I am hereby hanging up the gloves so to speak with regards to most of the thing which I've been blathering on about for the last 5 months or so. I'll explain what I'm stopping, what I'm continuing, why I'm doing this and for the first time a little about me (though not enough to completely deanonymize me, let me assure you 😜)

Stopping this stuff

Witnessing

I'll no longer be running a witness server nor doing witness-like things. I recently read @timcliff 's post asking what a witness should do and I found myself agreeing with most that a witness should be active in the community in some way, not just running the server. This is true of most of the top witnesses, and many backup witnesses too.

I'm pretty active but to do it justice and campaign for more votes I need to step it up. I can't do this, for the reasons described below. So instead of just treading water, I'm going to step back from this role.

The post STEEM does NOT need more STEEM Witnesses by @chillbill was also very timely and I find myself agreeing with them in content (not in tone). Steemit as a network really does not need so many witnesses. I think perhaps 20 backup witnesses would do it. Think about it like this: there are 20 full time witnesses. Of those ranked less than 20, they are basically in a lobby, waiting for their chance to move up to the top 20. They get paid well for this wait, depending on how close they are, and probably break even at around position 90 (I was just about breaking even).

You don't want to just break even though, and if you're not planning on at least trying to get into the top 20 then why bother. I do not want to be a career backup witness, so I'm bowing out.

I have really enjoyed learning about how the blockchain works and participating in it in a very real way. Some of those blocks were written by me 😊 I feel very honored to have had the opportunity to try it out. Thanks again to everyone who helped me along the way. I went from knowing nothing to writing a suite of scripts to automate the process 100% to build from source, so I was glad then to help out others in turn.

After posting this my witness will become inactive and the server will shut down.

Please remove your witness vote for me and give to someone else deserving - there are many, do your homework on this.

FOSSbot organisation and Voter bot

This will come as a disappointment to several people, but I will no longer be developing any FOSSbot project, chiefly Voter bot.

Rest assured though that I will get us to v0.3 as promised. This includes several critical bug fixes, fixing the new post processing and migrating the back end DB to MongoDB. I hope to have a build release out in a few days and the minor version 0.3 out soon after that.

Sorry especially to @camb who recently wrote a post urging people to get in on feature suggestions. You can still do this, I may come back to it or someone else might continue (nudge nudge @shaunmza 😉). If you want to get involved in development, contact me soon.

Project Smackdown, with @smackdown.kitty

As I mentioned in the final report yesterday, this project has been stopped. I won't go on here, you can read that post for details, but I will say that that I think we did some great work there and contributed positively to the platform with it.

I will reiterate that I'm disappointed there isn't more opposition to self voting and that people are quite happy to do it and not campaign for a change. I'm glad that relatively speaking it is quite low in general but you should all know that you're wasting your time self voting. It does not add anything to the community.

@treeplanter voting bot

An interview with me was published yesterday in which it was announced that I will not be running @treeplanter any more because of a realization that pay4vote, even for a good cause, is not something I can support.

On Friday at 12 noon UTC I will officially stop supporting this project in every capacity.

Continuing with this stuff

@sadkitten and scam opposition

And you scammers thought you were in the clear now that I'm taking a back seat 😂 no such luck!

I'll be continuing this important work with the @spaminator group led by @patrice and in collaboration with @sherlockholmes. However you will not see me making posts about it or publicizing my work there. I am going incognito. 😎

Wha happen?

About me - for the first time

My work here has gradually begun to interferer more and more with my real world life and has become a problem. I've been working sometimes late into the night on the project smackdown, trying to get progress on Voter bot, keeping up to date on things happening and stay in the conversation in chat, as well as keep sadkitten running. I'm burnt out.

I haven't talked about myself that much but I'll reveal a little now. I feel it's important to say I'm a regular worker and a father (yea @stellabelle you were right, I'm a man 😝). I'm not a rich man, and my family is not very well off. My real life work is getting more intense all the time. The work I'm doing here on Steemit has paid back, it has, but I cannot afford the time any more. It's sad to say it but I'm missing some special moments with my kids.

I'm the kind of person who is very drawn to this kind of work, it finds me. When I joined Steemit I had just quit and deleted all my social media accounts as well as every single account on every single online service I'd ever used (where the option existed). I went back through 7 years of notification emails. It took some time. Where I had to keep an account I changed the email to a unique email, change the passwords to ultra strong. The only social media I had left was Diaspora. It was on Diaspora that I found out about Steemit and thought I'd look at it. I was quickly sucked in!

I guess enough of your folks liked what I had to say, or like opposing what I had to say, because I got to know a lot of you and here we are, almost 9 months later, and many people know the name @personz. 😊 Again, I'm honored.

However I know I need to get back to what is truly important - family, and peace. My mind is in turmoil taking on the concerns of others, it's time to disconnect for a while. So this is what I'll do. I want to be clear that I'm not rage quitting, I'm just talking a big step back.

Powering down some

Like many families of the world, we are in debt. Debt is ancient. It seems like it is Just The Way It Is™. Certainly you cannot function as a normie without a certain level of it and most of us are drowning in it.

Well, I'm going to power down some STEEM, sell it for fiat and dig us out a little. On the one hand I know I have to do this, and will. On the other I truly believe in Steemit as a social media platform and as an investment, so I'm annoyed that I have to, but I do. Got to keep the wolf from the door. I hope to retain as much STEEM as I can because we're only getting started here.

I made a big fuss about buying $100 of STEEM earlier in the year. This makes me feel kind of foolish now. I'd love to be buying $100 more instead of cashing hundreds out, but I am grateful that I can do this, and that my $100 was a seed for the investment I have here now.

What will you be doing?

I'm going to log on less. I'm going to allow my knowledge of current events on chain to get rusty. I'm going to go play with my kids and breathe for a while. I'm going to get us out of debt as much as possible so we can live freer.

I really hope I can switch my IRL work over to something like this so I don't have to work two jobs. But that time is not now. Hopefully something will come up in the future.

On Steemit I do hope to find the time for some straight up blog posting, thoughts and such, not Steemit business. That will be nice. 🙂

Thanks to my nearly 900 followers and the supporters of the different projects I've been involved in. Steemit has inspired me so much. Thanks. 🤗