Understanding the Minnowbooster Whitelist process from a voter's perspective.
Minnowbooster recently started a whitelist for their vote-bot services, and it seems like there is no end to the people who want to be a part of it. That's not surprising: votes for whitelist users are more profitable and more readily available. Plus there's the added benefit of being able to participate in evaluating new users for the whitelist, and earn an affiliate commission for their future vote purchases. I was lucky enough to be one of the first wave of users on the whitelist, and I thought I'd make a post about how the process works from a voter's perspective. @minnowbooster already made an extensive post about how it works to be invited. I'm going to tell you about what we see from our end.
Blue votes are available to normal users, green only for the whitelist.
Once a user is invited, they get added to the voting page, which only whitelist members can see. From this page we evaluate the account and vote to accept or reject the user based on the quality of their posts. A user needs five yes votes to move from pending status to acceptable,and five no votes to move from pending status to rejectable.
Whitelist activity page.
In starts with invitations. Every user who is added to the whitelist starts with two invitiations. They're precious! Our job is to find excellent posters and invite them to the whitelist. If an invitation is successful we get two of them back. Because each user has so few, they're being spent carefully but quickly, and we usually don't have them to hand out to people who ask.
The voting page. Names blurred for privacy
We also have a comment box where we leave the reasoning for our vote for the Minnowbooster admins to look at when they do their final review. Once we've invited or voted on someone we can see the status of their application in the Whitelist Activity page. I left some of the usernames in this one because they're really obvious; most of the first invites were no-brainer yeses. (The comment field is just my comment, I don't get to see anyone else's.)
The voting page. Names blurred for privacy
We also have a comment box where we leave the reasoning for our vote for the Minnowbooster admins to look at when they do their final review. Once we've invited or voted on someone we can see the status of their application in the Whitelist Activity page. I left some of the usernames in this one because they're really obvious; most of the first invites were no-brainer yeses. (The comment field is just my comment, I don't get to see anyone else's.)
After a user gets five votes they move out of the voting process and into the admin review process, where a Minnowbooster admin looks at the votes and approves or rejects the user. Just because someone has five votes doesn't necessarily mean they're going to be accepted to the list, but so far a large majority have been. I doubt someone with five no votes would have their voting overturned.
Votes are more common than invites; everyone started with ten, and if your vote matches the final decision you get two back. I'm almost always at zero invites, but I've only been at zero votes once; by and large I get them back faster than I can find time to evaluate accounts. (And I've been doing a lot of that. It's addictive, and I've found a bunch of people to follow here by reviewing their accounts.) The voting process has generally been working pretty quickly.
Commissions page
If you're a user looking for an invitation, @news-today has created a post where you can comment to suggest whitelist voters look at your account. Minnowbooster is also looking into some other options for users to suggest themselves, but I don't think any of them are quite ready yet.
If you're a user who has been invited and you're looking for votes, by far the best thing you can do is make an excellent post on your account. We're going to be looking at and judging your content, so you want to make sure we're seeing your best work first.
Please note I do not work for Minnowbooster, I'm just a user who was standing in the right place to get whitelisted right away. I'm happy to help with whitelist-related questions but I am not Minnowbooster support, and questions they need to answer should be directed to them on their Discord. We also have a whitelist-specific forum there where you can ask questions.
Not asking for an invite anymore. :P However I would love it if you took a look at my account to see if it's whitelist worthy. I believe it is, but I haven't received any feedback so I don't know if I should just give up or what.
It's not about written blog posts btw, all of the work goes into the videos. The edited game movie ones, not the livestreams, those are just for fun.
I am basically the worst person to ask about videos. I'm a cranky old dude who started using the internet when the only way to send images across it was to encode them as text. There are some kinds of video I can manage but things like gameplay videos have just never soaked into my brain properly. I'm sure there are good ones and bad ones but I can't tell the difference.
So the best I can do is wish you luck and let the other voters take care of figuring that out. I really hope you don't give up just because you've had a hard time finding feedback.
Edit: upvoted this a chunk in hopes that someone else can help you.
Lol, thanks for the honest response. :) I know the videos are good, just don't know if it's enough for getting whitelisted. I saw they have a form to fill now over at discord. I guess I might as well give that a go.
Very helpful review and letting us know how it works. I have been in the discord channel a number of times but never really got a solid answer as to what needed to be done. Which of course is totally understandable since everyone under the sun is asking! lol
Which makes perfect sense since being on that white list was massive effects on your postings. I was luck enough to get a non white list vote early this morning but they are far and few between.
Much success and thank you again checking out the other posts you recommended to learn even more. 👍
I would really like to vote for you, because your writing is really good, but I wish you would source your photos properly. Is it possible you would be willing to start doing that?
I use to and normally do just skipped it for some reason the last few times but your right I should be doing it and as a marketer I should know better :) so yeah ill be starting it again for sure come tomorrow.
I see that a lot of your older ones are from good cc0 sources like Pixabay but I still have to reverse-image-search them to figure that out. I highly recommend using the SteemSTEM Guide for finding and sourcing your images.
Good source thank you, I think ill be using canva from now on to build my images have to get a little better with it to make them really pop!
Thank you. I can't vote on you anymore though, you must have passed through to admin stage without me. Good luck!
Great post. I don't expect to be picked. I'm still trying to figure out how Steemit works. I had no idea about voting power, bots, buying influence, etc... I use to think if you posted valuable, original content, you'd be rewarded. I was wrong...it's not that simple.
Anyway...thanks for posting this. As I said, I don't intend on being picked, I just want to better learn how things work behind the scenes.
If there's one thing consistently true here, it's that nothing here works quite like it looks like it works.
It's never going to be that simple, but my hope is that in the long term it will be more true than it is now.
Amen
Is inviting and voting have the common percentage of commision if the person gets approved? Looks like voting on the pending whitelist is getting more interesting and rewarding that I thought.
Inviting gives a larger share than voting does.
Glad to know, thanks!
This sounds great.... I wish it's as easy to get whitelisted; I'd love to be on that list cause I think I deserve a bit more votes than I do presently
Your posts are really good and once you have more of them I'm sure you'll get an invite. It's hard with just 4, though.
😢..... I'll keep working hard
Nice post! Really helps outline the whitelist system :D
Wow, thank you for this review. I'm not on Dischord and I'm still fairly new to this site so I'm still learning how everything works around here. I'll have a careful read of the links you shared to try to understand it all a little better :)
If you would like an invite I will be happy to use one on you when I have one again.
Aw that would be amazing! Thank you for the thought :)
Someone beat me to it. :)
I saw it! Haha
Quite detailed and explanatory. Thank you!
I feel just as whitelist invite, there should be a way to invite a user for blacklist too. LOL!
By the way, MB was very successful in generating the user interest for Whitelist. Good marketing gimmick on its part. The term Whitelist is something every one wants to get associated with. In fact, I too got quite curious initially. I came to know about this service a day later. So when I checked my profile my name was already on pending list. This itself was an achievement for me 😉. And I noted today that it's still showing the same status. LOL! Must be, I attracted many negative votes but not sufficient enough to reject it yet and positive votes are still not sufficient enough to accept it. So I'm in a hung state. But honestly, I ain't very keen on getting white-listed here. I feel, it's primarily their business interest to get me whitelisted if they ever want to whitelist me. Why should I make effort for that?
I never write my posts according to someone else's expectation but only what I feel like writing. So I ain't gonna write any better for the sake of seeking votes. I'd keep doing what I do.
Yesterday, I posted my first dLive video and sent payment to get MB upvote. Strangely enough, I was told that MB don't upvote dLive and dMania posts. There are many bots who have chosen this strategy. Putting a blanket ban based on the dApp used to post on your blog seems very unfair to me. What's the logic behind it? Some says low effort content is not appreciated. Hell, these people don't know the difference between hard work and quality work! I don't know what's the MB's policy on it but it didn't make any positive vibes on me by its response.
@xyzashu Actually, since it sounds like you don't mind me saying, you're the blurred-out user I voted for but was rejected. I can't explain why; voting for you did not seem like a difficult decision for me.
As I said I'm not MB support but I'm not aware that they prohibit dLive and dMania content. That's not part of the TOS and it would make some of our voter discussions a lot easier, and the admins haven't mentioned it. Did you send the Steemit link to your dLive post and get that error? It may just be that the bot doesn't support those links.
Ohh, I feel so sorry for consuming your vote. But I'm glad that it wasn't you who invited me. Invites are more precious. However, I still see a "Pending" status in my MB profile. I really don't mind being rejected when people like @reko too are rejected. It's their business their policies, I've nothing to do with it. I'm fine either way 😊
But yeah, regarding dLive, MB specifically mentioned it in the transfer memo while returning my transfer. You can check it here. You're correct, it's not mentioned in their tos.
Thanks for all your support anyway!
Notifying for rejections is broken. It's frustrating.
The steemd link didn't work but I checked your wallet. That's really weird. I'll ask about this.
As I think about it more, I have canceled posts with dLive videos that don't work all over my feed today, so it may just be a temporary response to that.
Response from admin:
Sorry.
I use @minnowbooster . This article is very much helpful for me .Now a days i saw the white list . But i don't understood what is that. But i am clear now by reading your article. Thanks a lot brother .
This is great as it helps identify the users that will help grow the platform with quality content. It will help filter most of what we see today on the new listings. I hope to be whitelisted some day!