It's Friday! I know some people are down about the Steem price falling, but all crypto is down. Steem is still doing better than late last year when it was under a dollar. It's all relative and we can't expect it to go up unless there are good reasons for people to want it. That time may come if the Steem Inc development team can deliver.
Of course Friday means a #FollowFriday post from me. This is when I mention some cool Steemians you may want to check out. I would suggest following people who post what is interesting to you so that you feed is always full of good stuff. Feel free to do your own Follow Friday posts as I'm sure you have different suggestions.
- @soundlegion is very active in the music communities. She's a judge on the Open Mic contests and had compiled several albums of songs by artists on Steemit. I liked her post about staying positive and helping the minnows.
- I encountered @bashadow in the comments for the post above. He's doing lots of good stuff for the Steemit community.
- @steem.camp are organising a meetup at a campsite in Germany in August. I may well be there.
- @eroche is behind the Let's Eat app for restaurant reviews on the Steem blockchain. He's also part of the Steemit community in Ireland.
- @artgirl is an artist and blogger from the Philippines.
I was having a discussion with @slobberchops about how to encourage minnow/plankton users on Steemit. He has his own bot to give selected people a vote. I have given up on using Steemvoter to automate my votes, so they are all manual now. I do delegate half my SP to others, including some minnows.
We came up with an idea about #AdoptAPlankton. I'm not fully sure how it will work, but let's say some of us pick a user who's struggling and give them some support for a while. I'm just looking at the New feed for people who have managed to build some reputation. Those between 30 and 50 should have some posts, but probably aren't making much. It's not so easy as there are lots of people just posting pictures or text that may not be theirs. I'm looking for those posting original content.
I tried looking for music-related posts and found @pizzaboy77. He's a fairly new user with reputation 37. He's mostly posting in German, but is doing bilingual posts for the Metal Weekend challenge. I'm going to follow him for the next week or so and give him a few votes. I'll let him know I'm doing this. Maybe I can help him gain some followers.
I welcome suggestions on ways we can help the small-fry on Steemit. We want them to stick around so they can benefit in the long run.
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I will be adopting a plankton this weekend, I know you know who mine already is, but I'll do a post about it. Maybe we can get more to do this.
The price of STEEM is getting more depressing by the day and we need to impart some cheer.
#AdoptAPlankton seems a good tag.
I'm not bothered about setting hard rules for these things. Let each person do it as they see fit.
I think there are a few things a person can do to help a new user who is interested in staying and learning the ropes of steemit. It is very difficult for new users to get a following and build an audience, so a tutorship for a little bit with helpful opinions. If it is affordable for you, first a gift of an @dustsweeper account, this can be done with $0.500, and would give them protection on about 70 received dust votes from fellow redfish/planktons on the comments they leave Second if affordable is an SBI, in conjunction with the dustsweeper account that would give a payout of $0.030 on all the content they create. I know it is not much but when you look at a new user account it can be very helpful. Encourage the content creation, at least one post every other day, but post that people will comment on.
Encourage the new user to vote on and respond to at least one comment on the content they created. (this is why I suggest the every other day content creation). It is important for people to try and maximize their vote potential, yet it is also important to engage with a person's blog visitors. By commenting and voting on at least one comment, this shows other visitors to their post that they are trying to engage with their audience members.
Everyone's Idea of how to use the vote is different, Self voting at the earliest stages I believe is detrimental to a new user, it is potential reward that could be lost, so if a new user is going to self vote, it should only be on their post that have already reached a payout of $0.03. If they have a gifted @dustsweeper account, excessive self voting (and no I do not know what would be considered excessive) , could lead to termination of the account and funds returned, so make sure if they have one to be careful. Self voting on a comment is a complete waste of time unless it has also reached pay out level.
Just a couple thoughts, it really does not take much to help a new user as a new user,(about one month old), you could ask @paparodin what he thinks has been the most helpful advice and help he has received. (I use his name because he is one of more recent people I have tried to help). Also when you have the person you think is going to be a good steemian and productive member of how you see and want steemit, then promote the piss out of them drop their name, semi introduce them to others. Even as a brand new user to steemit, when I first joined, I found someone that was an awesome writer, I promoted him when an where I could without being blatant about it (like right now), he is now a REP of 64 and has close to 3000 SP earned not bought.
So that was just a few thoughts, helping does not need to be real complicated, sometimes just that little hand up, little piece of advice, and you have a person that may give it 6 months.
Being a social platform, people should just socialize a lot. Read content that you like and leave meaningful comments, have meaningful conversations. Especially for people who are as social-able as that, dustsweeper of course comes in handy.
Failing to plan is a plan for failure, so you want to have a solid idea on your writing and posting schedule too. Gathering ideas that you can pursue constantly is also helpful.
I'd not looked at Dustsweeper, but it seems like a good idea. I know I lost a lot of 1c votes in the early days. I have used SBI a bit. I will gift these to my nominated plankton.
I also did some thinking about supporting minnows,Im not a big 'Player' myself but do received great help from you and others.. I wanted to put in relation with people who arent as fortunate as I am for instance. So I support your philosophy 100% ,the knife cuts on both sides I think,helping people and giving more exposure to steem(it). But the devil is in the details,how do we implement such a thing :)
It can be as formal or as informal as you like. I have sponsored some SBI shares, provide regular votes (I use steemauto.com), but most encouraging, I feel, is commenting regularly on their posts. There are also initiatives like @pifc which runs a weekly pay it forward contest. At the moment, @pifc is building their account through regular posts - you can upvote, sponsor SBI shares or delegate steem. Here is the latest account builder post.
Maybe you can help those in the Dutch community, but there are plenty of good musicians who need support too. Votes and delegation are useful tools for this.
Plankton here, thanks for your support!
Welcome aboard. I sent you a few votes to help you along. Looks like you are on the right course
Thank you for your very kind words. Appreciate it!
I like the idea of adopting a plankton, and in general, thanks for all the support you've thrown my way.
I'll try and upvote others more, try and stem the bleeding from these latest price drops.
I think your observation about the value of steem being tied to public demand is important.
For all of Banfield's problems, he really recruited people to the platform well and created demand for the currency.
Thinking about that... maybe steem needs external advertising in addition to support for plankton?
I think bubbles are unsustainable by their nature, so we want Steem to rise and stay there. I'm just not a Banfield fan. We want people to join with realistic expectations. I hope Steem Inc will buy some advertising when they feel ready.
I agree that the Banfield "make money fast" approach isn't healthy, but I do think we need exposure. Nobody I talk with in real life knows about Steem. When I contrast Steem and DTube to the YouTube model, they all "get it" and see how this new paradigm should win in the long run.
I also think that moving away from the theme of crypto would be beneficial. Prior to my joining Steemit, I used to think of crypto as a scam of sorts -- people trying to make it rich betting on bitcoins. I basically ignored the whole technology because of the way it was hyped.
In my mind, a better pitch is, "Get paid to watch TV and vote on shows." I like blogs, but realistically, the majority of people don't have the luxury of sitting and reading, but they do have the time to watch shows while cooking or doing other house chores.
In my case, I never watch videos here, I much prefer to read. Vlogging is someone anyone can but not everyone is able, or wants to appear on video.
I think the other big benefit of the written word is that it's easy to tell shortly after starting whether younwishnto continue reading. With video, you can end up watching it all, waiting for it to get better only to find youve wasted your time.
Horses for courses my friend :-)
I do totally agree about some outside advertising. With the huge SP Steemit inc has at its disposal, I cannot understand why there isn't more promotion of the platform itself. Perhaps they are expecting the developers of third party apps to do it, which would be a fair point, but so few people know anout Steemit outside Steemit.
Mynsolutio would be a small upvote for each post shared to FB or Twitter...but max 2 a day to stop spammers.
I'm more of a reader than a watcher too. I think they don't feel ready for a marketing push yet. It's no good millions coming here if they can't sign up. The next hardfork should be fairly soon and then it may all happen.
Very interesting "selection" of steemians! I follow some of them from many months and they are fantastic ;)
Awesome to hear how you and @slobberchops came up with the idea of #adoptaplankton. I think it sounds like a great initiative. I look forward to being able to give back myself someday!
That is really great to keep supporting to the plankton and help them to kerp steeming..
By encouraging and supporting plankton then they can encourage other new usres to keep steeming... thanks for sharing..
it is so nice post of the day.
i support you man.
That's nice, but share your opinions
I always respect your ideas about this platform....
Thanks. I'm just trying to make it better. We can all do something to help.