A new shinny toy was recently announced to the steemit community recently and it looked like ti would be a great fit for the Pay It Forward Curation Contest. Being a new contest I felt it would help to encourage engagement, that is I wanted to get people commenting and have a chance to chat with them.
Source
What is Steem-Bounty
For those that don't understand what Steem-Bounty is let me take a minute and give my take.
Steem-Bounty is a program that any steemit member can use to help encourage engagement on your posts and reward those who take the time to comment. You pick an amount to pay for the "bounty", which is just the amount of the reward pool your commenters will receive. This Bounty/Reward is split into 2 pools of money with 80% decided by the upvotes of the Sponsor (you) and 20% decided by the Community (any upvote other then yours).
So it's important on Steem-Bounty posts to upvote other peoples comments that you feel are quality to help them get an increased portion of the Community portion of the bounty/reward. Don't be selfish, help reward those that deserve it.
Now in case my overview didn't help, here @steem-bounty explains How to Create a Bounty.
Ways to Use Steem Bounty
There are a few ways that I have seen bloggers use this program.
- To reward your followers and hopefully increase your engagement level with them.
- To make sure every entry to a contest wins something (what I'm currently doing)
- Need an answer, Create a post asking the question with a bounty on it.
- Have a task, like need a new logo, add a bounty and reward more then just the winner.
And I'm sure there are other uses for the Bounty and would love to hear about them. Will edit the post if anyone has a good idea of how to use a Bounty that isn't listed.
When is Payout?
Payout happens at post payout. Steem-Bounty comes in and leaves a comment on each qualified comment about how much they earned and transfers all the earnings to the winners. It's all automatic and no work is needed on the sponsors/bloggers end.
Any Issues?
Like anything where money is involved there are some spammers running around to all the bounty posts and leaving BS comments which typically aren't going to get any votes from the Blogger running the contest. They means they can't get any of the 80% reward pool, but they come back right before payout and upvote themselves. This last minute upvote means they are taking part of the community 20% reward pool.
Have chatted with the creators about this issue and they have a couple ideas that might help with this down the road including any flag from the post author excluding someone from getting any rewards from that bounty. This solution seems like it would be useful as a 1% flag wouldn't effect the voting power of the author, doesn't effect the steemian that left the spammy comment so nobody has to look like a bully flagging a smaller member, and still lets the rewards go to people who actually contributed to the post with real comments.
If this gets implemented I will just flag all spammy looking comments the second they are left and call it a day.
Overall Opinion
It's as close to perfect as any tool out there for authors to use. In my opinion it's much better then paying for bid bots for "exposure" as you are rewarding those who actually engage with you and your post vs giving more profits to the whales (no offense, but the little guys need it more).
This is now the second post that @steem-bounty. The 3 SBD Bounty is there to help reward interaction and to make sure every contest entry get some SBD for taking part. Over time as rewards cover the costs of this contest the total prizes will continue to rise and that includes the Bounty.