This is a very important concept, especially for new users and users with a small following which I believe are the future of this platform. I'll start it off with a story...
Learn From My Mistakes
I first learned about Bitcoin in the summer of 2012. At the time the going rate was around $5 - $10. I decided to try mining them on my desktop computer and successfully mined ~0.025 over the course of a couple of days. At that point I thought - it's not worth the slightly higher electric bill and risk of burning out my CPU to continue doing this since I would only make about $10 / month - so I stopped and went on with my life.
The mistake that I made, which has now probably cost me tens of thousands of dollars, was that I did not know how to properly value the mining rewards.
Fast Forward to STEEM
Now it's 2017 and I'm finally getting back in the cryptocurrency game, and I've come across STEEM. I've had some good success with my posts with some earning over $20 in rewards. I spend around an hour writing a post such as this one (my process involves outlining my writing points, filling in the details and then proofreading - yes I know proofreading can be a strange concept for some - and then re-writing parts that I feel didn't come out right or were confusing the first time around). Anyway I digress...an hour per post, plus say $10 of promotion, yields perhaps $20 in rewards, for a net profit of $10 / hour.
$10 / hour is not worth it for my time. If that's really what I was getting here, I wouldn't be posting, and you wouldn't be reading this. What I'm getting is not $10 / hour - but $10 worth of STEEM / hour. That's a BIG difference. Let me say it again - I'm not getting $10 / hour, I'm getting $10 worth of STEEM / hour.
This is exactly the same thing that was happening with my Bitcoin mining story above - I wasn't getting $10 / month from mining. I was getting $10 worth of Bitcoin / month from mining. At the time $10 worth of Bitcoin was about 1 Bitcoin. But I didn't realize that. I just looked at the dollar amount.
How to Value SteemIt Reward Payouts
So let's get to the point here - how should we value the reward payouts? The key is to ignore the $ and focus on what you're really getting - STEEM. STEEM is a very new (in the grand scheme of things) and relatively scarce asset. Like Bitcoin many years ago, the world is only very slowly starting to realize what it is really worth. If you're here then you probably see the value in STEEM and you know there is a good chance it can increase in value by leaps and bounds over the next few years.
Value your rewards by what they can be - not what they are worth right now. Even if you only make a fraction of a STEEM per post, think not about the fact that it's currently worth only a fraction of a dollar, but about how much it could be worth years from now if STEEM succeeds in becoming what we all believe it can be.
A few years in the future it will be SO much harder to get even a fraction of 1 STEEM than it is right now. Sad that your upvote only adds $0.01 of value? Remember to ignore the $! You're getting 0.01 worth of STEEM! If STEEM becomes valued at what a Bitcoin is today then that 0.01 upvote would be worth about $40!
There are a lot of posts on here that talk about how hard it is for newbies/minnows to earn rewards, just like I thought it was too hard for me to mine Bitcoin in 2012. But if you look at it this way it's actually incredibly easy to earn rewards right now on SteemIt. Just imagine every $0.01 you see as 0.01 BTC and you'll understand how easy it really is right now.
Let's Get the Word Out!
If we want STEEM to be worth as much as a Bitcoin is now, and our $0.01 upvotes to be worth $40, we need to get the word out! Not just for getting new users on the platform, but for making sure they know how to value their rewards properly. Otherwise they will be unhappy with the dollar amounts they are seeing and quit just like I did 5 years ago. Let's make sure all of the new and current users know how valuable STEEM can be, and how easy it is to get it!