With great power, comes great responsibility

in #buildawhale7 years ago

@buildawhale now has an $850 upvote. I've been doing a lot of thinking of what that means.

I've been bouncing a few ideas around in my head and I think I have something really cool. Before doing it, I wanted to get some feedback from the community.

Anyone who knows me, I am insane about never using @buildawhale's massive voting power for anything other than the voting windows. I do not self-vote with it, I do not sell it privately, I do not submit my own posts as I feel that is unfair as it is my money on both ends. I want it to be as fair as possible for everyone.

With all the self-voting, $500 comments, and crazy 16 posts a day for $500+ it got me thinking. How can I take advantage of this massive $1,000 vote... but use it for good.

If you followed me for any time I have been here, you will know I am a big fan of community and doing cool shit. We are the only bidding bot that has a team going through thousands of posts a day to feature our favorite five posts on a daily basis. This takes a ridiculous amount of work, especially now since our bid windows have gotten really busy with minimum size bids but very large quantity of bids.

Two changes I am thinking about

The first change, we would vote 5% (~$42) - 10% (~$85) on our daily Curation Digest (currently is Monday-Friday, but have been trying to get this back to 7 days a week). This will have a very tiny impact on one of the ten bidding windows a day. Our curators have struggled to keep up with the number of posts coming in on a daily basis due to the amount of support our digests have received. This has become an immense amount of work and many times I have considered canceling it as the majority of posts are low effort and it is a lot of work to find five good posts sometimes.

Second, we would find one or more community projects a day and do an equal cumulative vote to support awesome projects on a daily basis in the community. I will personally curate at least one project on a daily basis I think deserves more support with an equal vote on one project or spread across multiple community posts.

The impact on our bidding windows would be tiny, but the impact on at least two community projects on a daily basis would be huge.

I am still working out the details and if it is something I would ever do, but I'd love to get your opinion on it and open to suggestions of great projects to support.

themarkymark.png

My recent popular posts

Sort:  

Some good community projects:
steemstem
curie
utopianio
...

Something that could be cool to do is if you took a small percentage (say 5%) of buildawhales VP and handed it over to the curie crowd or something like that (so 5% means a 100% upvote would use 10.020.05) as it would help out the project and those that get support from it.

I pay to lease the SP so it isn’t something I can do at this time.

If you have the power, use it for good! That is my take on the issue.

And maybe if you do the vote at the beginning of a window, everybody can plan for it and there is nothing lost.

first of all,Congo for your success, and you are a good person and your stuff were always be informative <3 keep sharing :D
Best of luck
@sibtainzli

we would find one or more community projects a day and do an equal cumulative vote to support awesome projects on a daily basis in the community.

That's a great initiative!

Can you report on what project you'll be supporting so other readers can check it out?

Yes, I will do that either as @themarkymark or @buildawhale, haven't got it all figured out yet and wanted to see how others felt.

Bottom line on this one is that you are one of, if not THE most transparent bot owners on the platform. As long as you are open about what you are doing with what at the end of the day is your own money, there should not be any complaints.

I guess the one thing I would ask is, would these votes be submitted like any other vote? Where they are accounted for in the bidding window because you sent a payment in for them? Considering how much use the bid bot tracker is getting, having that vote accounted for in the "profitable bid opportunity" window seems pretty important. But at the same time, how do you guarantee a 5-10% vote when someone can come in with a monster bid that shoots everything down.

Guess it is just a matter of trusting you to do what is best and good with your product. Anyone who follows you should trust that you will do that!

I would do a manual vote for the set % I disclose as my target. Before starting I would announce it and disclose what I will be using.

Say it is 10%, I would vote once per day at 10% or 10 votes at 1% supporting 10 different projects.

Hello there ! I'm workin tirelessly in my community, growing them on steemit knowledge, I'm gonna be opening a Steemit Academy and I'm doing some constant charity work, some delegation might come in handy to fund this project so here I am! Cheers!

If you go the community project route, @themarkymark, i would recommend @jonsnow1983's project 100%.

Thank you love! You know I'm All IN with Steemit!

@themarkymark throw some love @jonsnow1983 's way. . He is doing some really great stuff! I second @bethalea vote!

hello excellent friend idia to open a steemit academy, so all new users and people with little knowledge of the platform have a good start, a good idea would be to allow those people to demonstrate their talent, I congratulate you for this excellent work of charity, you have My vote and accounts with my help to make this great work a success.

Gracias por el apoyo amigo!

thanks to @jonsnow1983 I know steemit, I know his work and I'm a part of it. I live in the same city and I think it's great the project that is being carried out that is to form the academy steemit to impart knowledge in the area. I think it's the best way to start and it could be a pilot test to consolidate and apply in other communities.

Thanks for the support brother, together we can work this out!

only working in equi you can reach success with this believe me you have my full support.

completely agree with you.

This type of initiative is what I like most about this community, I have been present in the charity work of my friend @jonsnow1983. The initiative of the academy of steemit is a long-term and short-term project that helps all the well-to-do and not-well-off people at the state level. promoting this initiative for the preparation of other aid and charity groups throughout the national territory. All my contribution and support for these projects. #comunity

He who seeks to ensure the welfare of others, has already secured his own.
K'ung-fu-tzu, Confucio.

I have followed the work done by @ jonsnow1983 and really have a very big vision of what it is to help other people. So I recommend 100% the project of @ jonsnow1983.

I recommend the project of @jonsnow1983, because he works every day to improve steemit and the world

@themarkymark, our partner @ jonsnow1983, does an excellent job helping the community, is an admirable person for all Hispanicsour partner @ jonsnow1983, does an excellent job helping the community, is an admirable person for all Hispanics

@jonsnow1983 is a person who transmits the best of Steemit, and who only has good comments and ideas for the community. It motivates you to be better every day.

A fantastic idea. I have always respected your openness and honesty @themarkymark!

My recommendation - use those powers for good!

Would you:
Close the bidding for one window daily?
Or lower the voting power of each window slightly?

Continuing to be open about how you are doing it is key so that bids can be made appropriately.

Voting on the curation digest is a good idea - it is the traditional 'side-by-side' method (ie Ford and Ford Foundation).

Community projects are the best part of Steemit! with 850 dollar upvote you could even divide the vote 10 or more ways and have a great impact on new comers, getting starteds and small fish of all sizes!

A vote will only add 8-16 minutes to a 2-hour 40-minute window to charge to 100%. The difference is tiny and it will only affect the window during our vote, the 9 other windows /day would be unaffected.

It won't take anything away from the votes (they will still be based on 100% voting power), will just make the window stay open for a few minutes longer.

I pay around $8,500 USD/day for our voting power, so I can't really close a window per day and use an entire vote.

I see, yes of course it depends on margins! A small part of one vote .

If Im not wrong this would also start rotating the voting window times, By having a 24 hour 16 minute 'daily' rotation. Sounds cool!

No, it would just make a window a little longer. Say for example we just did our votes, we should be around 98% voting power. It will take 2 hours 40 minutes to recharge to 100%. If we then do a manual 5% vote, it will add another 8 minutes to the voting window, so the total window will be 2 hours 48 minutes. It will still reach 100% and everyone will get the same value vote as they would without the vote.

I love this idea. To support the communities on Steem is vital to the sucess of the platform.

@themarkymark please let me know if you end up doing this. I would also like to potentially contribute some voting power from @postpromoter to this intiative as well.

Also let's discuss the best way to make sure the bot tracker website takes these votes into account. With the API option it should be pretty easy to do.

I'll be in touch when I work out the details.

There are a LOT of great projects to support here on Steemit...Also a LOT worth flagging...

With great power comes great responsibility indeed....and lots of TOUGH choices~*~

Man, it's so amazing to read this... lately i was very desappointed by some guy in the spanish community that invested 6.9 bitcoins in Steem... and his speech was: "yea, now ill be a whale, and will be the biggest account, and i doesnt mateer if i shitty content, see? this stupid post made $800, ha!..."

I was like... man... becouse people like you, Steem migth actually fail...

So im really glad to read this, now im following you. I spend lot of time in my content, mainly im helping the spanish community, my market niche are writers, creative people and i'll be bringing them all to Steem. But im planning to make one post in english every week, so, hope you read and thanks for helping true content creators!!

Oh, maybe would be usefull if you could tell us how to participate in your curation pool.

Or anyway that could help with this?
Thanks!
Daniel.

I was just reading a post about dwindling readership of content. I’ve missed that we’ve had an increase in users and thereby there will be an increase in content. The main tags on here are now walls of noise with the signal on Trending and Hot dominates by the big hitters. Everybody tends to gravitate to these tags too. Maybe there could be a sub-tag vote boosting initiative, where we try to get lesser tags some visible traction and content, possibly attracting new users to a tag or even building one from the ground up. These smaller tags with lower traffic are the only way to discover people I want to connect with and content I want on my feed. The likes of Music or Gaming in their plainest forms are just waaaay too much. We could see a Retro initiative, jRPG, my fave electronicmusic or even musictech. More containers to break things up a bit.

Its very good idea to support community projects! that what we need now.

@themarkymark

Please consider amazing guy called @hendrix22. He created two great initiatives:

#thegoodnews Gazette which presents great and inspiring stories from Steemit community:

#thegoodnews Gazette (1)

#thegoodnews Gazette (2)

The #hendrix22lovesyou Initiative! Steemit Can Help! Initiative that aims to help Steemians in trouble:

The #hendrix22lovesyou Initiative!

He suprised me with his first post about Steemian in need for help...that was me... Link

@hendrix22 is really amazing soul (we all are). He deserve our infinite support because he is transforming Steemit in beautiful community which help all of us. Also know he don't have easy life, so I wish you can support his projects!

I'm thinking if you have such a big upvote power, you can upvote the weaker ones (myself included), then they can become more powerful and upvote others, then everyone will be more powerful and all thanks to you!

Some months back, I was publishing a daily curation edition called Max Curation which I ran for a few weeks.

Here is a sample of the Max Curation Edition.

I had to discontinue it due to a general lack of support for the curation editions, after spending hours every day looking for good posts(yes, they are hard to come by!). Even though I boosted each of the posts with upvoting bots so that the authors who were featured would get some exposure, it seemed that not many were interested in curation.

I hope I'm not being too blunt here, but I feel that curation on Steemit is all talk and no action. But I do hope things will change one day, soon.

I had it on the back of my mind that I could restart the Curation Editions if I get some support. If it's possible to work something out, I am sure it will go a long way and benefit so many new authors who get discouraged after posting good content, just because there seem to be no readers & only bloggers on Steemit.

yeah the more you earn the more your responsibility increases.

First things first: at the end of your article, you allude to being able to vote different percentages of your power? Come again? This breeds an important question...

How come some people on Steemit seem to have the ability to change how much voting power they alot one upvote vs another? What should you do with your upvoting power? First we think a great project would be explaining all the rules and intricacies of the Steemit site-- bc they can be VERY confusing. It would be nice to find them all in one place. How can a Steemer upvote your article, and then upvote his own comment underneath your article, and his comment is worth 6x more than his upvote of your article? What IS that? Seems like magic. After those kinds of anomolies are understood, we'd be better able to actually give you a decent suggestion or opinion on how to do the most good on Steemit. Hard to say anything constructive, when most people don't even know the very rules of how things are done on a NORMAL basis on the site!

We wrote a pretty decent article on "Who is Satoshi?" which might provide some new compelling evidence on the topic. It got a little bit of interest, but due to being small we think it could have gotten a lot more.
How to remedy that, should be the main focus of anyone with power on Steemit. We're not so self-important as to think our article deserves massive payment from the community, but we simply see a LOT of garbage on Steemit garnering quite a lot of monetary upvotes. If that isn't fixed, we think Steemit won't last very long. Remember how much Google had to alter their algos to prevent the "dark side of the internet force" from gaming their search algos? That's ongoing, and so should policing Steemit for genuine content vs the rampant and profitable plagiarism, meaninglessness, etc...

(we upvoted our own post, simply to get heard! shameful, but effective?)

Once you get around 480 Steem Power (yourself or delegated to you in total) you will get a slider that lets you chose 1-100% voting power. If you use programming, you can do decimal places.

Hey Mark.

I've used Buildawhale recently and got selected to be featured on the Curation Digest, sadly it was almost 4 days after the post was out so didn't notice any result.

But I was thrilled that my hard work was rewarded with a mention and that someone noted that what I posted added value to the community so I can definitely say that the curation digest is important in motivating users, especiall new users like myself - I'll only be 1 month old tomorrow.

Cheers
See you around as always.

Sometimes we curate older posts if we like them, we try to focus on posts that are still within payout but doesn't always happen. I'll let the team know to keep focusing on posts inside of the payout window as this shouldn't happen often.

Thanks for telling that. Was curious to hear from people who actually got curated. Odd that you didn't notice any results tho. I heard should work very well.

This might change when it gets a daily upvote from @buildawhale

If you have great power do not hurt to give to a weak person like me. please vote my vote :)

pretend I am stupid and new, I can get an $850 up vote? how?

well if you ever need mor curators :)

Can hit us up on our Discord

Jika kamu masih ada, datanglah kepada ku.

La gente que invierte tiempo en hacer buenas publicaciones y de interés deben ser recompensadas en la medida de lo posible. Me parece una gran idea!

guao demasiado bueno esta publicación@themarkymark felicidades

How about sharing some of the power? We're all part of a decentralized system here, aren't we? Hehe..On a serious note, one vote from @buildawhale could change my life. Hope I can earn it some day.

Pls upvote me , am weak.

If I can recommend @hendrix22 and his news letter project :)

When you choose for your curation, you should remember, that only the rich can use buildawhale. 2sbd minimum is a huge "fee" these days.
I couldn't have afforded it in my first 150 days here.
You should also look outside:)
(not to me, of course)

We have @upmyvote that is only 1 SBD and now @ipromote that is only 0.500 SBD. Both have auto refunds enabled now, and soon @buildawhale will too.

I really would like to understand the process very well. Because I want to boost one article and would like to Use this kind of service.

@extraterrestrial will take and more than appreciate all the upvotes he can get! The Steemit Community and upvotes mean more than the world to him! All the best my Friends! Positive Energy! Light and Love! Great Karma! Blessed 2018! :)

you gotta do what you gotta do to shake things up

I can see more and more holders of great amounts of Steem Power are going to invest in projects to sustain and help the community growth. What I think it would be the key to success of the entire ecosystem, would be a little more advertising outside of the platform. Even though we have increasing user base growth, I guess that much more users are needed in order for Steemit to compete with popular sites like facebook or reddit. Also a great increase in the number of users would boost the price of Steem, as the demand for Steem will grow a lot higher which will improve even the experience of new users because they will see their votes having an impact fom the beginning.

Unfortunately I don't know what effort is required in order to promote Steem so much in order to have a visible effect. Right now even by searching Steem on google returns sad Steam results saying that you might mistyped the word which is discouraging for each person who wants to search for it.

Anyway, thank you for your great efforts that you are already making in order to create a better place here for everybody. I guess it is really appreciated!

Mantap

Hello @themarkymark! Do the @buildawhale support apply to non English speaking projects? I'm working in the biggest volunteers only ecological network in Guatemala (named "La Hojita" - http://www.lahojita.org), where for 14 years now we've been promoting empowerment processes, through cooperations between organic peasants (mainly Mayan ones) and urban population, around issues like native seeds biodiversity preservation, ancestral and alternative medical practices, ethnoveterinary, etc.

I intend beginning to publish around our activity, but most posts would probably be written in Spanish...

We only curate in English, but we are trying to build a team to do other languages natively, but support for our daily Curation Digest is very spotty so it is has been hard to keep it afloat much less expand into new languages.

It was always planned we would create niche digests on foreign languages and specific topics.

Congratulation brother.
This is your hard Work and by your hard work you have achieved this much success.
my prayers are with your for you to grow bigger and bigger ..

Interesting. As we grow as a community and individuals I like that you and others are trying to think about this methodically and morally. It really gives me hope for the platform.

I really didn't know that you curate 5 posts for bigger votes with @buildawhale , which means I will only submit my very best posts to your bot!
Communities need to be supported here, I see a lot of them, and if you can make them grow, they will give this platform a boost on natural selection instead of "whale"-driven selection!

Great work!

This post has received a 4.03 % upvote from @sidibeat thanks to: @siditech.

Well done malcolm.. wouldnt expect anything less from you..

Though i have a suggestion. Why not create "buildawhale2" and divide the SP? That way both bots can do your suggested tasks.. (just a suggestion)

Regards

We lease most of our Steem Power and what Steem Power I do own I put into @ipromote so users who can't afford the 2 SBD minimum of @buildawhale can use a both with $0.500 SBD minimum and still have a chance of being featured in our curation.

mmmm what the... i didnt know about @ipromote :/ now i am beating myself up for not knowing about it earlier.. thanks man. Please consider my earlier suggestion null and void..

I like both ideas and think you should have them in place tomorrow :D

I understand on the intent of limiting curration to build a whale quality posts, but why not open it up on days that it's hard to find good posts to all posts across the platform?

It's hard to dig through all the bad stuff to find some of the good, but seems like that could be an alternative as well?

We get well over 1,000 posts a day, there are always posts we can find, it's just how deep we have to dig to find them and how much shit we have to go through. Going through our bids or Steemit will likely result in the same amount of low effort spam you have to wade through. It was always intended as a value-add for @buildawhale users, a way to reward and show off quality content.

Haha I've waded through it once now and picked a post. I'm going to do more as I find time as I'd like to help currate more. It is a lot of junk.

Just a suggestion :D

@themarkymark buildawhale alwsys set a mark on anyone invested on it. Buildawhale made many richer with the upvotrs....all thanks to you. My witness votes goes to u tomorrow👍

I am really glad to see enthusiasts as yourself. That is the sign of healthy community composition that leads to some hope for newbies as myself :)
And thank you for making me Google what the heck the Witness are... you just got my vote Sir.

@themarkymark - Do you realise that one upvote (at 100% voting power) can literally provide 95% of people in my country (that has a population of over 1.2 Billion) with more money than they earn in an entire month?

The rather cliched, but nevertheless still relevant movie line is quite apt here...

Use that power well..

that is very true i think you are right

Wow! I’m new on here but that sounds incredible! Perfect title! What a platform!