Official STEEM Witness Announcement

Why Vote for Me?

I am dedicated to this platform 100 percent. In fact I even moved the majority of my altcoin holdings into STEEM for the long haul. As many of you know, I don't blog for the money but the love of creating. It's the very same with helping new bloggers on Steem make the most of their time. The more people I am able to help, the better the content on this platform will be. I neither get, nor want, anything in return for advising new creators on their work and I am happy to answer all questions.

Every vote for me as a witness will allow me to help more individuals. If we want Steem to continue to grow, both in value and users, we all need to create our best content. Witnessing new blocks gives the witness Steem Power. I will use this Steem Power to help the communities that got me to where I am today, and will delegate a percentage of this Steem Power monthly on top of it.

I do not care about the potential for monetary value. I simply want to use my technical know-how to help keep the Steem blockchain moving along and improving over time. I believe Steem is the future for content creators and I plan to be hands-on as it improves. I don't want to be a mysterious witness, so please reach out and ask me everything.

Why Be a Witness?

I'm a big nerd. I love computers, servers, and the command line. Setting up servers to do different things is a huge hobby of mine. I even have one in my home that runs Nextcloud (a private Dropbox-like service) and mines a little Monero on the side.

Mix all of that with Steem and there was little doubt in my mind about starting up a witness. Filling my insatiable craving for being nerdy in the command line while helping to secure the Steem blockchain is a no-brainer. I was going to wait until my clout was higher within the community, but my inner nerd took over.

This fits perfectly with my current skill set. Promoting will be a bigger challenge, but honestly? I don't need to be a top 20 witness. All I care about is using my love of Linux and technology to help Steem. If the server can only break even, so be it. Heck, I'll even take a loss for a while if I have to. This is the next logical step for me on Steem. It may turn out to be a waste of my time but I'll never know if I don't try.

I am starting up several community projects involving Steem. The main goal is to help creators make better content and improve the #technology tag as much as possible. That is the writer in me. The witness server is for the nerd I've always been.

About Me

What stirs me up the most now is cryptography and decentralization. I believe these are the two main aspects to keeping the internet as free as possible.
-- Me, June 2017

In case you don't know, my name is Jaron Swab and I will be thirty years old this September. I am married to Leah, an amazing lady whom I met in college, and we have a cat named Haven. We currently live in Pennsylvania, USA, where we grew up and lived most of our lives.

As I said in my first post on the Steem blockchain, I created my first website back in the 1990s when I was in the third grade. It was at that moment I fell in love with the internet. I never looked back and immersed myself in technology. As I spent time learning how computers worked and how the internet worked, I started blogging.

This year marks my fifteenth year as a blogger. I've owned many sites and blogs over these years. Some hosted on WordPress, some on Blogger, some on my own domains, and I even had a blog on Xanga. Yes, the company that now makes Facebook games.

Over these fifteen years I learned a lot about blogging—that it is not a sprint, but a marathon. It's generally quite clear to me when someone's intention is to build a respectable blog, not just to earn money. It is one of my goals to help these hard-working bloggers on Steem get the recognition and coaching they deserve.

My interests outside of technology include politics, poetry, and music. My college degree is actually Political Science with a minor in music. I consider myself an anarcho-capitalist because, in my mind, it is the only system that upholds basic human rights indefinitely.

How I Plan to Help Steem Improve

I am a programmer by hobby and recently started working on a project on the Steem blockchain. This will be announced in the future by either @ashleykalila or myself. Knowing how to program and make cool apps to access the Steem blockchain is just one of the things I want to pursue. But there is so much more I would like to do.

Where I see my efforts having the most impact on the Steem community is in guiding and coaching bloggers. The more I am able to share what I know with others, the better we all become. There are so many talented creators on the Steem blockchain that only need a slight push or a small tweak to start the growth ball rolling.

In an effort to help on a more personal basis, I started the Creators' Guild Discord group. The aim is to improve as bloggers, vloggers, podcasters, and all the rest! It's with this group that I aim to create a standard for the content to drive more investors and large content creators into the Steem ecosystem.

I also recently created the group called the Tech Bloggers' Guild, a group specifically for the #technology niche. There is a huge problem with people simply paraphrasing an article from another site. This niche even gets a lot of blatant plagiarism. The goal for this community is to provide support for tech bloggers who work hard, produce original content, and then get drowned out by the endless amount of low-quality posts. Big thanks to @techslut for jumping on board with me on that one.

As these communities grow, we will need people of many different talents to help out. For now, while they're still brand new, I will handle all serious requests and help one-on-one for the 'Supporting Steem Creators' group. All participants of these groups must have the Growth Mindset, both at the community level and as individuals. Without the desire to grow and the appropriate level of effort, no amount of guidance will help.

Steem and the Steemit community have taken my love of blogging and made it profitable. I want a more direct way to help every serious person take their blog to the next level, earn more rewards, and foster deep engagement. As time goes on, my goal is to impact enough people on Steem so that they can do the same for others. In turn, we will end up with an even better platform for creators and consumers alike.

The beginning of syncing the witness server (right click to view full size)

How To Vote

In case any of you do not know how to vote for witnesses, it is very easy. Head over to steemit.com/~witnesses and scroll down to the bottom. You will see a box, and above that it reads:

If you would like to vote for a witness outside of the top 50, enter the account name below to cast a vote.

In that box type jrswab and click vote once. If you do not see my name appear below that box, refresh the page and scroll back down. Clicking the box twice in a row will remove your vote.

vote-jrswab-for-steem-Witnesses—Steemit.gif

Some Others I Recommend Voting For

If you trust my judgment and want to simply vote for the awesome people that I vote for, all you need to do is type my username in the very last box and click the button that says "Set Proxy."

Server Specifications

Intel Xeon E3
32 GB DDR3 ECC RAM
2 TB HDD
1 Gbps Bandwidth

Contact Me

Feel free to contact me anytime on Discord. My username there is jrswab#3431. I can be found in many Steem-related Discord servers such as PAL by the @minnowsupport project, @thewritersblock, WhaleShares, and the @isleofwrite to name a few. You can also message me on steemit.chat if that is easier.

Please let me know what you would like to see from me as a witness. What do you want to read in the updates I roll out? What kinds of things are the most important to you in keeping Steem awesome as well as making it better? It's through working together that we will build up Steem to the number one social media platform.