Exploring alternate ways to contribute to the community...

in #cryptocurrency6 years ago

Steemit has, weirdly, close parallels to another project which has had my participation for some time now. Instead of the social media and crypto payment for content concept, we went with the wikipedia model. The reason for mentioning it is that instead of adding much content to the wiki, my input ended up in participation in programming bounty projects (support of Open Source being the main mandate of the project) and as the HR Admin.

In the same way my heart tells me not to depend on more and more life stories to raise my reputation in this fish tank. You will no doubt have to read through more of that; however it need not be the main reason for my advancement in this system. Being a semi-retired programmer it seems natural that some software contribution be considered.

After an incident the husband of a friend of mine had with a greedy whale on Steemit, an idea began to form in the back of my mind where a difference could perhaps be made through the use of software.

A Witness mentioned in one of their posts that only about 4% of Steemit users participate in the Witness voting. With such pathetic turn out there seems a natural need to bring awareness not only of the fact that voting can help shape the direction of Steemit, but to also present some ideas for users' feedback of changes to the system. My thought is that this could be done via a bot. To create a sort of Steemit Political Party. Ideas, or platforms, could be formed among groups of users who folllow the bot and then lobbying of Witnesses to bring such changes into reality through their voting system. Those that are for the ideas presented would have our user base encouraged to support them and those that do not support the ideas... well you get the gest of it.

With only 4% participation any block of voters would have a lot of say.

So it's off to study up on bots. Feel free to steal the idea. The more decentralized Steemit's political system the better.

Any feedback on the idea is most welcome. My home server should be able to handle it with its eyes closed.

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I want in on devcoin but I don't want to download the whole blockchain to my home pc lol. What are my options? lololol

There is no freewallet.com for DVC to my knowledge. Will ask the Dev Admin who is presently seeking out exchanges if they would mind approaching freewallets.com. Will keep you informed.

Good luck with your project! I know bupkis about programming, but I appreciate the people who are trying to improve nthe blockchain with it! One witness just recently released a site that ranks people's upvote habits - how many different users they upvote, do they upvote themselves, and so on. This way, people can see who is being selfish and who is being generous and support accordingly. I thought that was a great idea! It's called Steem Ocean. The maker, if I can remember his name off the top of my head right, is @ura-soul.

That is a worthwhile project in regards to the patterns it is showing. My feeling is that it is better to look for software solution rather than shame/punish someone who is simply taking advantage of the system they are given.

For example there could be a fork which did not allow self voting. Problem solved, unless it has some function not aware to me?

I think the upcoming hard fork IS eliminating self vote rewards. I think.

Great to hear that the code is actively evolving. There seems to have been a lot of forks. Not sure what changes have taken place along the way.

Just checked out Steem Ocean. Thanks for sharing @phoenixwren!

Thought this link was relevant to the discussion.

... and this one.

Thank you for sharing the post. I appreciate it.

I didn't know that only 4% of the Steemit users voted for witnesses. Frankly, I have no clue what witnesses do and I wasn't interested in voting either.

Now, I'm curious and I'm in for building a block to work for better policies on Steemit. I'm looking forward for your posts and actions about this issue. Please, let me know if I can do something for it. My next step will be to google what Steemit witnesses do though :)

I definitely think this is a great idea. You know how technically challenged I am..lol..so any tools created to make better of use of the steemit platform should be rewarded in similar or superior ways than someone plagiarizing a meme and making $100.

I think a lobbying bot would definitely improve the environment of Steemit and add some accountability to those who wield the power(Witnesses) I nominate @novacadian as witness President based on Rob's Rules of Parliamentary Procedure.. : ) With your programming skills and technology savvy, have you considered setting up a witness?

Thanks for your vote of confidence, Papa. :)

steemd is installed on my home server and the blockchain has been downloaded. In the process of syncing the blockchain at the moment. Having a few technically difficulties. Please remain calm and keep your seats in an upright position. ;)

To actually apply as a Witness will take more than having the needed software readied. It looks like redundancy is needed. If your server should go offline for some hardware reason you really should have another to plug in or be renting a server on the net that has such redundancy. The cheapo server of mine of the net always takes a great deal of whining to get a port opened up. You get what you pay for. There is only the one server at home at the moment.

Missing blocks can cause one to loose their position in the Witness Hierarchy.

Some days it seems that the full depth of Steemit has only been scratched by me. For example suggesting a software "no upvoting yourself" check only to find that it has Witness approval for the next fork. So a deeper understanding of this wonderful system is in order before considering to offer my services; for the mere fact the present Witnesses probably know a lot more about what is going on here than me. ;)

Looks like there is much more to it than I realize. I definitely think I barely comprehend the opportunities within Steemit, much less blockchain technology as a whole. I was reading a post from another gentleman who has a witness setup and he was running into the redundancy problem you mentioned. One thing that struck me about his post was the willingness of other witnesses and the witness community to rally around him to help him get things straightened out.

Well as you are researching and studying bots....I have no problem throwing you 100 DVC for a flawless crypto trading bot if you guarantee it will always win trades!

Well as you are researching and studying bots....I have no problem throwing you 100 DVC for a flawless crypto trading bot if you guarantee it will always win trades!

On it! lol!

I think this is an excellent idea @novacadian! There are times when I wonder why do witnesses exist at all! Your idea can help a lot steemit, I hope this gets more traction and attract more people to participate. The sad state of things in steemit thanks to whales, spammers and whatnot is a disgrace! Thanks for sharing Nova!

That would be my first proposal for the party's delegates to vote on.... caps on the percentage of the reward pool that could be awarded to any one account per day.

From reading some Witness posts it appears they do vote on forks of the code. So if you had Witness agreement and developers to make it happen it should be doable.

Keep in mind that each day there is slightly less steem produced than the day before. In about 20 years there would be 95% less steem produced than today.

Couple that with the huge potential growth in the userbase. With present design there will be less rewards to reward a much greater amount of content. Caps seem one easy solution for scalability of the userbase.

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