How to get more out of Minnowsupport and PALnet: why community is more important than bots!

I've been a moderator for the MSP/PAL discord for a few months now. With the large amount of time I spend on the server I (and the other mods) have made some observations and I would like to share some of those with you. Our mission at minnowsupport is to help give minnows more visibility through curation and resteems, help users make better quality posts and the most important of all: create networks and grow communities!

Community building resources

In the last few months we have started a number of country/language and interest based rooms so people can find and chat with other users who share a niche. Sadly we feel those rooms are not adequately being taken advantage of! Finding other users who blog about similar things or live in your geographical area can be imperative in creating a sense of community and opens up a wealth of knowledge that can be shared to help one another. Many minnows join this platform and don't see instant success. That is normal, it takes time to grow but some people could improve their game and do very well here if they had a little support!

Here is just a small sampling of the rooms we have to offer:

• Country/language based: canada, australia, nigeria, turkey, indonesia, french, spanish and more!
• Interest based: art, music, contests, crypto, poetry, photography, rap battles, sustainable living, truth/conspiracy
• Minnow help: We have poetry and fiction workshops and also a room for helping users with english spelling and grammer, so if english is not your first language (or even if it is) and you need to spruce up your post @lenadr has been kind enough to offer her help to anyone who wants it!
• Manual cuaration: we have multiple curators who scour Steemit for well written blogs in various niches and have started some community based curation projects designed to give minnows more exposure

The importance of community

We have noticed a trend of many users who join and use the services of the upvote bots but never once stop in to say hello or meet anyone. Ultimately this is the decision of the user, we can't and don't want to force anyone to interact with us, but they are missing out on making friends, gaining followers and getting a wider exposure than they ever could alone. Chatting with other bloggers and learning about who they are has greatly enriched my experience here on steemit. Seeing the success of some of the communities who have developed on the PAL server is encouraging and gives me hope that we can build up even stronger communities if we just put in a little work :)

How do we do this?

It's pretty simple actually. You could spend some time in the shallow end greeting new users and helping them navigate. You could go into a room that interests you, introduce yourself and say hello. Engage people. Make an effort to say hi to someone you've never spoken to, ask them about their life. The possibilities are endless, but anything that can start the process of forming a bond and opening up a dialogue are great ways to contribute :)

Bots- Do's and Dont's

Our community is growing everyday, we have already hit 5k users but due to our ever vigilant anti-abuse team headed by @discordiant this number was reduced. Well guess what? We hit 5k again which is amazing! We have over 1k people upvoting with our little bots banjo and minnow everyday. We want each and every user who uses this service to get the most out of it. We also want to make sure that delegators who have loaned their hard earned SP can feel safe knowing that the bots are being used on quality posts.

To acheive these goals we have been muting a number of users who's blog posts do not meet our community standards. We will blacklist users who post any of the following content:

• NSFW- (members posting NSFW content are welcome to use our community to network but we do not allow the bots to upvote these posts)
• Low effort posts- these are the bulk of our mutes. If you are posting content that is not yours such as videos, memes, photos or copy and pasted/plaigarized material we will mute.
• Doxxing or harrasing- this should go without saying but these types of posts will not be upvoted either

If any of this content slips past us we do our best to retract the votes from the users before payout and add them to our mute list.

I would also like to clarify that we do not expect everyone who joins our group to be a professional blogger. Nobody is perfect and everyone starts somewhere. If you want to succeed on Steemit but feel like your posts are lacking feel free to visit some of the rooms mentioned above and start a converstaion. Lots of people are willing to help and/or direct you to some helpful resources! All we ask is that you are making an effort to be original and make content that adds something to the platform.

Delegation- How you can help!

In our community of 5k we currently only have 650 delegators across all our available curation bots and only 230 unique delegators to the minnowsupport bot! For the amount of people using our services I was quite surprised to see this number! We do not want to ask any of our minnows to delegate until they have a minimum of 50 SP, but for those who do I would kindly ask that you consider making a small delegation if you feel our community has been helpful. Delegations as small as 10 SP coming from a large number of people are extremely useful and allow you to give back a little and help in supporting all of our members.

If you are a whale or dolphin and you want to support our endeavours we would certainly be grateful for your contributions!

Delegations can be made here: Delegation Helper

If you don't know how to delegate this tutorial is very easy to follow: Delegation Tutorial

To those of you minnows who have yet to join the community I urge you to hop in and say hello! The PAL server can be found here: https://discord.gg/expKwN

I am a true believer that if we work together and support one another we will all benefit in the long run. I have made some amazing friends and had some fantastic times on the PAL server. Yes the bots are a nice feature and they are often the first draw for most users, but relying on these alone will not get you where you need to go. You need a community, consider the bots as a small bonus. If you are floundering on Steemit and want some support we would all be pleased to have you in our little pond.

Peachymod
<3