An interview with @quochuy via meet a whale..... episode29

Hello Steemians, it's another episode of my interview in which I get to ask some technical Steem questions and also bring you closer to your witnesses.For this episode's interview, I have the pleasure of bringing to you @quochuy, a steemian who has a great passion for the Steem blockchain, a steemian who works tirelessly at the witness level by supporting various communities, as well a reputable witness. This episode promises to be educating, and interesting . Be sure to sit tight and grab a cup of coffee while reading through this great interview.

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@jamesmovic - Who introduced you to the steemit platform, and what inspired your commitment?

@quochuy - I am a moderator and admin of some Facebook groups about vermicomposting (worm farming) and one of the other admins one day sent me a message saying he found a blogging system where you could earn money by blogging and curating content. I thought I would give it a try because my blog and Youtube channels are bringing me nothing with advertising. I initially started posting only about vermicomposting and started to make few cents per post, which is still better than one year of advertising on my Youtube channel and regular blogging website combined!

As I learned more about Steemit, I started to understand the ethic and values behind it and started to try to write more consistently but there is just so much tutorial and articles I can write about worm farming without repeating myself. Then I discovered that technical topics, especially development ones are more rewarded and my day job is working as a developer so I gave that a try. I then started to diversify my topics of writing to gardening, photography, music, programming and witnessing.

It’s when I discovered the concept of #ulog that I decided to write at least one post a day. The ULOG concepts allows anyone to be able to write good content on a daily basis because the main topic of a ULOG is you (hence the U in ULOG). Talk about you, about what makes you happy or sad, what makes you think or laugh, what happened in your life today etc…

@jamesmovic - What would you consider your greatest challenge ever since you joined steemit?

@quochuy - Tough one, I don’t usually remember challenges cuz I just see them as part of a learning process, I usually try to solve them and forget about them. Hmm, maybe:

finding something decent to write about everyday
producing content in multiple topics while people might not be interested in all of those topics
getting other Steemians engage with you on your post

@Jamesmovic - If you have been able to conquer it, how did you go about it?

@quochuy - Finding something to write about everyday has been partially solved by the ULOG movement. But still, after a week or two it still can become difficult to find something original and you feel like your life is just a repetition of events. “Same shit, different day” as they say. This is where having multiple interests in life will help you most. Also try to see your life in more details, there is always something that you can talk about, something you might think is boring or routine but might interest other people who want to learn more about you.

As mentioned earlier, I write about multiple topics and my followers might have started to follow me just for one particular topic and would be annoyed to see too much of other topics. This is something I’m still working on but it’s hard to balance because there will be times where I will write more about something. For example, during the HF20 issues, I wrote more about witnessing and I noticed some people who were more about gardening starting to unfollow me…

Nowadays, it’s all about bot wether it’s the vote selling bots, bid bots or community bots. I’m part of several communities and some of them have community bots that help their members get some reward. It’s great, as it will help newbies get some motivation and write more. But as a content creator, upvote and rewards are not enough, I want to know if people are interested in what I write and receiving some comments on a post is more rewarding than the reward payout itself. Otherwise, why would I spend hours formatting my articles, editing my images and videos for? I can easily write low quality original posts with crappy images and no formatting at all and receive the same reward. But no, my goal is to write something that people would be interested in. A way to get people to engage with you is for you to engage with them too. It’s not always easy for me because I’m also a witness and a developer and I’m often in my code and at the end of the day (actually at the end of the night) totally out of energy to go and browse for content to engage with.

@jamesmovic - How many quality posts would you advice newbies to make daily?

@quochuy - Newbies should focus more on curating and engaging (commenting), especially with HF20 where the initial RC might be too low for them to write a lot of post. By commenting on other author’s posts regularly, they will start building some relationship with other Steemians, get quality followers and hopefully good upvotes on their comments. As they build up their reputation and power, they will increase their RC and be able to start posting more posts.

I think a newbie can start with writing one or two posts a week and focus the rest of the week to go and read other’s people content. I really mean, read the content, not just click and comment blindly. Read about topics you like, read about articles related to how Steem works etc…

In the long run, you will want to write at least one quality post per day and I think a max of 3 or 4 per day. I’ve never seen anyone able to write more than that number of quality content every day, they would be spammers usually.

@jamesmovic - What communities do you support, and why?

@quochuy - Team Australia, because I live in Australia and the members are awesome
Team Vietnam, because I’m Vietnamese and I have founded this sub community of the Vietnamese community on Steemit and I’ve created a community bot to support the members
The French community because I’m a french citizen
Minnow Support Project because it was the very first project at large scale that helps all the little newbie to grow and learn about Steem
Dynamic Steemians and Helpie because they are doing amazing work to help the Steemians grow on the platform
ULOG because it’s an awesome idea that helps the newbies to find ideas for blogging
Earth Tribe, The Global Homesteading Collective and Homesteaders Online because I’m into gardening, worm farming and environmental stuffs
SmartVote, because this is a new service/community I’m co-founding

@jamesmovic - What inspired you to become a Witness?

@quochuy - When I was introduced to Steemit.com, I didn’t blog straightaway, I spent several days reading posts and videos about it to understand about it. Before I even wrote my first post, I already knew the importance of voting for witnesses. Later on, I realised I had all the skills to be able to setup and maintain a witness server and on top of that it would help me understand more about how the Steem blockchain works internally. Helping by providing a stable and fast network is one thing a witness brings to the platform but at my rank when starting, my contribution would be totally negligible.

@jamesmovic - Can you tell us your experiences as a Witness?

@quochuy - It can be hard work. Firstly, when you begin, you have to pay your server off your own pocket. You can get a server for as cheap as $26 USD per month but this would soon be not viable anymore because the blockchain is growing fast. In few months, the cheapest server for witnessing would be around $60-$80 USD per month I think. However, a new witness would not receive enough votes to pay out for the expenses. I’m currently ranked #116 I think and making only about 3 STEEMs per day, which is about 90 STEEMs per month equivalent to about $74 USD at today’s price. But my expenses includes 1 server for the witness node and 1 server for the seed node and occasionally a third server for witness node for testing and upgrading the blockchain.

On top of that, when you have events and issues like what happened during the HF20 update, you will spend many hours or days applying fixes, replaying the blockchain and debugging issues.

@jamesmovic - Why are steemians required to vote for their Witnesses, and can you give a reason why you think steemians should vote you as a witness?

@quochuy - Steemians are not really required to vote for witnesses as there is nothing that enforces this. However, it is highly recommended to you do so if you care for the future of the Steem blockchain.

Here are the reason why your vote is important to elect those of the witnesses who will make the Top 20:

Witnesses are this who will sign all your transactions (posts, comments, upvotes, transfers etc…). If you were to transfer a lot of STEEM, you would want to trust who is witnessing the operation.
Witnesses are providing fast servers to sign all those transactions happening on the blockchain.
Witnesses make sure updates to the blockchain are working properly and if not, then they will be capable of making proper decision as to how to handle issues.
Witnesses are also social and should be able to articulate their knowledge of the blockchain to non-technical user.
I have been working as a web developer and have experience working with servers since 1997. I’m also used to meet non-technical people and have to help them understand the technical aspect of projects I’ve been working on. I’m also a content creator and bring value to the Steem blockchain by also writing blog posts on various topics not just about IT. Despite having to juggle between day job, other personal projects and family life, I have still managed completed projects to help Stem:

• Steemed Phish - Steem Anti-phishing Chrome extension

• POCKET-JS Confirmer

• I developped the code for the contest bot: @photochainreward for the Photochain community

• I’m co-founder for @smartvote and developed it’s upvote system

• I’ve written a script to generate the weekly witness earning report

@jamesmovic - A lot of stemians have given up on steemit as a result of the low upvotes and recognition they get despite writing quality articles daily. What would you advice such steemians?

@quochuy - Quality is relative. What I think is quality for me might not be quality for others or maybe not yet. Maybe your audience is not on Steem yet, why not promote your Steem posts outside of Steem and bring in more users who will follow you? Not only you will get more followers and voters but you will also contribute in the success of Steem itself.

Engagement is king. Even a great author needs to engage with his/her audience and go out and participate to discussions other than his/her own. If people can’t find you, go find them.

I have faith in the Steem blockchain and I’m working on my blog for the long term. Forget about upvotes and payout and focus on quality content and quality engagement. I know it’s easy to say when I live in a country like Australia and have a decent salary but you don’t have to spend 12 hours a day on Steam, 30 minutes to 1 hour a day is more than enough to build something up. Do it on your spare time and start allocating more time when things are going better.

@jamesmovic - Most newbies don’t understand the the hf20 and the changes it has brought. Can you briefly summarize them?

@quochuy -. HF20 contains too many changes to talk about them all here I think. But the most important ones are:

The replacement of the bandwidth system for the resource credit (RC) system. Everything you do on the Steem blockchain now has a cost, because it costs something for that operation to be processed and stored on the witness servers. People were complaining that new accounts are crippled but that mainly impacting existing new users created not long before HF20. After HF20, new users account should be created along with a delegation of SP that will allow them to enjoy Steem. But the primary pros for the RC system is that it will put bars in the wheels of spammers. Less spammers draining the reward pool means more reward for genuine authors. Check my previous witness update. The RC system also makes it harder for new users to create more free accounts which further reduce spam. Only accounts with a lot of SP will be able to create free accounts, which makes sense as they will need to delegate SP for those newly created accounts.
The upvote window has been changed from 30 minutes to 15 minutes. The curation reward from upvotes at 0 minute after creation of the post will go back to the reward pool (instead of becoming author reward), at 7.5 minutes, 50% of the curation reward will be shared between authors and from 15 minutes onward 100% of the curation reward will be shared between the curator.

@jamesmovic - Based on the current low market value of steem, would you advice steemians to sell or hold it?

@quochuy - Tough one for me to answer. I’m not a trader nor an investor. Steem was my first and only crypto for a while. I’m not trying to make profit by playing with the market and I’m here for the long term so I hold everything and continuously power up. I will sell part of my SBD when the price will go up. If the price of Steem drops even more, then I will start buying more to power up.

@jamesmovic - In what way do you think Steem can be hospitable to a new investment?

@quochuy - I think we need Steemit.com to come out of beta soon or have a strong replacement for it, steempeak.com is a good candidate. Then we need to clean out the Trending and Hot sections and find ways to promote real quality content. We need more adoption from the public, the more people join and use Steem on a daily basis, the more it will make noise and attract investors. I think many of us have left one or more social media websites to join and focus all our energy on Steem but we forgot to go back there and promote Steem. SMTs will also help a lot.

@jamesmovic - Is their anything you would like to say without me asking?

@quochuy - Isn’t this interview already long enough? 🤣🤣🤣

We just need to start thinking about the money. Forget that Steem can earn you money, consider Steem was just another blogging or social platform where you would create content because you like doing so and want to contribute with quality articles that people want to read and build a network of people who you like to discuss with and who like to discuss with you. One day, when Steem is worth $100, your wallet will just suddenly explode 😂.

@jamesmovic - What other witness would you vouch for if you are given the opportunity?

@quochuy - I can’t vouch for one at the moment, still taking time to get to really know each of them, they all have their pros and cons, as we all do I guess. More recently @oracle-d got my attention as they are trying to do things to bring more investors into STEEM, I’m keeping an eye on them. @helpie is also one worth checking.

You can follow @timcliff's weekly Reports from the Witnesses post to know what witnesses are doing each week

> From @quochuy :

On Steem, Witnesses are playing the important role of providing a performant and safe network for all of us. You have the power to choose 30 trusty witnesses to package transactions and sign the blocks that will go in the Steem blockchain.Vote for me via SteemConnect to help me do more useful projects for the communities.

Thanks for reading. Till next time
**VOTE @yabapmatt @timcliff @pfunk @someguy123 @arcange @b0y2k @enginewitty @pjau @themarkymark @jatinhota @yuriks2000 @qurator @aggroed @good-karma @steemcommunity @neoxian @lukestokes.mhth @blockbrothers @adsactly-witness @timcliff @drakos @roelandp @reggaemuffin @felixxx @jackmiller @teamsteem @steemgigs as witness.