Going Green for Steem
September 2019 is a month of new beginnings, in the Southern Hemisphere it is the start of spring, a new dawn of the future that is being written today, page by page.
We each can conrtibute towards the future and herald change for a better tomorrow.
BuildTeam has been building businesses on Steem since early 2017 and has focussed entirely on the Steem Blockchain, the fact that we chose Steem is a testament to the cutting-edge properties of Graphene, the underlying technology of the Steem blockchain, allowing for fast and fee-less transactions with a bootstrapped community for an immediate userbase.
In this post, we provide a recap of the services we have made possible on Steem and our social impact strategy going forward.
Our Portfolio
BuildTeam has successfully launched several projects on Steem, including:
@tokenbb Steem Powered Forums - The technology powering bulletin board communities such as Splinterlands, Drugwars and NextColony. TokenBB is an example of communities on Steem and furthermore is a top-ranked app on Stateofthedapps and Steemapps.
@dlease (dlease.io) - The first-of-its-kind Steem Power Delegation market, having facilitated nearly 26 Million SP in leases since inception, helping users rent SP for optimised curation, Steem account claiming, Resource Credits for apps and improving the overall Steem experience for users while providing an investor class platform with APR returns from 16% to the 20% range. Dlease also engaged in several external media campaigns in Q1, with over 3000 USD spent.
@ginabot Discord Blockchain event notifier used by over 8000 users, BuildTeam has kept this service running even though it is not monetised and plan to release GINA 2.0 with a react frontend and more integrations and notification customisation.
@steemvoter curation automation and guilds app, create guilds to support your communities and automate your voting for your favourite author, ensuring you vote on time to maximise curation rewards. Https://beta.steemvoter.com is currently free, Steemvoter classic is still running but is closed to new signups.
@quicksteem (quicksteem.com) - Steem account creation with altcoins app.
@bitsports (bitsports.io) sports forum using TokenBB technology.
@minnowbooster (minnowbooster.net)- Post promotion app, Steem Monsters card pack sales and auto trading bot.
NextColony Automation Bot - Reduces clicking fatigue and frustration of manual play.
shop.buildteam.io - Pay with Steem or SBD for Steem and Steem-based projects' merchandise.
Techinvestor.io - Crypto news content aggregator with auto Tweet, pulls RSS feed data from major crypto news sites with priority to given @steemitblog and @buildteam updates.
Corporate Social Strategy
Steem is a social network and it is important to cultivate the spirit of 'Ubuntu'.
Ubuntu - "humanity towards others", but is often used in a more philosophical sense to mean "the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity".
For Steem to be great, each project and each person needs to do their part, to reduce impact and ensure a sustainable future for all of Steem.
Private Api Nodes
BuildTeam has never impacted on the public api network of the Steem ecosystem, for nearly two years we have operated two of our own private nodes and when altcoins and Steem were thriving, we even made available two 512GB full account history nodes.
Most, if not all of our competitors were using the free Steemit api and saturating the load on public infrastructure, even though their projects were several times more profitable than ours. BuildTeam has been through historical spend periods of as much as 3000 USD per month to maintain node infrastructure.
Going forward we have some of the best talent in node operation and maintenance and have reduced our node footprint to efficient MIRA nodes to reduce our Steem to fiat spend and continue to have an eco-friendly infrastructure as far as api nodes are concerned.
Supporting Translators in Emerging Countries
Part of our strategy is to empower those who need support the most, we have partnered with several translators from regions such as Venezuela and are struggling to support their families, writing for BuildTeam and being included in the BuildTeam payroll and stake distribution has made a huge impact in supplementing sustainable living under extremely oppressed conditions.
Translations also provide for a wider reach and SEO benefits for all Steem based Ui's displaying our content.
20% to 50% Post Burn Strategy
You may have noticed our posts which have a disclaimer at the end, mentioning it is a Steemvoter payment post. Please do not confuse this with bidbot activity. We operate the Steemvoter.com classic service, which is the predecessor to https://beta.steemvoter.com, this is where the self-vote comes from, when signing up to the service, since we do not charge any mandatory subscriptions, the user authorises us to use one vote per day to promote any of the BuildTeam accounts, the user can, however, pay a 3SBD per month for additional rules and so that we do not use their vote daily, those not registered for the premium service thereby choose to pay with an upvote and it is their right to do the same with their sake.
What BuildTeam decided to experiment with, is to set our daily payment posts to have 20% beneficiary going to the @null burn account, which we hope will not attract downvotes, but we don't expect it will attract upvotes either. We will adjust with community feedback.
After consulting with Dan, we agree that organically voted posts should be most favoured, and only promoted posts of extraordinary or "high of effort" content, combined with a 50% burn, have a chance of being supported with further upvotes, provided the content is suitable. Note other curators may have different criteria in evaluating promoted posts.
All posts will have a disclaimer in the footer indicating the burn percentage, we may also choose to donate part of it to the @steem.dao by setting it as joint beneficiary with @null.
As a result of increased community shift in consumer spending away from bidbots, we propose legitimate use of bots such as @minnowbooster to be used in conjunction with a 20% to 50% beneficiary burn to @null, we think this is the safest option to continue to use the @minnowbooster bot to avoid downvotes, assuming your content is good and original content.
By supporting the @minnowbooster post promotion service and our daily payment posts, you are ensuring that BuildTeam is able to maintain all of the valuable services mentioned above, the reduced Steem price is affecting all projects and businesses, currently we are operating extremely lean and can only continue to operate our own nodes and provide our services if we have the support of the community while we wait for and continue to build towards a better, more sustainable market price of Steem.
Challenge to Steemit Inc,
We acknowledge the great work Steemit Inc, has put into our blockchain with respect to improved communication, development reports and actual development in rolling out hard forks with newly developed features such as MIRA, the EIP, SPS and soon-to-come SMT's and communities.
The current year's performance hasn't always been the standard however, last year, for example, the communication was non-existant and certain promises of live appearances never happened. Very little development took place, while the programmatic selling of 800 000 Steem per month has persisted for as long as memory serves.
Steemit has tightened its belt considerably and has reduced its AWS node cost from 200 000 USD per month to around 20% of that at current cost savings since the development of MIRA, in addition to reducing rental costs and other frivolous spend. Steemit has also begun generating ad revenue of cira 90 000 USD per month; in addition to allegedly reducing their staff compliment further from the 15 staff remaining post job shedding to a further reduced complement of 7 staff, while the programmatic selling remains in place.
While the community appreciates the commitment of the Steemit team, and the talents of great individuals such as Justin, Vanderberg and Roadscape; the monthly systematic selling has not changed, even in the face of the above cost efficiencies and newfound advertising income.
To put it into perspective, 800K Steem per month amounts to 1.6 Million USD per annum, in addition to a further 1 Million USD per annum in projected ad revenue based on 90K USD per month. This means that Steemit Inc, is extracting 2.6 Million USD worth of value from our blockchain every year, when divided by a 7 staff compliment that means a 370K Annual salary for each at current prices for 17 US cents per Steem and double that when Steem was above 30 cents. Likely not all are receiving this amount and some goes back to shareholders, potentially even Ned. Note: rental and petties have are negligible in comparison and have not been factored in the estimate.
The overarching narrative of #newsteem is that there is a lower impact on Steem emissions going forward through reduced reward extraction and reduced impact on the trending page with frivolous content, users and businesses are going to be sacrificing and reducing in their respective capacity, even though they are the ones benefitting the least from the chain and many are just on the borderline of sustainability.
We don't believe Steemit Inc, should be exempt from doing their bit in reducing the overall emissions impact on market price and challenge Steemit Inc to equally burn at least 20% additional Steem when programmatically selling, this means an extra 160 000 Steem burned every month which will drastically impact on market sentiment for the better, #BURNCHALLENGE!
Programatically selling large amounts of STEEM every month, from a ninja-mined stake, derived from providing very conservative value and underperforming over the years is not any different to extracting rewards through bidbots and should be treated with the same prejudice.
We, therefore, #BURNCHALLENGE Steemit Inc, to embrace #NEWSTEEM and join in on the burn of at least 20% additional STEEM over and above their monthly selling. (This will likely be equal to the 2.25% per annum they are earning on their 50 Mil Plus stake anyway).
Sincerely,
BuildTeam
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( Want an easier way? Use our SteemConnect proxy link! )
Disclaimer: This is a @steemvoter subscription payment post. Thank you to Steemvoter customers for allowing us to use your Steem accounts to upvote this post by virtue of your free subscription to the Steemvoter.com curation automation service. @steemvoter is proudly a @buildteam subsidiary and sister project to @dlease, @tokenbb, @ginabot, @steemsports and @minnowbooster.
BURNPOST: This is a 50% Steem burnpost by setting @null as beneficiary.
Wow I would be very happy if I were one of those 7 employees of Steemit Inc
Appreciate all your efforts, and burning is a good idea! I started to add @steem.dao as beneficiary... It isn't much, but I may adjust the percentage upwards. Giving back at times like this is more beneficial long term imo.
Thank
Thanks to your suggestion we have started doing that on some of our posts as well.
Thanks for reminding me of the whole #newsteem thing. Due to this I have stopped selling my vote via your service. I feel it is time to move on from vote selling. Best of luck!
Great to hear, I hope many follow in your footsteps.
With 50% curation and all these free downvotes looming, why not just curate honestly to add value to the platform and have a bit of fun while you're at it?
Same.
Just about to hit 100% VP & DVP so better go find some good and bad content! =)
Also, in the same vain, I have pulled my delegations through MB too, and I was plesantly surprised to see my 0.035 vote go to 0.044!
Steemit,Inc is pretty quiet any time the issue of stopping or slowing the programatic selling comes up. I have to wonder if the ad revenue is not nearly that high on a monthly basis but was more of a one-off event. Either way, it sure would be nice to get them to stop the selling. We can't get any price momentum because they are sitting on the ask all the time and we can't get any new buyers because there is no price momentum, ever. It's a chicken and the egg sort of thing.
What is good for the goose is also good for the gander. I think @Steemit Inc should also show some commitments by embracing this noble Steem-burning challenge. Cheers!
If you see my latest post you will indeed see that they have slowed down:
https://steemit.com/steem/@thecryptodrive/steem-burnpost-initiative-in-solidarity-with-steemit-s-reduction-in-stake-selling
Thanks for sharing this valuable link. Cheers!
I've seen you talk at length with Smooth about vote selling and I echo his views. Essentially, vote selling is just incompatible with honest curation and such services completely undermine the proof of brain process of our ecosystem.
If vote selling pays better returns than honest curation, why would you expect people to curate honestly? In turn, if there are very few honest curators, what is the incentive to produce good content? These services take 100% of the voting rewards and splits it between the vote seller, service provider, and vote buyer in a way that's completely content agnostic, similar to self voting or circle jerking. And unlike the latter two, these services have a tendency to undermine real curation even more by interfering with content sorting to a greater extent.
I did not understand the part about burning 20-50% of author rewards (setting beneficiaries to @null). If I'm understanding you correctly, you wish to have a farm post a day to fund your other services, among them a vote selling network that greatly harms our ecosystem for the reasons mentioned above? And using posting keys from inactive Steemvoter accounts? Even if you burn 10-25% of total rewards on these farm posts (as only the author part is burned), it still feels that you're doing this place quite a disservice. Voting rewards come from a pool which are consensus determined allocation of rewards that would best add value to the system, not one's private stake based returns, nor should it be used for payment directly. Now that NewSteem is here I would anticipate considerable resistance to this scheme over the long term.
Like Smooth did in your previous dialogue, I would also advise that you redirect your considerable business acumen to projects that would benefit the ecosystem. Perhaps a more robust curation initiative?
I understand that vote selling is currently likely by far the most lucrative business initiative, but if it remains so, it comes at the cost of virtually ensuring that we'd never correctly function as an honest content discovery and rewards proof of brain system, and would likely lead to our demise.
Interesting. I put some accounts on auto-vote whom I visit once in a while to see what they are posting but want them to get my vote in case, I forget or am busy.
I don't know if I understand that correctly. But is what you are saying that I support an abusive principle with putting some authors on auto-vote?
Do you have any recommendations where I can go to use auto-vote and where they charge me a fee for that? I would be wiling to pay some amount of SBD for this service. Or do you recommend to delete all auto-votes and from now on curate only manually?
No you're not taking part in abusive behavior if you're just automatically voting for people who you've consider to have built a reputation for decent quality content over time and trust their upcoming posts.
Abusive behavior generally comes from vote selling (someone pays you $10 to get roughly a $10 vote), vote swapping (eg you vote my posts $10, I vote your posts $10) and post farming etc.
Good. Thank you very much. Sometimes things here get so overly complicated that I start to see UFOs where there are none.
I am not always in favor of every post but I do compensate that with previous content and my overall impression of the person I have my auto-vote on. None of them acts in a way I'd have to become alert.
Vote selling and swapping is so far clear. And I heard a lot about the multiple accounts abuse and stuff. But what is post farming? Is it that someone sets up a blog and then only fills it with the same contents on a regular basis and gives himself upvotes/buys votes/sells votes = harvesting artificially and worthless stuff?
Yes.
Basically these practices all share something in common: they're content indifferent voting behavior.
When you vote on your own post farms, or swap votes, or sell votes, you don't care about the content itself. If the content isn't the thing influencing your decision, and this becomes widespread over the entire platform, than we have a worthless platform.
That's basically what happened for the last 2 years but the new economic incentives gives us tools to fight it, such as free downvotes.
Thanks again. ... I don't vote for myself. Neither my posts nor my comments. It's a principle I follow. I never downvote anyone of whom I in general have a possibility to approach in person first.
Maybe if people would have behaved in this way we wouldn't have the problems we are facing (but who knows the hidden benefits of that whole thing). But I find it nevertheless an interesting experience and I think people learn a lot here in terms of the issues entering an unregulated space. They face the great issues of society which is reflected in democratic history. We experience here what the settlers of unknown territory once went through who grew to communities and nations. Maybe those mistakes were needed in order to realize what we blame others for is not that easy.
By the way: Actually, the reward pool: Does anyone know it's size and when it'll be near emptiness? If you find that a silly question: I rarely hear it asked ... :)
The reward pool doesn't empty
It comes from inflation, the currency increases at a certain rate, around 8%pa right now, but goes down over time.
About 65% of that goes into the reward pool split 50/50 between author and curators.
Kind of difficult to believe that Steemit,Inc would comply with such a request.
But perhaps the community can lead the way and push Steem forward even without Steemit’s assistance?...
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Thanks
Certainly an interesting concept and challenge to consider! Keep up the great work and hopefully things will continue in a path forward.
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That is it
Let's see if this ever happens, my guess is not in a million years... But I would love to be proven wrong.
Let it happen :)
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wow
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Thanks for the update we appreciate all the hard work that your team has put into the steem blockchain...keep it up🏆
Umarım güzel şeyler olur 😊
This post has been included in the latest edition of The Steem News - a compilation of the key news stories on the Steem blockchain.
Nice Team