Papa Rodin Recommends - Dustsweeper
Greetings, Steemians and Steemettes!
My fourth week on Steemit is coming to a close slowly. I will to write a bit more on that on the weekend. 4 weeks of doing something consistently and with passion leaves you in that grey area where something is still new and exciting while you start to feel comfortable doing it. I understand that there are a lot of people who have started around the same time as me and/or are going to start steeming soon. If I were to give someone good advice, it would probably be to work really really hard and also be very very smart while doing so. Universally useful advice.
But you can get that kind of advice everywhere and I like to be a bit more useful than the general population.
50 Greyshades of Rodin
A true hero
Before I get to the actual meat of this story, let me tell you a tale of one true hero that would be known to become the source, the very inspiration of this glorious blog post of mine. His name is @bashadow. Four days ago, he stumbled over a post of mine and apparently took a deeper look into my most recent exploits on steemit. It was the weekend where I was doing the 100 comment challenges for close to five days in succession, so there was plenty to see. Apparently, I left an impression because he came and commented to a comment of mine. Before I get to what he told me, let me tell you something that I didn't know until just these few days ago:
Dust!
We all know these low SP Upvotes that are worth little to nothing. While the intend behind them being given to us is usually pure, they end up not accounting to much. In fact, as I learned, any upvote worth less than 0.02 apparently doesn't get paid out at all! Upvotes or rather, upvoted content that is worth as little as that is called dust. Now of course, one could go and say "So what, who cares about these small fry amounts of money, especially when the big fish are reeling in money in the tripple digits?"
Newcomers do. Rightfully so.
I remember receiving my first upvotes around here and how amazed I felt when I saw that someone liked something I did or say enough to actually show me some value for it. Even if that other guy was as small in the grand scheme of things as I was and still am. Thanks to a delegation I received earlier today, my voting power has finally reached a point where my voting power is worth more than 0.00$! But even with that, my votes wouldn't be worth anything unless some other people also decide to vote on top of my votes.
Even if it is small fry, with me being a german, I can't stand things going to waste, especially if there is novel excitement being involved. And risked. Which leads me back to this hero called @bashadow I referred to earlier.
A heroes tale!
The hero did what a real hero should. He saved me from my own ignorance by informing me about it AND showing me the solution to all things. He contacted me with this comment.
Sounds great, right? .....no? Well, yeah, it didn't sound all that exciting to me either. Mostly because I did not really understand anything. Yet.
Needless to say, I was willing and able to check out the source given to me. I was intrigued, so I wanted to find out what was going on here. Here's my reaction after I read up on what i was dealing with.
Does this sound like a terrible commercial?
Oh, absolutely. But stick around, I will make it worth your while.
I explained what Dust is earlier. The @dustsweeper is a bot that upvotes your posts and comments that are worth less than 0.02$$ so that you can get the rewards for those when the time for their pay out comes. In short, the bot ensures that you get something where you wouldn't have gotten anything otherwise. The Bot stores any SBD you sent to it and uses these SBD as payment for these upvotes. Doing so doesn't cause you any profit or loss, yet you will still profit from all the Dust that would be left uncollected otherwise.
This is obviously huge for someone who comments and posts a lot like me, but it is especially useful for newcomers, who have to fight for every tiny bit of currency in their earliest day.
But there is more!
Remember when I said that #bashadow is a real hero? Being the hero that he is, he actually went and gifted to me 1 SBD worth of dustsweeping! Shortly after he did, I already saw the machine go to work on steemworld.com. It prioritizes posts that are between 4 to 6 days old and I had a couple of those. You can make the calculations for yourself on how much you will get out of that with any given amount of SBD spend. But it will add up over time and it will be SBD and Steem Power generated where no SBD or Steem Power would have existed otherwise.
If you want to read up on what @dustsweeper can do for you or your friends, check out this introduction post, For all your questions, refer to this FAQ Post.
Did I blow this out of proportions?
Oh yes, big time!
But when I learned about this, I was really liking what I was looking at and saw some results stacking up quickly. Since I also have an interest on the longevity of Steemit and the retention of newer users joining in, I was sincerely impressed by the idea behind this service because it offers everyone to help others and yourself, especially during these earliest days of Steemit which are also the hardest.
If you have anyone who is as new as me or even newer who happens to catch your attention by posting amazing content or does his best when it comes to engaging with the community, consider sending a couple SBD his way. Doesn't have to be 1 SBD or more, @dustsweeper takes even the smallest amounts of SBD. Fitting for a service that is about making use of even the smallest amounts of value around here.
My take on bots
I usually do not have a high opinion on bots even though I used and still use them myself. While I understand their economic appeal, they do promote the creation of lazy and lowquality content while also making commenting and discussions much less appealing for people. It also makes the entire voting and curation mechanism very awkward in more than just one way.
What I like about this bot is that he does neither of these things, on the contrary. It rewards people for being appreciated by the small people people should be aiming to entertain and enrapture with the content they create or the comments they leave. @dustsweeper is a bot that rewards using steemit in what I consider to be the right way and for that it has my full support.
Also, again a big thanks to @bashadow for this gift and for introducing me to the @dustsweeper. I hope that in writing this, I made steemit a slightly better place for everyone, big or small.
That was very well written, thank you for spreading the word about @dustsweeper, it truly is a wonderful tool for all users. I am glad that you saw the usefulness of it. Sometimes it is hard to explain the concept, you did a wonderful job of explaining it.
It's cool, really. Let's just wait and see if people will start using it. I would like it to become as engaging to use as Steem Basic Income is.
Love the @dustsweeper. It's a good project.
Don't forget to consider the creator, @danielsaori, your Witness vote!
I will keep that in mind. There are a lot of witnesses to consider it seems.
This post received upvote from @tipU :) | For vote buyers | For investors.
I think this is great but some sad news. For steemians
It's not exactly "news" because apparently, it has always been that way and it was small enough to not matter to me until I got told.
Since you call it "news", I guess that it is the same for you.
Great! I've been meaning to write up @DustSweeper but haven't. So happy you have.... resteemed. The more plankton/redfish who know about this the better.
I'd asked when it came out if it would be possible to sponsor @DustSweeper for other Steemians. It wasn't available at that time. Is that what @bashadow used to sponsor you, @paparodin?
I have to check what's up with mine. It took quite awhile to kick in then it did, but I haven't seen anything happening for at least a couple weeks now. Maybe that just means that there wasn't any upvote less than $0.03 though. ;)
Congratzzz on your delegation. You must have breathed a gigantic sigh of relief. My first 100 SP delegation made such a HUGE difference voting power-wise with that red zinging 'out of bandwidth' notice every time I was trying to upvote.
This comment was made from https://ulogs.org
I never had a problem with my bandwidth. Or rather, if I did, I never noticed.
I haven't looked into how exactly Dustsweeper operates in detail, but every time he votes up one post for me, he invests about 2.4% weight. If my calculations aren't wrong, that means that he is quite limited to how many posts he can upvote per day yet without cutting to deep into his voting power.
He needs to recharge just as much as we do, so I guess that he spreads this voting power over as many users as possible, to the point where he sometimes upvotes 2-3 of my comments a day.
Congratzzz! That's usually a huge bane of new Steemians with low SP. Nothing to wish you had. ;)
I haven't checked the account's SP so not sure if it would be a voting power issue. I believe the $$ users pay for @dustsweeper upvotes goes towards increasing voting power.
I should just ask #davemccoy and/or @danielsaori but I just haven't remembered.
This comment was made from https://ulogs.org
I just did a quick calculation, which ends up being quite interesting.
Most of the time I see @dustsweeper upvote, he does so with about 2.5-2.7% weight. Right now he is at 60% power.Assuming he always keeps that level of power, and follows the general rule of thumb of upvoting up to ten times a day for 100%, he can make around 370 dustbot upvotes to get people over the threshold.
Most of the time, he covers two of my posts per day, so that means that he is helping 185 people per day, more or less. But let us put that number to the side, here is the actually interesting part:
Each time he does, he also get's a curation reward. Thanks to delegation, he has close to 20k Steem Power. Most of the time, upvoting generates 0.003 SP as a curation reward for him.
Assuming that 370 and 0.003 are his daily constants for this, he makes 1.1 SP per day. Not bad for a bot that is basically running on auto pilot.
Now as I said, the bot is running at 60% of his voting power right now. That means that hypothetically, he could increase his earnings by another 66%, bringing him to a daily earning of 1.7 to 1.8 SP.
Looking at his Steemworld page, things aren't quite up there yet though. Over the course of last week, he made 4.8 steempower, which equals to only 0.68 Steempower a day. There are probably factors that I am overlooking, maybe the bot could also just be optimised in some ways.
But it is interesting to see one way or another.