SteemIt can be a tough nut to crack. I am sad to see that there are many authors who drop scores of posts without getting rewards.
One of the best of ways to break into SteemIt is to join a SteemIt Community. A well run community will have dedicated moderators who assure that the small accounts that post in the community receive upvotes and rewards.
A post needs a minimum of $0.02 in upvotes to receive a reward. The rewards come from interest on STEEM POWER. The general rule is that one needs over $500 in STEEM POWER to deliver a $0.02+ upvote. The exact cutoff changes with the price of STEEM and the size of the reward pool. Currently, one needs about 3000 SP to deliver a $0.02 reward.
Before posting to a SteemIt Community, one should study both the content and the voting patterns of the community.
I am currently challenging myself to generate an image a day on Night Cafe. Since this post is about communities, I decided to publish the post in the AI Art Community.
Examining the community, I see that the last post happened 5 months ago and that the last 40 posts in the community received a total of $0.04 in rewards.
This does not appear to be a thriving community.
The community was created by the account @marcosdk. It appears that @marcosdk was a witness and active in the development of the ill fated #steem-engine platform. The account was last active on SteemIt 2 years ago. It was last active on HIVE 3 years ago. So, this is not the account of a HIVE apostate.
It appears that the community was started by a witness who burned out on the platform ... which I can understand.
It costs only 3 STEEM to create a community. I created two prior to STEEM/HIVE schism. I let my communities languish.
The demise of the AI-Art community highlights one of the big problems with SteemIt Communities. The communities generally depend on the dedicated efforts of the community administrators.
Another problem is that the community structure on STEEM can actually divide a community. In my quick search for AI-image community, I found seven STEEM communities interested in developing AI-Images.
These seven communities were competing for the same users and they ended up splitting the people who wanted to develop AI images. The individual communities ended up undermining the larger community. Funny how that works.
I mentioned Steem-Engine. Streem-Engine created a feature called a tribe. A tribe combined a community with an alt-coin. For example the photography tribe would supplement STEEM rewards with the PHOTO token.
I had several hundred thousand alt-coins when Steem-Engine went poof.
It is possible that some of the tribes were just ponzi schemes. Who knows?
Back to the point of this post. One of the best ways for new accounts to thrive on SteemIt is for the user to join a community. One should study a community before joining to make sure that there community accounts that support the posts.
Unfortunately, since communities deliver rewards, it is not uncommon for malicious users to join and then abuse communities. While most communities are supportive of new members ... some communities are jealous of new users who try to rewards without contributing much STEEM POWER to the community.
Each community has a HIVE number. The HIVE number for the AI Art community is hive-149647 . These HIVE numbers work a lot like hashtags.
Personally, I prefer to use straight up hashtags to communities. For example, I personally prefer to publish AI images with the hashtag #ai-image than with the community tag.
It is possible for users to develop a hashtag as if it were a community.
One can also form a community simply by following and actively supporting like-minded members of SteemIt.
To be frank, communities and tribes add a political element to a group that I wish to avoid.
I have limited finances and cannot buy STEEM at this moment. Buying enough STEEM to have a $0.02+ plus upvote is a great way to be active in a community because it allows you to assure people get a payout on their post.
For this post, I asked Night Cafe for an image of prehistoric tribal people dancing around a campfire to symbolize community. Here is a higher resolution of the image.