RE: Applications Team Update: Hivemind/Communities, Sign-Ups, Developer Tools, Condenser, and More!
I spend a lot of time rooting out faucet rings pulling down the impact of communities and propagating abusive behaviour, so I'm personally really excited and hopeful for on-boarding speed ups and slow downs. 😊
I'm liking the rotation of the updates through each branch of the team — kudos. It's nice to be able to build a "bigger picture" knowledge base with each subsequent update, and the frequency is just right. I did prefer the linking of a few specific issues and PRs in the past tech update, however. For some laypeople, I imagine clicking over to the main Git might be a bit more intimidating, making it harder to choose subcategories and pick out pertinent bits. With one or two relevant, more direct links, gleaning whatever they're able to from the description and comments might feel a bit more inclusive than, "this is too technical for you, go check the code" and dumping a giant pile at their feet. This is a niggling criticism, though. Keep it up!
Sorry for the ignorant question, but what are faucet rings on Steemit? Google search gave me useless results for the most part.
They are rings of STEEM accounts that are often automated to post (usually plagiarized) content every few minutes or hours with the idea that Steemit can be used to generate no or low-effort passive income by doing so. They generally upvote each other as well. The tactic doesn't actually work well to make money because people can tell the accounts are fraudulent and rarely reward them. Moreover, when they are discovered they will get put on blacklists and their meagre rewards reduced to zero.
You may already know this, but the term "faucet" comes from sites like http://moonbit.co.in/ that offer users a steady but very tiny trickle of satoshis for clicking a button (surrounded by many advertisements.) The basic idea is "free money" but as we know "there's no such thing as a free lunch!"
@daan
Thanks for the explanation! I knew what faucets were, but had never heard of these sort of schemes on Steemit. That explains it well.