TimCliff Witness Update 2017-01-08

Hello Everyone!

Here is what I've been up to since my last witness post:

• A reminder to only use 4 tags (instead of 5) when creating posts, due to a glitch in the blockchain code that decreases the visibility of posts when 5 tags are used. The details can be found here.
• It was a very interesting week with @the.masses project! Someone (or multiple people?) went on a flagging spree, and started flagging several users posts. It got to the point that multiple users were asking me to shut down the project. @anyx stepped in, and updated one of his auto-vote bots to automatically switch any downvotes/flags that the account makes into upvotes. A HUGE thank you to @anyx for doing this!!! Now people cannot use the account to flag :) @the.masses also had it's highest paying post to date, with a $9.99 total payout. It was a parody / humor post on how people were draining the reward pool.
• I created the latest edition of the Reports from the Witnesses series, with a summary of what all the witnesses have been up to. Note - I have changed the format of the report. I am no longer adding my own summary, and just encouraging readers to view the individual reports from each witness.
• I created a "TIL" post, letting people know that you can streach the comment text box as you type replies. It seems that a lot of people did not know you could do this (myself included), so it was a helpful tutorial!
• I created a post to encourage people to vote for STEEM to be added to Coinbase, based on this post from @joseph. I'm not sure if they are still accepting submissions, but it looks like the poll is still open. If you haven't voted yet - click here to vote for STEEM!
• Since pre-hardfork-16 Steem Power was being massively inflated, the price of a MVEST is a much better indicator of how Steem Power investments have done over time than the price of STEEM. I posted an updated historical price analysis on Steem Power MVEST to USD from 6/19/2016 through 1/1/2017.
• I posted the latest Steemit.com GitHub Report showing what the Steemit development team has been up to in GitHub.
• I continue to be involved with a lot of the GitHub discussions about feature additions and glitch reports.

Forward Looking Plans:

• Continue my involvement with existing projects.
• I am starting to look into a few GitHub issues that I plan to work on pull requests for. I will post more details as make the changes.
• @bitcoiner and I will be reviewing the images for the "Welcome to Steemit" page banner with Steemit. Hopefully (with Steemit's approval), we will be working to update the page with one of the images. This will take some time though. Expect an update within the next few months. The winners of the bounty will be paid once we decide on the images.

Use of Witness Funds: (No Change)

• So far I am continuing to run my witness servers at a loss - which is totally fine by me. I believe it is important for witnesses to be doing what they do for the community, and not to make money. I have been able to cover the costs of my servers using author rewards from my blog posts though - which is really great!
• If the amount I make from my witness position exceeds the costs of running my servers, I plan to use a majority of my witness funds to create bounties that incentivize more Steemit.com front-end UI development.

Summary of current witness parameters:

• Price Discount: My discount remains unchanged, at 2%. The SBD peg has held very close to $1.00, although it has recently started to drop below $1.00 periodically. Currently it is at $0.98. I plan to keep a close eye on this. The debt level is still high too, at 3.4%. I feel that we need to be encouraging more people to convert SBD->STEEM right now to reduce the debt. I may consider raising my discount to 3% if these trends continue.
• Registration Fee: My registration fee remains unchanged, at 40 STEEM. This is approximately $6.05 worth of SP (at the current market price). This is still slightly on the high side (IMO), although it does provide an extra incentive for new users to sign up. My current policy is to keep the amount between $5 and $10 USD worth of STEEM, aiming to be closer to $5 without going below.
• SBD Interest Rate: My SBD interest rate remains unchanged, at 4%. My current policy is to only update SBD interest once a month (on the first of the month) as summarized in this post, but this is subject to change.

I welcome feedback on any of my projects or things that I can be doing better as a witness :-)

If you think I am doing a great job, I would greatly appreciate your witness vote!

Thanks everyone for reading my witness report!

Remember to vote for witnesses here:
https://steemit.com/~witnesses
If you aren't sure who to vote for, check out this Witness Voting Guide!