Steemit ain't Facebook

I was gonna write a nice friendly Nagan VII post. I was gonna write a milestone of how I got 100 witness votes in 2 days. I was gonna drop some of my snark and post all friendly like, but apparently this is the week a lot of weird shit has to go down.

I get accused of running a scam out of Minnowsupport by someone that put in more than one post for STEEMFEST MINNOW (he retracted and put out an apology). A witness voter of mine was frustrated with me for allowing dolphins to upvote themselves using the @minnowsupport community account. And the final straw was getting called a libtard statist.

Couple things

The community account , @minnowsupport, is a cyborg. There is a "bot" in Discord that has the posting key to @minnowsupport and can accept user commands to upvote posts. People walk in there, register their account with the bot, and then use it to upvote their posts. There is a trail in discord, and it leaves a comment on the post leaving a trail on the block. It's a public bot. There is a bot like aspect of a program used to vote, but every vote was cast by a human. Everyone in this whole community is welcome to use it as long as they pay the $0.001 SBD/steem that we need as part of a transfer to register you. The bot currently is used 1600 times a day by people that come into our discord, manually hit the command to vote, and either hang out and chill or leave for 12 hours until the timer resets.

I posted community guidelines, I posted a video from steemcleaners, and am going to put these things on the website coming out soon. Those aren't community guidelines everyone in Steemit must follow because I run bartertown (Mad Max reference). Instead those are the community standards if you want to use the public bot we manage. We follow Steemit community standards and add "No voting porn" to the list. That's it. We have some young people in there and don't want a trail of porn upvotes. I think it's pretty fuckin' low bar stuff.

If you have a beef with how some dickwad misused a free public community bot I suggest taking it up with them. Despite a couple posts to the contrary I'm not a statist dickwad and I'm not going to write in rules to limit how people use the bot. If you don't like what they did then flag them. If you're flagging because you don't like their opinion you might just stick your dick in a hornets nest of 3000+ people. If you're flagging because they are just upvoting comment spam on their own shitpost you'll likly get 3000 people that think you're a champ for stopping abuse on the bot. But don't look to me as a central authority to come in heavy handed. That's not in the spirit of Steemit or in the spirit of a group called Peace, Abundance, and LIBERTY.

Also, about the dolphins that occasionally use it... it's ok. It's all ok. First off the bot on a single vote is adding like 0.4sbd to a post. Yes it has 110k delegated SP and about 4k of it's own, but it's used SIXTEEN HUNDRED TIMES A DAY. So, the votes are small. If there is abuse it's pretty minor and usually done by some minnow that's hasn't gotten over their dipshittery from other social sites. More importantly though minnows need connections to other people if they're ever going to get out of minnowhood. Would I prefer that whales don't come in and upvote themselves with the bot? Yes! Am I going to enforce that? NO! Because I want dolphins and whales to hang out with the minnows in the pond and if a 0.4SBD vote twice a day is enough to do that then by god vote away!

This ain't yo mama's facebook

See, this Steemit is "run" by a bunch of libertarian anarchist crazy people that think we should all be able to do as we want as long as we cause no harm. It's do no harm, but take no shit. These morons come over from Facebook and think that flag wars and trolling will get them places here. It doesn't take long to earn a negative rep and lose all your post rewards. You get that Magneto moment of "What have I done!?!" Ultimately some of that is good for this community. It's like our immunity to bullshit is working (lookin at you Trainer), and also some of that is good because it means that people are learning about this place.

We have an obligation to teach our ways

Hopefully people show a little restraint and patience though for these idiots that come over here. yes, they are annoying as fuck, but we have a world to change. I'm not sure we want to spend all of our voting power nuking minnow idiots into the ground. That probably won't help our brand nor bring many new users to our platform to drive up the demand for steem and thus send us to the moon. So, I urge everyone to teach peace, teach how this place is different, and give these people a least a shot or two to figure it out. We need those idiots to come here, learn, and become advocates for this place and the ways of Steemit. We don't need them to come here, get nuked, and spread shit about us.

So, yeah, I could run around removing every single upvote and policing every single shitpost that catches 0.4 sbd from us, but I'm not going to kneejerk react and put rules all over this project or become the police I can't stand. 5 votes out of 1600 go bad. If we have constant abuse from an individual I'm going to root it out. Otherwise, it's on this whole community to police shit. Just make sure you're in the right before you start flagging because it usually leads to unintended consequences.

I'm a scammer

Let's talk about this too. If Minnow Support is a get rich quick scheme it's the worst fucking one I could envision. I spend about 4-5 hours a day trying to work on various aspects of this project. I get mods. I recruit people. I write witness posts. I run bots. I manage some finances, I answer questions from 3000 minnows, and I answer questions in steemit chat and Discord all day. I talk to other witnesses to try to figure out what we need to do about inflation, block size, error messages, recruiting, hardforks and other shit. We're building bots, websites, and a radio station. Currently after 2 months of this I now witness 28 blocks. That's about 26 steem and about $26. I'm making less than mimimum wage for this. Also, that doesn't include the expenses taht I pay out of my pocket typically and give to @minnowsupport. I'm net negative on the whole project and you can check my transfers to see that money is going from @aggroed to @minnowsupport and I don't think there's a single case of it going the other way.

I generally don't even use the bot I helped create, but occasionally I do upvote myself 100% when it's community related and I'm trying to get the post a good start. I don't know how many times i've done this. Maybe 3-4 in 1 month.

What about "this whole thing is a giant project just to get votes?" Well, it's not entirely false. It's my witness project. It's what I'm doing to deserve to be a witness. But the voting is a consequence of fighting for a bigger deal. If you've read any of my previous shit you'd know that I'm a pretty dedicated truther that thinks steemit is about the best antidote out there to fiat money created by debt by shiteating banksters that rule the world. I'm doing this because I'm a passionate advocate for peace, abundance, and liberty and want the world to change. I think Steemit can play a great role in that mission so I promote this place and use my time to growth hack it and support the minnows that do come over. Witness votes are a cool side effect of the work I do here. But it's not worth the minimum wage I get from witnessing. Now, if I became a witness and then started doing nothing and just collected some steem power everyday for jack shit... well that's a different issue.

So, if Minnowsupport is a scam. It's gotta be the shittiest time eating, low wage, constantly bombarded with questions, kinda shitscam ever created. Add in the fact that it's run by 6 witnesses and has had visits from multiple top witnesses checking it out, we seem to be a spawning ground for another 6+ witnesses and hopefully you get the idea that we are a positive force for good for the platform rather than a bunch of scammers draining the reward pool 0.4SBD at a time by giving it away to anyone in the public.

the real benefit of Minnow Support

The irony of all of it is that the real benefit comes from the community aspect. It wasn't the .4 SBD bot that got our people into trending or several hundred votes. It was the fact that people hang out all the time, make friends, and use those connections to get their material out into the world. People come for the bots, but quickly learn the community aspect of what we've built together is infinitely more important. That's why we're sitting on 200 delegations for around 140k SP total from some highly ethical mothafuckahs. It's cause we do good.

Conclusion

I'm not a statist. I'm not running a scam. Minnow Support isn't a scam. I'm not going to add more rules to how a completely public account operates. If you have beef feel free to add it in a comment below, change your witness votes, or start flagging muh posts. And even when you do... I'm still just gonna keep doin' what I'm doin' because it's helping a lot of people. I'm operating my mission statement of Peace, Abundance, and Liberty as best as I can.

Anybody else got a beef with me this week?

I try to pack all my negative energy into one shitty week. So, if you have any other accusations you'd like to lob at Minnow Support or me personally I'd love for you to take this time right meow and do it publicly here in these comments. If you would like to share some positive non-scammy experieces as a counter to fears and misunderstandings that'd be swell to.

Comment responses delayed as I have to start work.

Rant Jamima out.