it all sounds pretty pointless still, until I mention that while any topic is okay for PAL (except for hate or plagiarism, which don't belong on Steem anyway), LEO posts must be related to investing! Great, this means, you can open LEO on the Tribes of Steempeak and you'll find all the investment related posts. Now this sounds more interesting. In a similar fashion, PHOTO deals with photography, TUNES with music, and PORN with... you guessed it: lots of T&A!
General vs Specialized Tribes
Since I keep tagging every single one of my posts with #palnet, only to get the additional reward (which is not that much, really), I thought I might as well do the same for #neoxian and #lifestyle, which to my understanding are just as general, where pretty much anything goes.
But what started sparking my interest in my latest experiment, were the specialized tribes of Photo, Tunes, Splintertalk, LEO, and Creative Coin. (And I'm not going to use any of these tags here, since this is not post on either of these topics... except for #steemleo.) Most of my posts are not specialized in any of these categories, but some of them are. I have posted a couple times about music, or about Steemmonsters / Splinterlands, and my growing mural collection is great for the Creative Coin and Photo tribes. So, over the last few days I made a couple of posts geared specifically towards these topics. As far as the general tags, I include them as well, since they pay additionally, though they have yet to get me excited.
Staking the Right Tokens
Just like Steem, these coins can be staked. And just like when you're voting with your SP, whichever coin you got staked is going to reward the author (and you as a curator!) with that coin, in addition to Steem. So I staked a bunch of Creative Coin, and as a result, every time I give an upvote to a post that uses the creativecoin tag, they receive some of that token. Then I also get rewarded for curating it.
The significance of this became apparent for me just now, when @naturalmedicine released their lotus coin. I'm not so knowledgeable about making herbal tinctures, so I haven't been using that tag a lot, but many of the folks I interact with do. Now I'm seeing, that any kind of homesteading related articles got the green light to use this tag. Great! So I went ahead and bought myself a modest amount of Lotus Coin, staked it, and kept upvoting the posts by the same people I enjoyed reading anyway. It didn't take long to see how the more you vote, the more you get, the more you can stake, and the more you'll receive next time you vote.
Future Plans
For now I want to keep tagging my specialized posts for the appropriate tribes. This means posting about music, my photos of murals, and the occasional post about Splinterlands or about investing. Let me increase my holdings in those tokens, and stake them for future rewards.
As for the other tokens... let's just see. I got my six-pack of beer tokens staked, so I can give out a beer a day. In fact, let me invite the first one of you lovely readers who has read my post till the end, and let me know in a comment. Automated comments are obviously excluded.
Please check out these great communities I'm contributing to:
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#ecotrain | What is EcoTrain | Discord Community
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/446343435985879071/570807211115151361/tribe-steemup-banner-NM2.png?width=795&height=225 #tribesteemup |The 8 Pillars of @TribeSteemUp
#team-mexico | Discord Community
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