The Beginning
July 2016...
― Pablo, ¿do you know this new website, steemit.com? A friend of mine posted an article there last week and he earned 2000 USD for it! - It was Manu, his younger brother, calling with an unusual level of excitement.
― Really? Who paid for that?
― Well, actually, no one paid for that. It just got upvoted by many people, by the whales, and it was in the trending page for a day. But it's not normal money, it's a new sort of digital money called STEEM.
― Has he seen the money yet?
― Not yet. It's now converted into something called STEEM POWER, it is blocked for two years. But...
― It's a scam! I have to go. Meeting. Bye!- Pablo said.
It was thursday and Pablo was busy, since hollidays was about to start and there were still issues to close. Nevertheless, he opened an account on steemit.com and just in just in case: he wrote his first post. It was the 25th of July of 2016:
A couple of hours later, @gargon published his first post, seeking for answers:
Both posts remained unnoticed and unpaid.
Pablo gave up. “It is a Scam!” he kept saying, but Manu was convinced he would make it and he did not gave up.
It was summer and instead of going to the beach of “Torremolinos” to enjoy the mediterranean sommer, he wrote, and wrote and wrote.
And finally, on the 13th of August, at 03:58:15 he made it it. @berniesanders, followed by other whales, upvoted his post:
― Feelings Pablo! It`s all about feelings! Is about people, real people. - Manu, who has not gone out of his dark room in the whole half of august, was over the moon:
― What the Hell are you talking about?
― Steemit, man! They upvoted me! They loved my post! They love my post about music!
Much more than that!
Soon we realized that steemit.com is not just a content creation website where you can get rewarded. Steemit is a community. Steemit is about people around the world who love to share their life experiences and knowledge.
This community feeling was confirmed by every single attendant of the Steemfest. They all were blown away. @gargon spent in Amsterdam “one of the best weekends in his life”
The problem with the spanish language
Since we joined, we could see the potential of our native language. There are more than 450 million native spanish speakers around the planet. It is the second most used language in the world - after chinese.
Nevertheless, back at that time, 99% of the new posts feed were written in english!.
It was even worse than that: spanish native speakers were forced to write in a (sometimes) broken english in order to gain visibility.
Luckily, the same problem was being addressed by the curation guild: Visibility and content discovery was not only a problem of language, it was also a inherent problem of how curation works and how the stake is distributed among users in the platform.
The #cervantes Project was born.
Very soon we received support and resources of the Steem-Guild Project and their voting power donating whales. The mission was clear:
Since the beginning of the project, we have curated approx. 1200 post from over 150 different authors contributing in the distribution of approx. 25.000 SBD among the community.
Fighting abuse & plagiarism
We have been actively collaborating with @steemcleaners to not only fight abuse, but also to educate the people to use the platform in a way that increases visibility and votes.
At the beginning, many spanish writers didn’t even know about plagiarism. They just copy pasted texts from blogs. We are quite sure many of them didn’t have bad intentions. It is a learning process and we feel very proud to see some of those users becoming good and stable spanish content creators.
Helping newcomers
Same way @andrarchy created his channel "andrarchists" to help new people, we created the channel "hispanohablantes" to guide and support spanish speaking members. There is a boiling community up-there of people supporting each other with tips, tricks, promotion, translations, tutorials, videos, photos and fun.
Community Outgrowth
We keep promoting Steemit as much as our daily job allow us to do so. This is just a msg I sent just today to a friend who is an amazing artist. If you talk to some of our friends they will probably tell you that all we talk about since the last sommer is Steemit related.
Everything counts!
We are also working on different outgrowth initiatives always with focus on the spanish speaking community.
Future Plans
- We will keep curating spanish content as long as we have the support of curating guilds.
- We will keep moderating the spanish speaking #hispanohablantes channel in steemit.chat.
- We will keep welcoming and guiding spanish speaking newcomers.
- We will keep fighting abuse of the platform. An interesting form of abuse is copy/google translating/pasting posts which is actually difficult to detect automatically.
- We will help translating or providing translation resources for guides, faqs, tutorials and application interfaces (please, contact us if support needed).
- We will keep promoting Steemit among our network.
- We will keep communicating our plans and achievements in regular posts.
Being a witness
Becoming a witness node and providing a seed node is our way of showing our commitment to the platform by investing time and money on the setup and maintenance of the servers.
He hope, with the @cervantes witnesses to become yet another pillar of the STEEM ecosystem, in this case, the one on which the spanish community can be supported and promoted.
Witness Node Specifications.
The steemd daemon has been downloaded from the official github repository and compiled with the “low memory” flag. It is running on a high performance virtual server running on Ubuntu 16.04 LTE and physically located in a high reliable north european data center with following specifications:
- RAM: 16G
- CPU: 4
- Storage: 400GB SSD.
- Network: 1 Gbit/s NIC
- Bandwidth: 1.65 Tbit
- Juniper Routing Technology
- High-Speed Access to All Internet Uplinks
- Network Availability min. 99%
- DDoS Protection
The shared data files are stored in memory on a RAM mounted device (/dev/shm) to minimize the I/O pressure.
Running it on a virtual server will allow us if needed to up-scale the resources or setup a backup node in a matter of minutes.
Witness Parameters.
Following some recommendations, we have set the actual parameters to:
- account_creation_fee: 30.000 STEEM
- maximum_block_size: 65,536
- sbd_interest_rate: 5,000
- sbd_exchange_rate: base 0.168* SBD /quote 1.020 STEEM
(*) The price feed will be updated manually until a automatic feeding script is deployed in the node.
Seed Node.
We have as well set up a public p2p node that can be reached under the following ip and port:
Voting for @cervantes as a witness is voting for the steadily increasing spanish speaking community:
We count with you!!
Your sincerely
Pablo @pgarcgo and Manu @gargon