The rant first. This week marks five months since I've begun this experiment of growing SP using faucet earnings. I was a bit skeptical at the beginning, as I had heard many people say that using faucets was a waste of time, but I decided to try it out anyway. In the end, since the STEEM price is low, the crypto earned from faucets translate into a nice amount of STEEM (at least for small users like me), and this led me to continue. As I keep saying, the STEEM price may be low compared to the USD right now, but I hope to have accumulated a considerable amount at the time the price recovers!
Every week, I've been publishing these posts talking about how the experiment is progressing. I want them to be more than just statistic posts, though.
- These posts give me something to write about, and also force me to take notes and keep track of my faucet earnings.
- I always try to make them more interesting than just showing the weekly numbers. I like to comment about how the rise and drop of crypto prices impacted the faucets, or something different that I did to increase my earnings, and so on.
- I continue publishing these posts in hope that they reach users who have never stumbled on my faucet posts before, especially new users who have little SP (also meaning that they still can't do much inside the platform because of low Resource Credits). This experiment is an alternative to increase SP and RC without having to spend any money, and my results might inspire others to try doing it as well.
From the comments I've gotten so far, these posts are reaching their goal. Some people found the experiment interesting, others decided to also try it out, and others commented to say they have already been doing the same as me for a while (nice to know I'm not the only one!). My faucet posts even received some nice upvotes from curation groups, something I really didn't expect. It means the posts were interesting enough, and I'm glad to know this.
However, last week, I began getting downvotes. They were from a big account who has separate accounts to curate different tokens, and I immediately thought something was wrong with my posts. At first, I thought it had something to do with the posts' content. Did he think it was spam because it was a "statistics" post or something? I was a bit scared, and already thought the worst. My first impulse was to consider stopping publishing these faucet posts altogether, or only keeping them to one monthly post only, or only publish one once I reach an expressive goal like 100 SP through faucet earnings in total, or something along these lines...
But no, it wasn't anything like that. On further research, I saw that this is happening to many other users, regardless of their posts' contents. It turns out it's someone that decided to downvote everyone who receive votes from automatic upvote services, including the well-known SteemBasicIncome (the program where people sponsor authors who they want to support, so they receive a little boost in the form of upvotes), even though SBI has been changing to adapt to the rules of "newSTEEM" (those mostly whale accounts who are against upvote services because, ideally, the value of posts should be determined by organic upvotes, and there are a lot of curation groups now with the rise of the different tribe tokens), and from what I understand, even many of the newSTEEM folks seem to be okay with SBI for the most part now, as many people use the program to help smaller users (the SBI upvotes usually aren't even big, just a few cents for the majority of small users, unlike the votes from bidbots that used to bump posts up by many dollars and pollute the trending page). Even so, this person seems to view SBI as harmful, and goes downvoting everyone who SBI votes on. If anyone reading this has started getting downvotes out of nowhere and for no apparent reason, then this may be the cause.
This is all I'll be saying about this issue, though. I just wanted to tell my readers what happened to me. I won't mention the person's username to avoid summoning him here. I'd rather stay far away from trouble and flag wars, so I please ask that no one mentions the username in my post's comments, either. Thankfully the downvotes were small, and I'll just let it be. It's annoying, but as long as they don't cause much harm, I'll just keep ignoring them like I do about those SDL trolls (those small accounts who downvote at 10% who have been around since before HardFork 21) which I've already learned to ignore.
Conclusion: this incident gave me a scare, but I'm glad my posts' content wasn't the problem. Life goes on, and the faucet posts will continue.
Sorry. The rant is over now. Back to our normal schedule... I mean, the faucets.
The Twenty First Week of Faucet Earnings
Last week, the Bitcoin price recovered a bit, but BonusBitcoin still kept giving me 8 satoshi each claim. I tend to have good results as long as the claim average is 8 satoshi (I had been getting from 10k to 12k satoshi the previous weeks), and I thought this would be the case for last week as well. However, there were two days when I didn't have much time for faucets. On one of them, I reached 99 faucet claims at the last minute and failed to get the bonus for the "100 claims in a day" goal (how frustrating!), and on the other day, I don't think I reached even half of that. This caused my weekly earnings to fall a bit short of the value I'd have liked. My earnings last week were "only" 10744 satoshi, converted to 0.01512945 Dash and traded for 6.509 STEEM using BlockTrades (Steemd transaction link).
Image source: Wikimedia Commons, by Busy Stubber at English Wikipedia, effects by Ysangkok [Public domain].
My other small investments gave more or less the same results, though. I got 1.029 STEEM from my SP delegation to the Brazilians project, and 0.229 STEEM for holding QuratorTokens. The sum of these earnings and the ones from the faucets was 7.667 STEEM, which I powered up. I wish I had made a bit more, but ah well...
Monthly stats
Like I've been doing every month, it's time to add up all the earnings and see the experiment's results for this month.
Earnings (faucets only):
- Week 1: 6.784 STEEM.
- Week 2: 7.126 STEEM.
- Week 3: 8.079 STEEM.
- Week 4: 6.509 STEEM.
- Total: 28.498 STEEM.
Overall (faucets + delegations + QuratorTokens + rounding etc.):
- Week 1: 8.007 STEEM.
- Week 2: 8.362 STEEM.
- Week 3: 10 STEEM.
- Week 4: 7.667 STEEM.
- Total: 34.036 STEEM.
Since the beginning:
Earnings (faucets only):
- Month 1: 6.416 STEEM.
- Month 2: 6.307 STEEM.
- Month 3: 14.718 STEEM.
- Month 4: 20.180 STEEM.
- Month 5: 28.498 STEEM
- Total powered up only from faucets since this experiment's beginning: 76.119 STEEM.
Overall (faucets + delegations + QuratorTokens + rounding etc.):
- Month 1: 8.382 STEEM.
- Month 2: 8.878 STEEM.
- Month 3: 18.601 STEEM.
- Month 4: 24.877 STEEM.
- Month 5: 34.036 STEEM.
- Total powered up from this experiment since its beginning: 94.774 STEEM.
This month continued the trend of having better results than the previous months. And 94.774 STEEM overall earnings... almost 100 STEEM during these five months! As I said at the start of the post, I was skeptical at the experiment's beginning, and couldn't have imagined that I'd reach these numbers with the help of faucets. Of course the delegation and the QuratorTokens have played an important part in that, but the bulk of this value comes from the faucet earnings. This means that the "100 SP total earnings" goal post will be coming soon :D . The "100 SP only from faucets" one will still take a while, though...
If anyone else is interested in growing SP through faucet earnings and would like to use the faucet websites I'm using, here's a post with more details and tips, and here's a short interview with a few more tips.