@personz love your post here and am now one of your top upvotes on it because this is better than I would have ever imagined! Finding a new witness guide is difficult because there are so many older guides out there that are already good most new witnesses are not motivated to make one. The only new guide I could find is by @someguy123 at https://steemit.com/steem/@someguy123/your-guide-to-setting-up-a-witness-server-steem-in-a-box-hf19. With your guide I now have another link in the course showing how to actually set this up alongside of all the old guides!
While I know you intended this as criticism, I take it as a huge compliment because you took a valuable action on behalf of the community based on what you saw me doing. Some of the best online courses I have made were motivated by seeing another instructor do a terrible job teaching a course I bought and knowing I could do better. Over time my original dislike for the instructor changed into love and respect him because the fact was he motivated me to be better. Without his terrible courses, I would not likely have thought I had what it took to make a great online course.
I voted for you as a witness because I like your desire to serve the community and willingness to speak up when you think things should be different. Making posts like the one you made is difficult for me now because I am so concerned about not offending anyone and I applaud you for making it!
As I am reading @someguy123's guide again tonight, I will now also be reading yours again to help me make sure I understand what I am doing before I start setting my witness up!
Thank you for writing this and helping me get started as a witness!
I was taking this action anyway, you just prompted me to put it together earlier.
I appreciate your witness vote, but you should really not be charging for this information. I will flag any further post on your witness course and encourage everyone else to do the same. Free information is just that - FREE. You are making plenty of steem with your posts, no need to string along hopefuls with your promises.
Missing the point a bit here. I highly suggest you stop your witness course and join the rest of us backup witnesses in learning and doing without closed-doors "courses".
You are right the information is free and what I charge for is early access to videos of my explaining why this information is worth taking action on today plus showing how to get started. You have made an awesome free post here which you would be well within your rights to charge for if you filmed a one to two hour video class featuring screen capture tutorials of how to actually use the information you posted here because that would be even more valuable than the post here and be worth paying for. I would probably buy it so I could watch the tutorials even though everything you posted here is free. I trust your judgement on which posts you flag and I was surprised to see someone made a post about it on Steemit because my intended audience for the course was YouTube and Facebook based on my assumption that few on Steemit who already knew about witnesses would be interested buying the course!
@jerrybanfield, while I would never begrudge someone's right to make a buck, I think the way you are doing it isn't great. If I were you, instead of asking people to pay to see some videos which are just an adaptation of other people's hard work, wouldn't you be better to ask people who found your work helpful to give you a witness vote? Even putting a SBD address for people to donate some STEEM to you wouldn't be out of the question. However, trying to milk an open community based on the free sharing of knowledge, for cash, isn't really in the spirit of STEEM. However, each to their own. You do you.