500px is for eyeball-searing, shortbread tin HDR and photos of very young Russian girls.
A a 500px user I challenge you to find an 'eyeball-searing, shortbread tin HDR' or any 'very young Russian girls' on
my photo pages
I take your point though, there is quite a lot of both of those on 500px. That said there is also a lot of great photography on there which, for me, is easier to find and to follow than it is on Flickr. All photo sharing sites are a curate's egg. There's a lot of junk on all of them and a lot of good stuff on all of them.
Keenon, you may want to start with Flickr, it's a good general starting point, though it is so popular your images do tend to get lost. You might then want to look at other sites as well and test them out - most are free or offer a trial period. At some point you might consider one home for everything you want to put online and somewhere else for those of your pictures that stand out.
As well as the general photosharing sites you can also consider setting up your own website and taking much more control of how your images are presented (I do this through my site at
smugmug though there is an annual fee involved for most of these providers). You could also start up a photoblog (
blogger, one version of
wordpress and
tumblr all offer free hosting and tumblr, where I am
photoblogging these days, has some nice photography specific templates available for a fee.
You will sometimes hear people suggesting that having your own website or blog limits your exposure compared to posting on photo sharing sites or social media sites. This is true. But all the latter do is expose your images to millions of people who don't give a damn about them, assuming they ever actually see them in the middle of the millions of other images posted there. My view is it is better to have more control of your images, how they are presented and how they appear so that the people who's views you actually care about and who will be genuinely interested in your work see your pictures at their best. You can still post the same images or a wider group of images to photo sharing sites and you can use your social media presence to direct people to your own sites.
That, of course, is probably a long way down the road if you're just starting out, but it's worth keeping it in the back of your mind as you think about how you evolve your presence online (and in print) in the future.