Hello Steemians, it's another episode of my interview in which I get to ask some technical Steem questions and also bring you closer to your witnesses.For this episode's interview, I have the pleasure of bringing to you 
As I learned more about Steemit, I started to understand the ethic and values behind it and started to try to write more consistently but there is just so much tutorial and articles I can write about worm farming without repeating myself. Then I discovered that technical topics, especially development ones are more rewarded and my day job is working as a developer so I gave that a try. I then started to diversify my topics of writing to gardening, photography, music, programming and witnessing.
It’s when I discovered the concept of #ulog that I decided to write at least one post a day. The ULOG concepts allows anyone to be able to write good content on a daily basis because the main topic of a ULOG is you (hence the U in ULOG). Talk about you, about what makes you happy or sad, what makes you think or laugh, what happened in your life today etc…
finding something decent to write about everyday
producing content in multiple topics while people might not be interested in all of those topics
getting other Steemians engage with you on your post
@Jamesmovic - If you have been able to conquer it, how did you go about it?
As mentioned earlier, I write about multiple topics and my followers might have started to follow me just for one particular topic and would be annoyed to see too much of other topics. This is something I’m still working on but it’s hard to balance because there will be times where I will write more about something. For example, during the HF20 issues, I wrote more about witnessing and I noticed some people who were more about gardening starting to unfollow me…
Nowadays, it’s all about bot wether it’s the vote selling bots, bid bots or community bots. I’m part of several communities and some of them have community bots that help their members get some reward. It’s great, as it will help newbies get some motivation and write more. But as a content creator, upvote and rewards are not enough, I want to know if people are interested in what I write and receiving some comments on a post is more rewarding than the reward payout itself. Otherwise, why would I spend hours formatting my articles, editing my images and videos for? I can easily write low quality original posts with crappy images and no formatting at all and receive the same reward. But no, my goal is to write something that people would be interested in. A way to get people to engage with you is for you to engage with them too. It’s not always easy for me because I’m also a witness and a developer and I’m often in my code and at the end of the day (actually at the end of the night) totally out of energy to go and browse for content to engage with.
I think a newbie can start with writing one or two posts a week and focus the rest of the week to go and read other’s people content. I really mean, read the content, not just click and comment blindly. Read about topics you like, read about articles related to how Steem works etc…
In the long run, you will want to write at least one quality post per day and I think a max of 3 or 4 per day. I’ve never seen anyone able to write more than that number of quality content every day, they would be spammers usually.
Team Vietnam, because I’m Vietnamese and I have founded this sub community of the Vietnamese community on Steemit and I’ve created a community bot to support the members
The French community because I’m a french citizen
Minnow Support Project because it was the very first project at large scale that helps all the little newbie to grow and learn about Steem
Dynamic Steemians and Helpie because they are doing amazing work to help the Steemians grow on the platform
ULOG because it’s an awesome idea that helps the newbies to find ideas for blogging
Earth Tribe, The Global Homesteading Collective and Homesteaders Online because I’m into gardening, worm farming and environmental stuffs
SmartVote, because this is a new service/community I’m co-founding
On top of that, when you have events and issues like what happened during the HF20 update, you will spend many hours or days applying fixes, replaying the blockchain and debugging issues.
Here are the reason why your vote is important to elect those of the witnesses who will make the Top 20:
Witnesses are this who will sign all your transactions (posts, comments, upvotes, transfers etc…). If you were to transfer a lot of STEEM, you would want to trust who is witnessing the operation.
Witnesses are providing fast servers to sign all those transactions happening on the blockchain.
Witnesses make sure updates to the blockchain are working properly and if not, then they will be capable of making proper decision as to how to handle issues.
Witnesses are also social and should be able to articulate their knowledge of the blockchain to non-technical user.
I have been working as a web developer and have experience working with servers since 1997. I’m also used to meet non-technical people and have to help them understand the technical aspect of projects I’ve been working on. I’m also a content creator and bring value to the Steem blockchain by also writing blog posts on various topics not just about IT. Despite having to juggle between day job, other personal projects and family life, I have still managed completed projects to help Stem:
I developped the code for the contest bot:
for the Photochain community
I’ve written a script to generate the weekly witness earning report
Engagement is king. Even a great author needs to engage with his/her audience and go out and participate to discussions other than his/her own. If people can’t find you, go find them.
I have faith in the Steem blockchain and I’m working on my blog for the long term. Forget about upvotes and payout and focus on quality content and quality engagement. I know it’s easy to say when I live in a country like Australia and have a decent salary but you don’t have to spend 12 hours a day on Steam, 30 minutes to 1 hour a day is more than enough to build something up. Do it on your spare time and start allocating more time when things are going better.
The replacement of the bandwidth system for the resource credit (RC) system. Everything you do on the Steem blockchain now has a cost, because it costs something for that operation to be processed and stored on the witness servers. People were complaining that new accounts are crippled but that mainly impacting existing new users created not long before HF20. After HF20, new users account should be created along with a delegation of SP that will allow them to enjoy Steem. But the primary pros for the RC system is that it will put bars in the wheels of spammers. Less spammers draining the reward pool means more reward for genuine authors. Check my previous witness update. The RC system also makes it harder for new users to create more free accounts which further reduce spam. Only accounts with a lot of SP will be able to create free accounts, which makes sense as they will need to delegate SP for those newly created accounts.
The upvote window has been changed from 30 minutes to 15 minutes. The curation reward from upvotes at 0 minute after creation of the post will go back to the reward pool (instead of becoming author reward), at 7.5 minutes, 50% of the curation reward will be shared between authors and from 15 minutes onward 100% of the curation reward will be shared between the curator.
We just need to start thinking about the money. Forget that Steem can earn you money, consider Steem was just another blogging or social platform where you would create content because you like doing so and want to contribute with quality articles that people want to read and build a network of people who you like to discuss with and who like to discuss with you. One day, when Steem is worth $100, your wallet will just suddenly explode 😂.
You can follow
's weekly Reports from the Witnesses post to know what witnesses are doing each week
> From :
On Steem, Witnesses are playing the important role of providing a performant and safe network for all of us. You have the power to choose 30 trusty witnesses to package transactions and sign the blocks that will go in the Steem blockchain.Vote for me via SteemConnect to help me do more useful projects for the communities.
