By far the most important choice you will make on Steemit is who you nominate to be witnesses. Everyone has 30 witness votes to place and should take the time to learn about the many great witnesses on this platform. Over the course of the next month I will be introducing you to many of the witnesses here in our community and trying to get to know each one of them a little better. Often time we just see usernames and don't really know the people behind the @ symbol. So I've decided to do what I can to shed some more light on who are witnesses are and why they deserve our votes. If you are completely new to the witness process, go check out the Steemit FAQ Page. If you aren't sure how to vote for witnesses, go check out the Witness Page. On that page you can click on any of the top witnesses names to find out a little more information about them. If you want to see other witnesses outside the top 50, you can check out the SteemDB Witness Page. I can't stress this enough, Every steemian needs to take some time and get to know who our witnesses are and what they are doing to help make the Steem community better.
Today I would like to introduce you to Chris. He was one of the first people I ever communicated with here on the platform. Chris goes by the username @someguy123. I used his service to get started on Steemit. The signup process for steemit can still be pain in the ass, so I decided to use https://anon.steem.network/ and bypass all the hassles of the regular signup process. The anon.steem service is great if you want to start steeming right away or you want to make multiple accounts. After my initial signup I made the bonehead move and forgot/lost my password and after about a month into my Steemit tenure, I thought I was finished. Luckily @someguy123 worked his wizard skills and got me back into my account. Lesson learned, don't be a bonehead and always backup your passwords. Anyways... Long story short, @someguy123 created a great signup process that allows you to bypass the waiting time and create multiple accounts, a great service. If you are new to steemit and haven't created an account, sign up here
@someguy123 is also a huge name in the Litecoin community, he runs various services such as Lite Vault and Litecoin Local. he has been a part of the Steem community for well over a year now and one hell of a developer. He can do many things that I don't even know how to pronounce. For more information about some of his technical ability, visit his website Someguy123. Last but not least if you head over to the Witness Page and scroll down to the bottom, you have the ability to vote for a witness who is outside the top 50. That feature is also thanks to @someguy123.
He is currently our 6th ranked witness and a Steemian that I am extremely grateful for. I had the chance to interview him a little while back. The following is a transcript of our interview, I hope you enjoy it.
- How did you first hear about steemit and what made you decide to join?
I had heard of Steemit a few times, but never thought much of it, I heard about the hack, but still never knew much about it, nor cared. Someone (@frosty) came into my Slack looking for an escrow for a giveaway on Steemit, they were hoping to catch Coblee (Charlie Lee, creator of LTC), but he wasn't available at the time. I decided "well, I'm pretty trusted, I could do the escrow for you". He pointed me to Steemit, I signed up, I never did much other than deal with the escrow...
Until the bots came... @someguy123/steemit-bots-are-here-and-they-re-down-voting-my-comments. Despite being attacked by bots, I thought I'd make an introduction post, as many others were doing, and see how that went. @someguy123/i-m-someguy123-a-well-known-developer-in-the-litecoin-community. @dantheman had upvoted me shortly after posting it, blowing it up to over $300 at the time, at that point, I knew I should stay. I thought "if it's this easy to make $300, then how much could I make from actually decent posts?"
Of course within a few weeks of joining, I had made possibly my highest paid post of all time, SteemDNS (@someguy123/steem-dns-your-username-dot-steem-dns-on-the-blockchain), sitting at a whopping $3,532 - there was no way I was leaving Steemit after seeing how well the platform rewards it's developers.
- Steemit has continued to build a user base over the past year, but still has a lot of work before becoming main stream. What do you think is the biggest obstacle before steemit rivals some of the online social media giants?
Signup still sucks. My own service AnonSteem (@someguy123/why-wait-for-a-steemit-account-you-can-get-one-instantly-with-anonsteem) takes away some of the frustration, but not all of it. Not everyone is willing to pay for an account, not everyone has cryptocurrency to buy one in the first place. It seems like every day someone is complaining about their account not being verified after weeks, or various issues with the email/phone verification.
One problem is that the main site (Steemit.com) seems to be having slower and slower updates. People have BEGGED for the ability to hide resteems from blogs for MONTHS, and we still can't do that. The slow updates are extremely frustrating, there's probably a variety of small issues like that, which add up to make Steemit a painful site to use.
Sometimes when the Steemit servers are running slow, it's possible to try to post your latest post, only for it to be lost, because the servers are down. Apparently if you post something, and it fails to post, it deletes your draft... That's just unacceptable.
Steemit needs a serious user experience overhaul before it can become mainstream.
- If you could give advice to all new members on how to be successful on this platform what would it be?
Talk to people. You can join the PAL discord, full of steemians (https://discord.gg/2HQU5sj), or you can talk on STEEMIT.CHAT, the important thing is to network as good as you can. This doesn't mean spam people with your links.
Collaborate with people on posts and projects. If you find someone writing about the same niche as yourself, you should talk to them, if you collaborate on a piece of work with them, you can get some exposure on their blog.
Comment on people's posts if you can, don't be spammy, but constructive criticism can help you make new friends, and potentially followers.
- Do you have an endgame in mind with steemit? if so could you elaborate.
A year ago, my endgame would have been making it into the top 20 witnesses. I thought this would never happen, being that I had never been in BitShares, nor known Dan/Ned from anywhere else. As you can see, I'm currently #6 witness, which is AWESOME.
I don't think there is an endgame. As long as Steemit is still thriving, I will do my best to keep producing things to make the network better.
- Your involvement in Steem and Litecoin is well known, but if you had to speculate on one coin that has potential for huge gains in the future, what coin would it be?
It's hard to say one coin. I think that @dan's EOS will do extremely well once it is launched. The technology behind it is powerful, DPOS based just like Steem, with the smart contracts allowing for practically infinite possibilities. EOS offers practically everything Ethereum offers and MORE, which could make it an extremely important coin in the future.
- When you're not spending all your time online with crypto, what other things do you enjoy doing?
I like to play the piano and guitar, and like most people, I enjoy various music, TV shows and movies. Sometimes when I have enough free time I play video games; I'm a big fan of crafting/building games such as Don't Starve, Prison Architect, and Minecraft.
- Where do you see the value of steem in 5 years along with the steemit platform?
I couldn't say. STEEM/Steemit development is slowing down, a lot of developers have left the platform, but a lot of new ones have also recently came to the platform.
Despite a lot of new users, there are a lot of older users who have became stagnant, or have left the platform. Steemit is extremely competitive, and people can get upset when they see their rewards going DOWN over time, instead of up. I've noticed this with a lot of friends I have brought onto the platform.
It's possible that Steemit Inc. could fix the various issues with the user experience, bring new features to attract new users etc.; but it's also possible for the platform to stagnate.
Nobody can truly say whether a certain coin will go up or down, I mean why is Ethereum one of the top 5 coins, when it is technologically inferior to so many other smart contract coins, and has had so many security issues?
- Last question, on a lighter note, describe what the perfect vacation for @someguy123 looks like?
Somewhere temperate - Unlike a lot of people, I hate hot weather. I almost collapsed from heat stroke when I was in New York City a few months back.
I enjoy big cities like New York, London, Amsterdam etc. where there's always something you can do, try some new food/drink, go sight seeing, experience some unique events, and just generally feel and explore the culture.
Most importantly a vacation where nothing breaks while I'm away... It seems everything works fine when I'm at my desk, and always breaks when I'm in a different country, with only my phone and no access to the servers to fix it.
Any vacation where nothing breaks while I'm gone, is a perfect vacation 🙂
Once again I would like to give a big thank you to @someguy123 for taking the time to answer these questions and for helping to make our community awesome.
This is part 3 of the series "Meet Our Witnesses", You can read the interviews with @rival and @good-karma by clicking the links:
@jasonshick/meet-our-witnesses-rival
@jasonshick/meet-our-witnesses-good-karma
Make sure you follow along to this series as we get to know many of the leaders in the Steemit community and show some appreciation for everything they do. Thanks for reading and check back soon.
