Hi there 😄 The following is my witness report, something all witnesses are encouraged to do. It's basically a round up of what I've been doing here these last 10 days as a witness.
Don't forget my witness is at account @personzzz
Made it to the top 100 witnesses, thanks to you!
My current rank is 99 by votes, but effectively 52 when inactive witnesses are removed. This is absolutely awesome and I could not have done it without you. Even more so since I removed by witness self vote, but more on that later 😉
I caught my first block and I couldn't be happier! Thank you again!
Price feed and block size
I am still using @furion 's conductor scripts to set the price feed and I am happy with it, I believe it is reflective of the market. SBD interest still at 0% as SBD above $1 USD.
I am not convinced yet that the block size needs to be increased but I will be focusing on researching this in the next week to make a firmer position on it.
Pull request for Whitepaper update document approved
@sneak approved my second pull request on the official Steem Whitepaper update project on GitHub. This included changes he specifically asked for, so perhaps not surprising.
I'm really glad this is moving and have been told by @sneak that there are some Steemit Inc. people on this. As I said, I'm available to collaborate with them on this too. I hope to contribute more to this soon.
Anti self voting experiment - @smackdown.kitty
This project is came from a discussion with @l0k1 on a thread where @eeks was self voting and the rewards were quite large. As the discussion went an idea popped which would become @smackdown.kitty - a bot which will do three things:
- Flag self voted comments with a 1% flag, increasing on each self vote comment to 100% or matching the effect of their self vote, whichever is smaller, but only on accounts with more than 1000 SP
- 1% vote on the comments of users who used to self vote on their comments, for every comment not voted on (but it will still flag comments where it left off if they do that too)
- Keep detailed stats of comment self voters and publish these periodically (probably weekly) through my @personz account and / or @l0k1 's
The idea is to promote restraint in self voting, by flagging up to and including the negation point (if we get the delegated SP power), and encourage by a little vote on comments without self votes. Obviously this will seem punitive to people, and the @smackdown.kitty was even called a policeman (both positively and negatively), this is not our perspective. Flagging is really down voting, a disagreement, and if you have followed my posting here you will know I support it when it makes sense.
The published stats are to increase the visibility of self voting. The interface does not show self votes prominently, and worse it does not aggregate comment (est) payout data in any way, so it's hard to oppose it. The list will obviously be a naming and shaming, if such a thing is considered shameful, which you may become convinced it is.
I may not go that far myself - I just disagree with it and want to promote it for all the reasons @l0k1 eloquently stated here. My own announcement was here, and we launched the closed beta test here.
This also extends to self voting my own witness which I have stopped doing. I do not think I am the best judge of whether I am I good witness, that is for you all to decide.
Get involved in @smackdown.kitty
We are still in the testing phase and will stop running it tomorrow (Tuesday) to review the data and comments on this bot.
If we continue I will be making a call for SP delegations to the @smackdown.kitty account to give it's down votes a little more bite. I have delegated 500 SP, @the-ego-is-you has delegated 500 SP also and @l0k1 about 200 SP.
Please comment on our posts about this. It is a community project, and though we have taken the initiative your feedback is important.
Issue and pull request to contender (the steemit.com website)
Related to #project-smackdown is this. In this issue I explained:
In light of the changes brought in by Hard Fork 19, there is growing concern about self voting. This is mainly to do with rewards, especially extreme rewards for comments of medium to high SP holders. Also of concern are redundant bandwidth usage and simply the fact that one is a poor judge of ones own work.
Submitting a story via steemit.com, which is I think where most posts are posted, may lead to self voting unknown to the user as the Upvote post check box on Submit a Story page defaults to checked, i.e. true for auto self vote. Also this could imply tacit endorsement of self voting by Steemit.
I think this should be changed to default to unchecked, i.e. false, and perhaps even be removed from the interface.
Since it was a change of a few characters I went ahead and created a change PR here.
No discussion yet, but I hope to get a response from some of their devs soon.
@treeplanter volunteer project to plant trees in Cameroon!
@kedjom.keku, a conservationist working in Cameroon, approached us in the #bots channel to ask for help making a donation bot similar to the @randowhale. The idea grabbed me so I volunteered for the project.
I've been working on the code and testing it for a week via my @roguelike test account, and we are days away from launching it.
It will work like this: for each STEEM you donate to the @treeplanter account, from 1 STEEM up to a limit of 10 STEEM, it will match your donation in percentage for a vote on a post of your choice, which you supply in the donation transfer memo.
Of course for this to work the account will need a lot of SP, hopefully up to whale size. I have donated 500 SP to get it going, and will also be running the bot on my server free of charge for one month to get it going.
For more information see the announcement posts here and here.
Note on Steem FOSSbot Voter
@treeplanter and @smackdown.kitty knocked me out of schedule with Steem FOSSbot Voter. So I have missed the milestone deadline and have extended it two weeks hence. I really hope to keep this and some more critical bugs have come to light.
Witness guide
I heard about @jerrybanfield 's $180 course to become a witness, and decided to publish my own guide for free (well, you know, votes if you want, no up front charge). You can read it here. The best part of it is a Steem FOSSbot script project which will automatically do most of the legwork to set up a witness server if you have a Ubuntu 16.04 server.
Steemit.chat moderation
I became a moderator of the #Cooperative_Agorism room on steemit.chat as I've been hanging out a lot there recently. That's to @the-ego-is-you for this. I also neglected to mention before that @pfunk made me owner (and mod) of the #bots room, to keep it on topic for the most part.
Discussed the @welcomebot with @reggaemuffin
I asked @reggaemuffin to reconsider some of the text on the @welcomebot which was self promoting as I felt this put it firmly in the category of spam. We had a good conversation and in the end he agreed with me and made some changes.
@reggaemuffin seems like a cool guy and well worth your witness vote
Forming of #steem-coop
From chatting a lot with @l0k1 and @the-ego-is-you during #project-smackdown there is talk of forming a kind of Co-op for the things we are up to. Watch this space.
@l0k1 is an active guy and I recommend you vote for him as witness.
Important side note - I am LEET
I saw this one day when I logged in, super happy 😂
I have seen my followers increase daily for the last while and I'm happy that people are interested in what I have to say.