Steem and Steemit
Not much to say about the Steem price this week. It's floating around 28c with no real trends either way. At least it's not falling much further for now. What is falling is the Steemit Alexa rank. New accounts are being added every day, but it's not creating enough traffic to turn this around.
Today I read about user 
Hive account@ben in the Daily Steem Stats Report by 
Hive account@penguinpablo. Hive account@ben joined Steem when it started and has had a couple of million Steem without doing much apart from withdrawing fairly large amounts. I am not sure where his original investment came from, but he has now powered up 2 million. I hope he will use this to support good content and not just for personal profit. I am not against people earning, but too much Steem is not being used as it was originally intended.
Steem in the media
I've seen a couple of stories that are mainly about the Hyperspace platform, but also mention Steem. I left a comment on the second piece, but it has not appeared yet. As usual they actually talk about Steemit without acknowledging that the platform is much more than that. Does any other platform have the variety of dapps that Steem has with such an emphasis on social?
Selected Steemians
I became aware of some sporting accounts on Steem in the last week or so. I will include some others I think need more support. I ask you to give them your votes rather than voting on this post as they need them more than I do.
Witness of the week
I want to feature 
Hive account@luzcypher this week. He has run the Open Mic contest every week for well over two years on Steem. This has helped to build the community of musicians here and brought about many collaborations. He recently became a witness. He is working with 
Hive account@prc of 
Hive account@dsound (another witness) to create an Open Mic app and is also trying to build a community portal to help people find those who share their interests on Steem. He deserves more votes. I will say that I do not always agree with his more political posts, but Steem is a platform for all opinions.
Make sure you use your witness votes.
The doghouse
I do not really want to attack anyone, but I am going to use 
Hive account@wizzdom as an example of someone who could be seen as abusing Steem. Here is someone who has been on Steem for over a year, so he should have some idea of how it works, but he expresses surprise that anyone would flag his posts with $50 of paid votes for a single picture and says why should he not when 'bit bots' are part of Steemit. He has not bought votes for every post, but he has done it a lot with some making $200 whilst only getting a few comments. Steem may be seen as a 'magic money mine' if you play the bots, but this is where the 'crab bucket' analogy is supposed to come into play. Note that I took issue with that post. Feeding the vote sellers makes them ever more powerful so they can take even more rewards away from those who choose not to use them. If we all paid for votes then that would become unprofitable, but the sellers would still win. One of the issues is that the first page most users see is Trending where every post has paid votes and so they may think that is what you have to do. This guy has at least engaged in some discussion on this with me. He says he will write longer posts, as he has before, but if he keeps on buying votes that can still be seen as abuse and attract flags. I can see few cases where buying votes is really justified, so I will continue to attempt to make it non-profitable in cases where I think there is a chance to persuade the user to change their habits. Trying to take on some of the big abusers can just earn you big flags in return. I fight the winnable battles. As for this guy I suggest you talk to him to show him what the community thinks, but whether you flag is entirely up to you. I know some people do not like to do it. If you do want to help fight abuse then check out @SteemFlagRewards.
I hope this post has given you something useful. Support the community!
I'm Steve, the geeky guitarist.
and
are professional badminton players who found each other through the sport and got married. They are being sponsored by
, so I would hope that some more people in that world will get into Steem.
is a soccer academy set up by British professional Andre Gray. He has got a site with coaching videos and encourages kids to post their videos of them practicing via Steem. He is working with
on this project.
has done a post with a load of new people who are into #comics. We need to give new users some support and encouragement to get going as it can be hard to build an audience.
who just joined Steem. He is also a game developer.
does not fit into any of the above categories and he has been here a while, but he is always worth a read. He has just been posting about his experiences at the FOSDEM conference in Belgium. Do any other Steem people get to that?