Cervantes Magazine - Vol. 1- A deeper look into our community

Translated by @juanmiguelsalas. SBDs from the post will be used to reward his good work!

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All illustrations by @enric68

We open a new space so that you can get to know the Hispanic community in Steemit and of course, to encourage all English speakers to come to know our micro world. We officially present The Cervantes Magazine, that will come to your eyes every week, to have the opportunity to be a little closer as a community.

Creating a community is not easy, opening the way to the Spanish language in an English language world is much more. That is why the Cervantes community is so valuable, being currently its center of action, the Discord chat. We are already 910 members and the number increases everyday:

Place where we meet every day from different points of the planet (sometimes you enter saying good morning and there is a user who at that moment goes to sleep). But we are immersed in a world ecosystem, a group of crazy people that every day strive to learn to create new and varied content.

But the time has come to tell the world of Steemit the best kept secret of @cervantes: We are more than writers who await the vote or mention of the Witness Cervantes. The community Cervantes is a space where we clear doubts, we talk and when I say we talk we talk about everything: From criptomonedas to our sorrows or daily joys.

Entering the General chat you find our four moderators: Lorena (@loreennaa), @nelyp, @the01crow and @rojassartorio. Its function is simple and complicated at the same time, its job is to make that the rules of the chat are fulfilled, that is to say, the General chat is for chatting, clarifying doubts and knowing us. Then to the left there are other Chats stated thematically where we can promote all our Posts or touch some specific topic. Does it seem simple? Well it is not, we are always tempted to receive more attention, especially at the beginning. But the moderators keep us all the same as they help us and answer our questions.

In the Cervantes community there is a platonic love that has spent liters and liters of ink, worn keys and given more of a headache to some. The love of @The01crow by @Loreennaa. Although Lore does not stop repeating that is not interested, @ The01crow does not give up:

Between laughter, smiles, talking with people with other realities, we realize how great our world is, although we have simplified it to a keyboard and a screen. And between laughter and laughter also appear the complex themes. We always debate about the posts, the importance of originality and quality. Sometimes we are passionate and it is very important for us that each member knows the rules of Steemit and have clear information. Each User is important.

Cervantes dresses in Music.

By @tincho

Ladies and gentlemen, I am pleased to present you with this new initiative of the Cervantes Project, which came to stay. Hisparadio, by the hand of @juamiguelsalas, is the new jewel of the dear Cervantines who habituate our appreciated chat in discord.

The project not only aims at conquering hearts through music, but also seeks to transcend the writings of our blogs, generating the first exclusive radio for our community.

Where guests, moderators, contests and music as main star will seek to keep your feet from moving under the table. Do the romantics will take over the chat? Or will we have the clan of the rockers defending their history? Everything is to be discovered, but there is only one sure fact: From this moment your buttocks do not have to be immobile in the chair, I invite you from the most hidden place where you are, that we all synchronize to the rhythm of @hisparadio.

Diversity is a pillar in our community. Scattered ideas, unknown dialects and the influx of talks on different themes, a constant bound in our mornings, evenings and nights in the chat. Now, we can add the chords of a good guitar, the scores of a piano or simply a velvety voice.

Perhaps love is made present through a sweet melody or it may, that a loud rock exacerbate an argument. Dear steemians, the sound of empty keys, the silence rumbling in a room, the perplexed sunsets through a window, already they do not have to be voluntarily silences. Accompany me in this new era, where the harmony of sound will colorfully revolutionize our path in Steemit.

To say goodbye, I leave a few words of @juanmiguelsalas, in reference to how this project is born.

About how I came up with the idea, well, the radio in Discord is not a new idea, the English-speaking users created "Steam Speak" a long time ago and I remember that I spoke a lot at first but it was always in English, never I could really say what I wanted and I always stayed with the desire to be able to do it. As the Hispanic community moved to Discord, after the problems with Steemit.chat, I saw the opportunity to create something similar but in Spanish and I approached the Cervantes team where I have several good friends and I proposed the project. The "Yes" did not wait, I received it almost at the moment of asking and well, two days later Hisparadio was online and transmitting. And there we go, transmitting.

by @nelyp

First steps.

At first EVERYONE has made mistakes. There are errors on the title, content, tags, spelling ... If you have committed any of them, do not worry, all you have to do is rectify and try to follow a good path.

It is very important to keep in mind that this is not just blog anymore, here you could be rewarded, in the form of STEEM, STEEM POWER or STEEM DOLLARS, for the content you publish and, given this, we must all understand that there are certain guidelines to continue to get our content rewarded. Given the above, these are our recommendations today:

The orthography.

Very important. I do not need to explain why, but it is the least expected of someone writing a blog. If you are ever unsure of how to write something, use an autocorrector or search directly in Google, but please be very careful with this because no matter how good your post is or how interesting your content is, as soon as we read The first lack of spelling we close and we go to another. This is a golden rule. Do not forget to also use points and also commas and, more importantly, put them in the right place.

The Tags

Tags are important because they "categorize" our posts. In this way, if we want to read something in Spanish, we can go directly to the "spanish" tag and there we should not get anything that, for example, is written in English. We say "should" because there are many users who make that mistake and, for this reason, a post with the inappropriate tag ends up in a category that is not correct and could be considered to be "abusing" it. In addition, the curators of Cervantes will thank you very much, as this greatly facilitates the daily work of selecting content. So that we can find the right content in the right place, always remember to use the appropriate tags, in accordance with what you are going to publish. Example: A post where we will share the photos we took on our last trip to the countryside and live in Colombia. Tags: spanish, cervantes, cervantes-fotografia, cervantes-naturaleza, cervantes-colombia.

BUT DO NOT FORGET TO START WITH SPANISH CERVANTES

By @dcaroa

Since you enter Cervantes in general you will find a series of characters of which we will talk week after week.
The first to fall among my Keys was Pablo, better known as @pgarcgo. Pablo lives in Germany with his family. His brother @gargon and him have formed all this madness.

⁃   Who started with the community who came up with the Cervantes project, what does it consist of?

Let's see.... when we did the accounts @gargon and I there by July 2016, there were no users who wrote in Spanish. Just then, @donkeypong was starting a project to vote for new users who met certain requirements, such as that they were new, that they did not have much SP (Steem Power), that they had not voted the last two posts, etc. He convinced some "whales" (Accounts with much SteemPower) to donate VP (Voting Power) to promote these new accounts, that would be in August.

@gargon had been a month posting in English and had received votes in some of his posts and among those who voted him was @donkeypong who told us how they were supporting new users. So we thought it would be great if we could do the same with the posts in Spanish, so that the voice would spread and more people would join the platform. @donkeypong launched the curie project (which still follows). Together with my brother, I proposed to launch the Project Cervantes, in a chat with @donkeypong. We chose the posts, and passed them to donkey (or other users who worked with him) in such a way that they voted for our elections.

⁃   What is Steam-guild?

Similar to the curie, but not only voted new users but overall good posts, so that quality articles will not go unnoticed by whales. The problem is that because the SP was centralized in a few "big accounts", the need for the existence of these initiatives was seen to distribute more the payments among the users.

Other parallel projects with more or less success began, such as the Steem Trail and whales that formed their own curation teams. The Steem-Guild was funded by @ned. He donated part of his Steem Power to @donkeypong who continued to vote the posts we chose and then began to emerge the first users who regularly write in Steemit like @dresden and @soyjoseluis, for example.

The steem-guild project ended, claiming that with the new functionality of the "Steem Power Delegation" could already be made a distribution of SP (even if only borrowed). But even with the SP delegation, articles in Spanish were still not voted organically.

Bear in mind that "whales" do not give their SP to anyone; They have to trust someone they know will not vote for plagiarism, etc. Steemit is a matter of trust. And we decided to do it. The best way to gain that trust of the Big Accounts and the community was to make a Witness, Thus Witness Cervantes was born: A user @cervantes who is at the same time witness of the network and unifies the voting of quality articles.

⁃   How long have you been with this project?

Well, a year. The Steemit.com page was published in May 2016 and went public in June.

⁃   How many people work on @cervantes?

It is not called work, they are collaborations of users in different projects for example: four moderators manage the chat, @moisesmcardona has helped us doing bots, @nelyp, @tincho, @soyjoseluis, @wartrapa, @dresden, @aneblueberry, @handmade and @angielb help us in curating posts. @juamiguelsalas takes the newly created Hisparadio @gargon, my brother, is the public relations, create new proyects like cervantes-meetup and community manager; and I take care of the most technical parts, programming bots, servers, Steem software update, chat organization, etc. . On the other hand we have a developer working on "The Next Big Thing". This is a project that we will talk about another day.

⁃   The Chat Discord, Why Did You Do It?

A) To have a good time.

B) To use the audio conference functions.

C) To separate the promotion parts of post with the general chat.

D) In order to have more flexibility, I can create my own workgroups. Everything is more organized, in the end ... we help each other, give us advice, grow the community, increase the number of users, upload the steem ... all happy.

I pick up a paper with words that I have come across in Steem and I have not understood, so I propose to Pablo, that I say a word to him and he tries to define it. Pablo smiles. "Okay, but I see it coming. Accept the challenge.

⁃   Witness

They are the engines of the network Steem, the nodes of the decentralized database based on blockchain where the posts and comments are stored.

⁃   I do not understand, are the blocks, the miners?

A block is a record in that database. A block can contain several posts (or votes or transfers or dozens of different operations). Each block is cryptographically chained to the previous one, so you can not delete a block without destroying the whole database.

A witness produces blocks, as a bitcoin "miner"; The difference with bitcoin is that the producer of a block is the node or pool that is faster solving a mathematical puzzle; Instead in Steemit, the producer (the Witness) is elected democratically by voting.

@cervantes produces blocks because it is voted by many people. To form a community and to be useful is fundamental to produce blocks in Steem, after all it is a social network.

⁃   Okay, let's go with another concept I hear here, Trail.

Trail is not an intrinsic concept of Steem. Trail is simply a way to automate votes. Imagine that you are 30 accounts, you make a trail so that all those accounts vote you what you post.

⁃   That's cheating, is not it?

No. If they are autovotes it is not usually well seen, that is, you vote for yourself. But it is not cheating, if you have 30 accounts with half a million steems no one can force you or say who or what you want to vote with them, what is politically correct is to use them to vote for quality content, but there are all kinds of uses. There are whales who vote their unemployed friends to get them out of a rut.

⁃   I've heard say @pgarcgo get me on the trail ... what does that phrase mean?

Let's see ... when we vote with @cervantes Why does the post we vote receive money? Simply because there are people who follow the vote of Cervantes, who is on the trail of @cervantes. You can go on vacation and your account will continue to vote for quality and clear Spanish posts. You will also earn money, because quality content gives you curation-rewards. It's a win-win situation.

⁃   And if someone wants to enter the trail, can he contact you or @gargon?

Well .. there are many ways, there are people who follow @cervantes manually look at what we vote and vote for them. Several program their own tools to follow our votes, there are some who use the tools that have programmed others and also are the ones that give me their account so that I include them in my tool that what it does is follow @cervantes. But Whales, for example, who follow Cervantes do not give me their key, that's for sure.

⁃   Curation.

That anglicism that does not exist in the SAR, could be better translated as "content expertise" or classification. It is simply to vote for a "good" article. Although we colloquially call it curation.

⁃   That is, the act of curating, is the vote itself, mine or anyone. And why do curating teams have more value in voting?

Of course ... I call them a curation team, because when they vote, they not only vote with their users, but with Cervantes that carries more responsibility because the trail makes the payment higher. It's like being a Hispanic mini-whale. But if we shit much or abuse, we run out of confidence and stop working, it is a responsibility to be in the team and choose carefully each post.

⁃   And the last concept, STEEMIT.

An uncensored social network where the product is what you write and not what you are sold with advertising.

And so ended the first Cervantes Magazine interview. Already calculating who we will ask next week Who would you like to ask questions?

The team of the Magazine and the Cervantes we all hope that you have enjoyed our publication and wait for us next week that we will return with more surprises.

We wait for you in our virtual home!