Witness Application for the Minnow Support Project

This is my formal application for a witness vote from the Minnow Support Project. Please check out this MSP announcement.

With this post I set out to answer the following questions highlighted in the MSP announcement above:

• What are you pledging to do to support the Steemit Community?
• What are you pledging to do to support the Minnow Community?
• What are you pledging to do to support the Minnow Support Project?

Importance of communities and networking

When I began my STEEM journey and started my blog I quickly realised the importance of communities, how they could play a crucial role for networking and how they could open for new ways to connect with like-minded Steemians.

I also understood the importance of comments, and how excellent comments can work wonders for your account. It is definitely the Nr 1 way to promote yourself. It is free, you can target your audience and you might even get paid for it. Sounds like an “advertising” scheme too good to be true.

It was with this mindset I connected with @aggroed and I joined the Minnowsupportproject on June 10th 2017, about a week after it was founded.

Comment Challenge

It was also in the summer of 2017 when I released my comment challenge, a challenge targeted to newcomers/minnows in an attempt to promote interaction and to highlight the importance of great comments. It is a challenge where the contestants are presented with a different post each round and their task is to produce a godlike comment.

I'm currently up to edition Nr. 43, with a new one being released bi-weekly. The prizes have comprised of both cash payouts and SP delegations. In total, I have paid out 520 SBD in prize money and delegated 9500 SP, split over several one week periods. I have also received a total of 90 SBD in generous donations, included in the total prize money above.

Dustsweeper

@dustsweeper is a service to help protect dust payouts. You see, there is a payout threshold for posts and comments set to $0.02. So if your posts/comments are below that threshold, they will be worthless at payout.

A $0.02 value doesn‘t sound like much, but it can be extremely demotivating for someone new, who might struggle to get more than a handful number of votes, to see that 0.02 turn into 0.00.

As Steemit is by far the biggest frontend and with their standard to use two decimals, it would make more sense to reduce the payout threshold to 0.005. A profit of less than 0.005 would then be displayed as 0.00 and the payout would also be 0. Simple and without confusion.

Dustsweeper is the first project @davemccoy and I created together, and it has so far been a great success. The demand has been staggering and we seem to constantly be lacking SP to be able to handle all the dust.

We have up until now relied on the minnowbooster delegation market and generous donation. But we are working on a new model where users can freely delegate and automatically get a share of the profit.

MSP history

Since starting coding on STEEM I have produced a number of bots for the MSP community.

• Minnowsupport bot - As far as I know, this is the biggest community bot in terms of the number of users. It provides a free upvote for all registered users as long as the content is in line with the Minnowsupport project’s guidelines. The current user base is above 20K and actively moderated to minimize abuse.

• Pond Patrol - This bot is a pure Discord bot active in MSP’s Discord server. Its purpose is to keep channels clean of Steemit link spam. It keeps track and warns abusers, and notifies Mods in case of repeated violations. Settings can be modified directly in discord to allow/disallow links in specific channels and/or to give special access to specific roles/users.

• Blacklist Bot - This is the bot-brain behind the MSP Blacklist. A blacklist with currently over 8000 banned users. The bot allows easy administration of the blacklist, it can mute accounts, pull votes and updates a Google spreadsheet which is publicly available.

• MAM bot - This is a bot for the Make a Minnow initiative. Please see the link below for the latest contest. The bot will screen all nominated candidates and verify that all requirements are met. MAM Contest

• Dorabot - This was initially my personal helper, which is now ”lurking“ in the MSP/PALnet server. Not much of development has gone to maintain it but it still provides some useful features for the community.

Other Dev activities

Freezepeach

I’ve set up a simple bot for the Freezepeach movement used to counter unfair flags/downvotes. The bot is active in Freezepach’s Discord server and can be used to counter flags on individual posts/comments, or a user’s all posts/comments.

Steemmonsters

I’ve recently created a Discord bot for the Steemmonsters community. It can be used to check various stats for your Steemmonsters character. In addition, it provides a complementary upvote service for all players.

Witness Monitor Tool

After becoming a witness I started to work on various scripts to monitor and control my witness.

Witness-Mon - GitHub link

This bash based monitoring tool can be used to monitor a witness node, automate restarts and disable the witness in case of fatal errors.

My Current Delegations

In addition to my comment challenge delegations, I have 3.5K SP delegated to @dustsweeper, 700 SP delegated to a number of Minnowsupport initiatives (minnowsupport, msp-music, msp-shanehug, msp-mods & mrsquiggle) and 75 SP to help out @hitmeasap in his delegation quest.

Thank you for reading and I kindly ask you for your support!

Please be cool and spare a Witness Vote for @danielsaori

SteemConnect Link

Steemit Link