Long exposure shot of a lit-up drone flying around at night! Photo by me.
This was a very exciting (and busy!) week for me. The first thing I have to say, as a witness canditate for many months now, I am proud to say that I have made it into the running as a top19 witness! If you're curious to know more about what this means, @pfunk wrote a great guide here. I wasn't planning on doing a witness update for a while, but there's a lot of stuff happening quite fast, so I figured I'd make a post.
1. Accomplished the past week:
- Did nothing to my price feed in regards to @dan's post about backing the steem dollar.
- Okay, this is a bit of cynicism/sarcasm. :) Some witnesses have made an entire post to announce that they have done this; I have actually already been doing this, and trying to garner attention about his, for two months. See this post here.
- In regards to the %apr, I have adjusted mine back down to 10 because
Hive account@smooth suggested that the interest rate need to be more well known, not higher, and I agree. With the rate now shown in the wallet, it's clear they are taking steps to improve this!
- I have been laying out an idea to bring back liquidity rewards in a form that will hopefully help the SBD peg. I chatted with
Hive account@arhag about it, and we discussed some very promising ideas. However I need to think about it a LOT more, as issues like self trading and market manipulation are not the only things we want to solve, but also relative fairness.
- Us at
Hive account@steemcleaners announced our stance on Anonymity and Identity. I really doubt you missed this post, as it was a massively trending one!
- I talked with
Hive account@roelandp and 
Hive account@firepower about 
Hive account@steemfest. Stay tuned for this!
- I combined a lot of my bot work, and restructured it to improve failure scenarios. There should be much less
Hive account@cheetah / 
Hive account@seraph downtime, and better responsiveness in failure scenarios (e.g. making too many comments/votes too quick.)
- Unrelated to steemit, but I completed a large grant application for my PhD. Wish me luck!
- Improved my vote follow bot. I also decided to send about half my vote power to project
Hive account@curie.
- Upgraded my witness structure to include a fail-over backup, which is important if I stay a top19.
- Hive account@cheetah made 224 comments this past week, or about 32 a day. One again, this is down from last month. Are we seeing an improvement in content quality on steemit? Also, community members have started calling spam accounts "cheetah snacks", which I find hilarious.
- As always, I continue to work hard as both a Hive account@steemcleaners member and the project leader.
2. Upcoming projects/goals:
- I hope to flesh out the liquidity reward concept I have in mind. Since this is not high up on the list of things for the devs to be concerned about (lots of more important stuff to do!), I hope to work out something nice before it gets higher on their to-do list.
- There is some testing I want to do with Hive account@cheetah to improve content detection. I also really want to do photo detection for the photography tag, and I might work on getting that integrated this week.
- I am trying to figure out the cause of unlinkable blocks from my witness node. Both
Hive account@jesta and I have this problem (we're both new to the witness list, so we haven't had time to figure all these little things out!). Fortunately, the problem is quite rare, out of thousands of blocks its only caused a handful of misses.
- And of course, continued work within Hive account@steemcleaners.
3. Thoughts from this past week:
Wow, are we ever moving fast. Resteeming was announced, and I have to say I am already seeing a drastic change in the way I see and curate content. Although I want to see the ability to turn off resteems from certain people but keep their blog posts on my feed, I am certain these changes will all be fleshed out in time.
There was some discussion on, I guess, "rigging" of the witness list by Steemit employees. The data was interesting (it also highlited to me that at the time, I was one of the few without an employee vote), but the post was inherently flawed in my perspective. They somehow implied that users needed employee support to gain a spot on the witness list, but this was inherently contradicted by 
Hive account@steemed having no employee votes and being a top19 at the time. Although he is no longer in the top19, it was because he was voted out by a community member, not an employee. Although yes, the big vote that put me in the top19 was an employee vote (thank you 
Hive account@ned!), it would have been entirely achievable with only community votes -- if 
Hive account@blocktrades voted for me as a witness, for example, I would have also have gotten in. Due to this, I firmly believe that the community votes do matter. On this topic, I also chatted about 
Hive account@charlieshrem in steemit.chat, where I basically said 'sure, he got moved in quickly. But that doesn't mean he doesn't have community support, it just means we were forwarding the inevitable'. I also firmly believe Hive account@charlieshrem has the ability to do great things for steemit, and I am glad he got placed on the list as well. I am also happy to see 
Hive account@steve-walschot and 
Hive account@gtg have a shot now -- it's nice to see some change every once in a while, to support different people and projects!
4. Plans/usage of witness funding:
As I promise, 100% of my powered down witness funding will be sent to Hive account@steemcleaners, to increase the reward pool (starting this week!). This is of course assuming I stay a top19 witness. Don't forget, you can also support the members and non-members helping, by upvoting the posts that the Hive account@steemcleaners account makes. All rewards, including my witness funding, are distributed back to the community. Read about how @steemcleaners does this, here.
Special thanks to Hive account@smooth and 
Hive account@nextgencrypto who have been funding Hive account@steemcleaners weekly -- hopefully, if I stay as a full time witness representing Hive account@steemcleaners, they will be able to have more funding to bootstrap other awesome community projects.
I hope to be 100% transparent with my status as a witness, so that includes my funding. I'll be sure to listen to the community if there's another place to put some of the funding. Of course, the power down is not high until I have been a witness for a while, so I am just thinking out loud. Who knows if I will be in the top19 tomorrow.
5. Questions for you, the community:
I have one question this week, that I hope to recieve feedback from people about. In Hive account@steemcleaners we have been debating our reward system to community members. Currently, we give out rewards in the form of SBD. However, an alternative is to reward users in Steem, Powered directly to their account (Same dollar value, just in the form of Power). This could be advantageous for two reasons:
- It reduces the immediately liquid reward from people who may be "witch hunting", in a way which may not be in the best interest of steemit.
- It increases the potential that members helping Hive account@steemcleaners are doing it with long term support of steemit in mind.
What do you think, should Hive account@steemcleaners make this change?
