I didn't manage to do an update last week, and I can't remember why, other than being extremely busy with school, and visiting my parents as our dog is sick. But anyways, here's what I've been up!
1. Accomplished the past weeks:
- SBD Price feed: I upped my discount to 14%. That's a higher discount than all other witnesses currently (I am currently reporting the lowest price feed among the top19). I have two reasons for such a high discount:
- Balance of the SBD peg has not happened. It's closer, but not quite there yet.
- We still are sitting on "too high SBD debt". This means posts will continue to be paid out in both SBD and STEEM, which is a confusing idea for new users. Having a premium on SBD conversion should hopefully cause more people to convert SBD to STEEM via the contract and sell (to get that bonus premium), and thus reduce the debt load on the steemit ecosystem. People who execute the contract will thus reduce the amount of SBD in the system, which necessary for the liquid reward to be once again paid out fully in SBD.
- Another note on the price feed: I refuse to create a full head post every time I update one variable in my script (10% to 14% is literally one number). This is also disrespectful to the bots that upvote my posts -- I do not deserve a reward for changing one number in my script. So I will keep this info to my update post.
- I drastically improved the copy-paste catch rate of @cheetah.
- Since the change, she has issued on average about 100 comments per day, about a 3x improvement.
- This has caused same-author regurgitation to start being caught more frequently, which is interesting but also quite the headache trying to manage.
- There is still some huge misunderstanding about @cheetah comments. People still get amazingly aggressive and annoyed whenever @cheetah comments on their posts -- even though she is completely correct.
- Despite the comment distinctly saying "I have NOT flagged you", people DM me "cheetah flagged me". Seriously?
- People think a cheetah comment "removes the reward they deserve". I don't understand this one.
- I tell people how to get whitelisted and they ignore me and continue to claim that cheetah is harassing them. This one I actually do understand -- one requirement for an author to be whitelisted is to not post old content of theirs, only cross post new content. Unfortunately, many authors are still copy-pasting their own content that is many years old, and they tell me they deserve a reward for it.
- There are some new people on cheetah's blacklist. Interestingly they complain about censorship (even though anyone can read their posts, PRO-TIP: you can't censor on steemit), and cry about steemit and cheetah (without taking any action to ask me to get off the blacklist).
- Us at @steemcleaners released our guide on Tag Spam and High Frequency Posting.
- I created a new steemit.chat channel steemcleaners-public. As opposed to steemitabuse-classic, which is unmoderated, this new channel will be moderated and kept on topic (discussion regarding steemcleaners). Hopefully this will alleviate the problem of people in the SA-C channel speaking on behalf of @steemcleaners, when they aren't even members.
- As usual, I participated as a @steemcleaners member to help fight abuse.
2. Upcoming projects/goals:
- I need to figure out something about @cheetah comments on people reposting their old posts.
- I personally think it's a terrible practice, people think, "Oh my post didn't get the reward it deserves, let me post it again. And again. Until a whale notices me!" Or worse, "I have upvote bots upvoting anything I do, but I'm out of ideas today. Lets repost something I made a month ago to get the money!" So I want to keep the cheetah comment on this, so at least people are aware its a repost.
- Fair warning: if reposting (no changes) ones own content becomes a socially acceptable practice on steemit, I might quit, as I don't want to participate in a copy-paste dumpster site.
- On the other hand, people rehash the same introduction paragraph or 'about-me' in their posts, or do weekly updates, etc. and this is fine, and doesn't need a cheetah comment.
- I personally think it's a terrible practice, people think, "Oh my post didn't get the reward it deserves, let me post it again. And again. Until a whale notices me!" Or worse, "I have upvote bots upvoting anything I do, but I'm out of ideas today. Lets repost something I made a month ago to get the money!" So I want to keep the cheetah comment on this, so at least people are aware its a repost.
- This weeks steemcleaners payout will be in VESTS instead of SBD. This will hopefully reduce the immediate incentive for people being aggressive witch hunters in hopes of steemcleaner rewards, and encourage only those who have long term interest in keeping steemit clean.
3. Thoughts from the past weeks:
If you can't tell, I'm a bit disheartened by the community reaction to @cheetah catching more content. I might have to write a new post, "The Steemit Tragedy of the Commons, Part 2", as we are seriously heading in a downward spiral if this is the attitude from our community -- I don't just mean price (which is also going down), but also author mentality.
Also, as it turns out, there's still a huge misunderstanding not only about @cheetah but also @steemcleaners. Someone thought that @steemcleaners was a bot, and was aggressive when they received a message from it. Some people of high notoriety here don't even know that I manage the group. Some people are still confused why the account sent them a reward. Honestly, this problem could be solved by an account bio -- essentially enabling us to pin our FAQ to the account so people can read and understand better what we are doing. Other than that, I have no idea how to solve the "awareness" problem.
4. Plans/usage of witness funding:
As promised, 100% of my power down each week has been and will continue to be sent to @steemcleaners. Note this also includes my own SP, from my own post rewards and curation rewards. This is of course assuming I stay a top19 witness: right now I am right on the edge, in the last spot, so I could get kicked out at any moment. When you vote for witnesses, I encourage you to think about what each witness is using their funding for.
Don't forget, you can also support steemcleaners by upvoting the posts that the @steemcleaners account makes. All rewards (thus including my funding) are distributed back to the community. Read about how steemcleaners does this, here.