A few people have asked a few basic questions regarding the Minnow Support Project. Let's answer some of those questions!
What is the Minnow Support Project?
The Minnow Support Project (MSP) is a Witness created community designed to spread the values of Peace, Abundance, and Liberty, help Steemit grow, and train and retain minnows on the platform.
What is a Witness?
A witness is two things: a server that builds the blockchain and the human being(s) behind the server. The bare minimum is to run the server, but to actually get votes (it's an elected position) you have to provide additional benefit to the platform. This can take the form of technological innovations or social innovations that help Steemit grow. The people that are witnesses can be voted on here: https://www.steemit.com/~witnesses. For a full list of witnesses that are part of the Minnow Support Project please visit our website at www.minnowsupportproject.org and click on the leadership tab.
What is PALnet?
PALnet is a channel in Discord. Discord is a voice and text chat facilitation program. So, people sign in there and can talk to one another through voice and text live. PALnet stands for the Peace, Abundance, and Liberty Network. You can come visit us here: https://discord.gg/HYj4yvw
What is the purpose of PALnet and Minnow Support Project?
Well again, we're here to help people on the Steemit platform. It may seem odd, but the bare minimum to success on the platform is a little writing or artistic talent. What really accelerates you though is having a community around you that supports your work and helps you. MSP is that network and we use the Discord room PALnet to communicate with one another.
How should I act in PALnet and on Steemit?
Let's start with what you shouldn't do. Don't come in and ask for votes. Don't ask for resteems. Don't ask for stuff. There are a million people every day that want to beg. We're not here for that. We're here to make meaningful connections with others. It's more like business networking. We're making real life friends in here for sure, but how many friends have you made by begging strangers for help? Try to make meaningful relationships by providing things of value to others. Lend an ear, provide a service, help on a project... things like that help you find people that will support you and ultimately those people that support you turn into followers, resteems, comments on your posts, and upvotes.
Is MSP a giant scam?
I haven't done the math yet, but we've existed for 5 months. We make over 1,000 votes a day from the account. Worst case scenario we've made 150,000 votes on posts. I actually think it's more like 200k+. It's on over 1500 different authors in any given week. So, the main account will self upvote, and me and the moderators use the collective SP to curate content from within the MSP community, but that's quite small and something like 80-90% of the voting power goes to support over 1500 people.
The main account is open to the public too. Anyone can walk in and use the community account by registering with a Discord program also called Minnowsupport and then using an upvote command to get a vote from the community bot.
There are 3 top 20 witnesses actively involved in this project, a handful in the top 20-30, and a handful more below that for about a total of 12 elected officials who publicly oversee how this project operates. We have rules for the community, community guidelines, and governance. We are attempting to be as open as we can be and do that while steering a 5,000 person community. It's not perfect, but we have rules that are open for review and comment and that we do our best to follow and provide transparency around that.
In short, no, it's legit and we've helped thousands of people get a head start on Steemit.
that's a good start for now!
If you have other questions why don't you come join us and ask them in person. We'd love to see you in PALnet and hopefully we can grow a friendly community around you!