With all the negativity surrounding bidbots lately, one can't help wonder if there are any other ways on how to boost and "improve visibility" on their blog posts. Yesterday, a close friend of mine asked me the same question. To which I was reminded of Whaleshares.
Image Source: Whaleshares Logo
What is Whaleshares?
Whaleshares are a new BitShares token created to lead the charge of BTS-based assets to be used for both pooling and representing community voting power on the Steem platform (and potentially elsewhere). WhaleShares are meant to give Steem-based communities the ability to rally their votes behind trusted individuals in their community in moments when most needed. Need a whale? Consider WhaleShares a tool to empower you to summon the votes of those who trust you!
Source: Whaleshares Openledger
It is basically a Bitshare token to which you can use in order to summon a whale to upvote your post. Whaleshares is one of the three tokens (along with BEYONDBIT and HAIRSHARE) to which you can use on Whaleshares.net. The whales you can summon are limited to @fuzzyvest, @hairshares and @officialfuzzy, they will boost your post depending on what type of token you used.
By now you are probably either very confuse or have absolutely no idea on what I am talking about, especially if this is the first time you heard of this tokens. So I'll just go jump ahead to how to do it.
1. Visit http://whaleshares.net/
The first thing you need to do is visit whaleshares.net. In there you will see an empty box to which you can paste a link of the post you want to boost. Once your link is verified as existing, a memo will appear below (normally just a U followed by your link) to which you can copy to your clipboard.
2. Choose whom among the three whales you want to get a vote from:
Seen below are four important things. The whales approximate current Steem Power, the whales approximate current voting power, the token you will use in order to summon them and where to send to.
3. Open your Bitshare/Openledger account
As I've said above, Whaleshare is a Bitshare token which means it works through the Bitshares dex. If you don't have a Bitshare account yet, you can easily create one for free at Bitshares or Openledger.
4. SEND!!!
After logging in your Bitshare account. The only thing left to do now is to send those tokens. Seen on Step #2 are the accounts to send to along with the token you need to use to summon the whale of your choosing. Seconds after sending, the said whale will automatically boost your post.
As an example, if I want to get an upvote from @fuzzyvest who has the largest Steem Power among the three with around 303k SP. I need to send BEYONDBIT tokens to the account whaleshares together with the memo we generated from Step #1. The Voting Weight is then decided by how many tokens you send, 1Token = 1% Vote. Using @penguinpablo's upvote calculator, we can exactly calculate how much upvote we will be getting. Sending 10 BEYONDBIT results in a $3.14 upvote value.
But how exactly do you get these tokens?
There are two ways how. First is to buy it yourselves. The easiest way to do this is through Blocktrades.
To which you will convert those to BEYONDBIT or WHALESHARE using the Bitshares or Openledgers market.
The second way is through joining their fun challenges. Almost every week Whaleshares has this contests which makes them one of the most active and awesome community there is on Steemit. Tow which you can join in here: https://discord.gg/CsDFM2a
Thoughts
What I love about Whaleshares is that you can literally compute how much vote you are getting. Bid bots on the other hand depends on a lot of things. In whaleshares, if you are not satisfied with the upvote value the whale will give, then you can just hodl your tokens and wait until they are at a level in which you can profit.
In your case, 1 SBD -> 15.76 BTS -> 5.44 BEYONDBIT.
i.e. 10 BEYONDBIT = 1.84 SBD
Am I correct?
Most likely correct. It all depends on the current STEEM/SBD, BTS and Beyondbit price.
With 75% going to the author, it' likely seen as a loss, but you could game the system by sending it immediately after you created the post and get the curation rewards in the process.
I'm still not really sure if this is good for people who wants to get some profit but it definitely is at least an alternative to post promotion
Some bots do not upvote post created in less than 20 minutes. Instead of refund, they will put you in the next round! What a smart rule they have!
That rule was probably put in place to avoid possible abuse in the reward pool. Some people immediately send in the bots minutes after the post is created.
This is not seen as a problem when the bids are below $20, but is another story when people send in over $100. It might also seen as rude as people who upvote the post after 30minutes will get less or no curation rewards at all.
I see many people have the idea about buying bot upvote at a later time for the benefits of early minnow upvoters. But if we dived into the figures, I don't think those early minnows could get any meaningful curation reward at all. On the contrary, a large part of the vote value (25% at most) will be shared back to the bot. Late bot upvote is therefore benefit to the bot rather than to the early minnows.
To reward minnow upvoters, the best way I think is to directly upvote their post or comment.
Just my two cents :)
Agree! I always try to upvote any replies to my post as well :)
As to the issue of minnows not getting 'meaningful' curation rewards, hard to admit but I agree with this as well lol.
Their however is a significant increase on the curation reward if the bots vote after the minnows, a minnow will most likely get around $0.10-$0.15 instead of the usual $0.001 SP. A definite increase but kind of useless one :)
I enjoy this nice and fruitful discussion with you :)
In my previous experiment, I was a relative early upvoter on a post. At the time I upvoted, it was at $1.87. Later on all the bots came in. That post ended up over $400. My curation reward was only 0.012 SP.
May be it was because my STEEM POWER was too low.
i'm very new to steemit and i still couldn't fully understand the things written here. but Im going to read them again and again :D
thanks for your post :D
Thanks for the info jlordc, I might try it out.
I've seen these whaleshares, hairshares, pocket tokens, ... around plenty of times but it was always way too complicated and I never really got the point and saw all of them as worthless and useless tokens not understanding why they existed. This makes it all a bit more clear.
No problem. I wish I could have explained it more and better. :)
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