A conversation with the creator of School of Minnows - What it is and why you need to sign up

I've just had a very interesting conversation with @lanmower over on the #steempunks Dischord channel regarding School of Minnows. I had received an invitation to join a while ago and I somehow only managed to set up my mom's account @grethaventer, with the service.
This morning I was doing some admin on her account, trying to set it up so she can still earn even though she's not able to post articles regularly. While looking at steemd it seemed that strange things had been happening with upvotes and I jumped on Dischord to find out what's going on.

Lanmower was very helpful and convinced me to sign up both myself and @moderndragon.

In short, School of Minnows is a service that uses your idle voting power to upvote members and it builds a credit for you on the upvote pool. So when you get back from your holiday or after being away for a while, you get your saved up voting power back as upvotes from school of minnows when you post. They only ever use your vote when your voting power is at 100%, so you don't lose your voting strength and they don't take you down to dust votes like a voting bot would.

If you want to skip to the signup link, scroll to the bottom :)

What follows is our conversation. Take some time to read though, there is a lot of very useful information here. After sorting out the strange upvote activity ( it had been a bug that had been fixed) he took some time to explain the system in more detail to me.
-My Dischord name is Moderndragon -

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• ModernDragon : " Just to make sure I understand it correctly, if someone signs up, their voting power is used ( only at 100%) to upvote other posts in the minnowschool network. But only if the user posts do they get a payout?
  So it's not the same as being part of a voting bot?"

• lanmower :"Yeah its totally different than voting bots and trails
  Its about remembering your contribution and then giving you the 'best possible effort' to refund that when you come back, so if you just make a bunch of posts if the payments are behind, you clear the credit.
  I call it proof-of-altruism, the system works 24/7 to make sure you're not altruistic, that you're safely capitalistic if at all possible.
  At the moment we should be able to clear 50c a post.
  This way you can earn your idle voting power back, so if you take a holiday you come back and get refunded and there's no need to delegate to a voting service for cash refunds. It can all happen organically by supporting writers directly, that's why we're treating the group as user curation.
  Please, if you know of a way to make it more fair or more profitable for members let me know, we're currently on 80 members, when we're on 800 it will be more profitable
  30c for every posting member is not bad in a week and a half (plus their refunds)
  Remember too, every vote you don't pay for is real profit so that 30c profit is the same as getting a 10$ vote from a service in profit."

• ModernDragon : "If your vote doesn't ever load to 100%, do you still get support from minnowschool?"

• lanmower : "Yes. You'll get refunded for any manual votes, and your profit will grow with the rest of the posters, so everyone is 30c in profit, if you didn't vote at all you'll get voted till you show 30c profit too
  It will always look for the post from the person with the most altruism who you haven't voted for yet, and select further down the line if you've voted that post already, so everybody gets votes, and they get distributed evenly per user not per post, post more you still get the same votes.
  We introduced the math because we had two members posting hourly, which is fine in my books but they should get the same group votes as those posting daily or less.
  We only track English posts since we can't read the other languages."
  Please, don't let idle voting power go to waste, allow it to mean something for you and tell your friends.
  I really really believe in this system and I will do anything I can to portray its honesty to you its important to me that people know how it works."

I then went on to ask him about helping me set up my and moderndragon's accounts. The workaround for signing up multiple accounts from the same browser is to open the link in an incognito tab.
I successfully added both accounts and then he continued and then I asked about getting other people to sign up:

• ModernDragon :"Thank you so much for taking the time to explain it to me. Is this an SA only group?"

• lanmower :
  "Not at all, but we're trying to get every last SA person on hahaha, we're maybe 20-25% SA because that way people will comment more on other peoples posts."

• ModernDragon :
  "So would you want people to share the signup link around? or rather invite people personally?"

• lanmower : "Please share, we have auto notifications for cheetah and steemcleaners and I keep an eye to catch the bad fish
  Its not a secret any more. I've also open sourced the voting code and shared it for disclosure"

• ModernDragon : "cool beans. I'll try to add it to the end of my posts. Is that ok?"

• lanmower :
  "Cool. If you use steempunks schoolofminnows or freedomfirst as a first tag, you'll appear on the #freedom-first channel on the discord, I'll vote you :)"

• ModernDragon :
  "Great! any final shout outs and links?"

• lanmower:
  "yes totally @thetravelingsa, who's been the strongest and friendliest partner I could wish for in this effort.
  it seems he catches every conversation I miss on discord."

• ModernDragon:
  "Sweet man. Thanks so much for your time. It's been great chatting. I will put all this together and lets see if we can get more people following :)"

• lanmower:
  "awesome, you are member 95."

So folks, I hope that cleared up some questions you might have about @schoolofminnows. If you'd like to join school of minnows, click here
or click here to read about it.

Hope you have a great day!

Find me on Sola https://sola.ai/simplylizelle

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Edit: From @lanmower
Hi there, you receive all the refunds by being preferentially voted by idle members as part of the fair use policy, beyond refunding your votes it spreads the rest of the idle votes evenly among the group.

So if you vote a group member 5c, that is remembered and you get voted back on your posts till its recovered so that you're not spending more than you're getting back, maintaining a safely capitalistic environment on a 'best effort' basis with group dynamics.

Hope that clarifies it, please please don't expect a huge vote from the @schoolofminnows user when you've made some votes, your refunds come back to you as votes from idle members, so it happens across a few posts until it has neutralized your altruism and you are fully capitalistic again.

I actively encourage my friends to stay idle so that the group votes, since it is the fastest way I know of to grow on STEEM without paying voting services or lobbying for a whales support.

I call the algo 'proof of altruism' .

This means you get supported by the very people that you support, which is very nice.

Thank you kindly for sharing the news! :)