Dolphin 541,753—Monthly Report: September (2019)

So Long September

I hardly knew you.

September, you will remember, was the first full month after Hardfork 21 (which then quickly became HF22), and though I tried to find my footing, for those first couple weeks, I just couldn't.

Thanks to my job, there hasn't been a whole lot of time to begin with, and then I didn't feel very motivated—one because who knew if the curation part of the EIP was going to take off or not, and two, because the SNAX-STEEM connection was knocked offline and never recovered. Prior to this, I had pretty much been relying on SNAX to provide me some incentive, since things weren't really clicking in STEEM rewards in the weeks leading up to the hardfork.

So, I believe that my numbers are going to reflect that. I know they will for posts. Comments might be similar. Upvotes. I don't know. Let's take a look.

Quick Summary

After managing an average of one post nearly every day in August, September fell precipitously, kind of like last year. Only, my wife wasn't recovering from surgery this year, plus Hardfork 20 (anyone still remember that?) hit in September, too. Last year, I had 11 posts in the month of September. That should tell you how it went this time around.

While my output was lower, I don't know that it necessarily will be reflected in the earned SP. I'm not sure how to account for it, other than possibly #newsteem. I'm thinking it might still be too early to tell, but if people can keep up the curation pace, maybe, just maybe, the Economic Improvement Plan will actually be an ongoing, not just for a while, improvement.

With that teaser, how about we get into the thick of it?

Posts (no comments)—12

So, the number of posts for August was 28, meaning the number for September represents a drop in production of over 57%. As I mentioned, SNAX was pretty much fueling my daily output, but when the scoring rounds went away, the reduction in time and a sudden desire to just do something else, anything else, got the best of me.

I've not had much of a let down this year, though, so I feel fortunate that it happened all the way into September, rather than very early on, like it did in 2018. I was in my first year of STEEM, though, which was pretty hard sledding, so how to persevere had to be learned.

Which I was doing pretty good up until the hardfork. I'm just not good with hardforks, I guess.

Comments—222

With posts down, that meant I had less comments on my own stuff to answer, and I didn't do a very good job of getting around to other posts, either. The difference in total comments from August was -77.

I had a side note in this category last month about dropping upvotes on comments. I was hoping to use ENGAGE instead, but the bot has apparently been down since the hardfork. So, replies to me are still going without some reward. I appreciate those who suggested alternatives. I still haven't found a good solution yet, but at this point, it's probably becoming moot, as most are probably getting used to comments mostly earning nothing.

Upvotes given—53/173

The numbers just keep falling. The vote spread is off by 65 from August, and the vote total is down 266. Last month wasn't all that great for upvotes, but I managed to crater them even lower. Kind of like STEEM prices. Not something I'm trying to emulate, but being unmotivated tends to spread out all over the place.

Upvotes received—419/922

Once again, without the posts, it's hard to get upvotes, so the numbers here reflect that more than anything else. While it's true that I wasn't visited by curie, which always brings the highest number of upvoters, producing only 12 posts didn't give folks as much of a choice as August's 28.

October is already off to a better start, so I'm hoping to see improvement all around in all of these above categories.

Earned SP increase—230.684

Surprised? I am. I did not expect to reach 150, let alone over 200 earned SP. Not with just 12 posts. I knew I had at least 100 SP thanks to one post with larger than normal rewards, but it came in the latter half of the month.

But here's the deal. Instead of having posts with $.50 STU to maybe $1.00, which would pay out something like 0.57 STEEM plus that amount in SP, 8 out of the 12 posts earned between 10-23 STEEM/SP, with the large one over 80 combined. Those numbers have never happened before. Not so consistently.

In fact, the only time I can see that I was consistently between 2-5 STEEM on posts was shortly before Hardfork 20. I remember because I was thinking that maybe I was finally getting traction, that I wouldn't have to hope that curie or some other curation trail would hit. Then it kind of dovetailed a little after that.

Since I didn't have a lot of posts, comments that earned enough to get over the payout threshold, plus a manageable quantity of curation, I actually have a further breakdown of how the earnings went.

In all, the twelve posts earned the bulk of the SP, 107.331 in liquid STEEM and 107.189 in SP. Comments, added another 0.536 STEEM, 0.540 SP, and curation brought in a whopping 15.088 SP.

That's whopping for me, anyway. I haven't kept track, so I don't know for sure, but even in my best curation months prior to HF21, I doubt I made it to 20 SP. That was back during the month or two Musing was really rolling.

Total earned SP as of the end of September was 3,303.907. All SP, tacking on investments, was 8,355.227.

I know that few would even be trying to do the math, if any, but there is in actuality a bit of SP missing from that total. That's because I used at least 61 STEEM to buy SNAX with. So, the actual total of all SP in my account was officially 8,292.951.

Even so, this represents a substantial leap from August's ending total SP of 7,620.674. That's because I also bought some STEEM, a portion of which I powered up. I'll get to that a little later.

Highest single payout—41.358 STEEM/41.300 SP

This came on a combined Food Fight Friday and daily five minute freewrite post where I used six previously unused prompts. Needless to say, it was not a typical post for either, but apparently the folks at OCD liked it since it got both a sizable upvote from OCDB and Blocktrades. The title of the post was Grandpa Gotta Eat: Food And Weather Go Together Like...

Basically, it was a pretty silly piece about a Snickers Blizzard weathersnack, his attempts at being witty, and the trouble he gets into while being outdoors communing with would be fans and Nature. It was probably the pictures of said Blizzard staged throughout a nearby park that did it. That, and an image of a very cold chicken curry plate sitting on the stands at a middle school football practice.

Self-Upvotes—0

Basically, since I'm not upvoting comments, it's easier not to upvote myself accidentally.

Contests—1

The same post that garnered the highest upvotes also earned me some SBI from @foodfightfriday's weekly contest. It had been a while, so that was cool. I've apologized for my lack of decorum profusely, but apparently the regulars there liked it enough to vote it in, too. Go figure.

Flags given/received—0/5

The anklebiting saw an uptick after HF21 and the free downvotes, so whatever. I managed to steer clear of any substantial downvoting, and no, I didn't enter the fray either. I've been like Switzerland so far as downvotes go, and I really don't see a need to change. I know that will put me into the upper levels of Dante's Hell with some folks here, but I feel like I downvote when I don't upvote at all, which is often. Since the vote farms have been castigated thanks to lack of RCs, if not full blown removal of delegated SP by Steemit, and the bad actors that were "abusing the reward pool" are now actually curating and downvoting, it just seems like the concept is hyper stimulated right now.

I stopped following the crowd long ago. Still charting my own path.

Reputation Ranking—66

I don't know why I keep track of this, since no one really looks at it except me. As I've stated before, I know what I've done, and I feel like I have earned it, as much as anyone actually could earn it, the way things work here. Regardless, this represents an uptick from 65.

Investment—534.794 STEEM

Yeah. I finally caved. Or put more of my money where my mouth is, take your pick. I actually did it so I could use part of it to by SNAXP on STEEM-Engine, though, so another nearly equal size chunk went to that.

I plan to do it again as soon as Coinbase will allow me to use my money. Thanks for the alternative exchange ideas by the way. Binance does have a US version now, but it's 10 days in limbo for fiat there. Of course, they don't tell you that up front.

I still believe in STEEM. Some may disagree that it's woefully undervalued, but I think it is. Especially now. But that doesn't mean we can't take advantage of it while it's cratering. And while I'm not going to buy as much as I would if it were to fall even further, it does feel good to buy it at substantially lower prices.

Token Trading

When I reported on this back in August, I had purchased 33,939.3992 SNAXP. As of the end of September, my SNAXP holding sat at 3,379,975.781. Yes, that's right. Over three million in SNAXP.

Why so much? Someone asked me why I was so big on SNAXP. Well, I like their idea. I'm not sure if they're doing anything with it beyond STEEM and Twitter, but I like the idea of a tokenized Internet, and this is one of the ways out there. The other thing is, I was not happy that the SNAX rounds for STEEM blew up thanks to HF21. I don't know who to blame, or if there is someone, but missing out on over a month's worth of scoring rounds has not sat well. So, I took some STEEM and bought some SNAXP.

Probably not the way you're supposed to invest, but I really haven't spent that much in STEEM or Fiat, and if SNAX manages to get off the ground, I'll have a nifty return. If it doesn't, at least I was on the ground floor of something, and might try something else.

In the meantime, I've been selling off other STEEM alt tokens to help finance the SNAXP, but again, nothing major. It doesn't seem to take much to moon or tank the prices of any of these tokens. From what I gather, most folks are having fun with them more than anything serious. Maybe that's just my perception, since I'm sure there are plenty of others out there who are taking their alt STEEM tokens very seriously.

SNAX

Scoring rounds for SNAX as mentioned above were frozen throughout all of September, so the amount there remained the same as the end of August at 176,418.124. Just for the record, the scoring rounds have finally resumed, and one payment has already gone out, with another probably showing up tomorrow.

Miscellaneous

There's probably a question in all of this that I should ask. Have I benefited from the EIP? As far as the month of September is concerned, I would have to say yes. Will that continue? I don't know, but it will have to continue for the EIP to have any lasting change, and not just with me, but with many others who are in my SP range and lower. Will that happen? I don't know. That's up to a lot of people. Right now, I think those that are curating are fewer than those who are upvoting, thanks to trails and autovoting.

Meanwhile, life goes on. SMTs and Communities come next. Hopefully, sooner than later. Maybe someone else will come up with the next great idea for some of us to get excited about.

In the meantime, I'm still at it.

Onward and upward.

If you like reports like this, @bashadow has been putting out one, too. You can find the latest one here.