Hi DSound tribe! :)

Welcome to the dawn of a new and stronger DSound Community. Get ready for a great new era for all of us!

First, the incentives available in the DSound Community had to be re-structured, due to the recent changes imposed by the removal our major delegation from the @misterdelegation account, from Steemit Inc.

Part of this strategy was already planned as contingency, but we needed to implement a few adjustments to face this new reality with the minimal possible impact to our community.

So get ready for a considerable wall-of-text. Our new approach has several levels of complexity - so it needs to be thoroughly explained.
Please bear with us - it will be worth it in the end!

So in the next topics we will describe the basics of what will change and how it all will work from now on:

• @dsound community account
• Incentivisation
• Community witness node
• Curation strategy
• Call for delegators
• Call for curators
• Roadmap
• TL;DR

@dsound community account

The @dsound account will be the main DSound Community account. This account will be used for delegations, curation and as the community witness.

This account will still be managed by DSound team, but it will work like a primary account that will perform the distribution of funds to all other sub-accounts.

Sub-accounts

The main community account will automatically distribute funds to these sub accounts, as described later.
The currently planned sub-accounts are as follows:

• Account for community projects (such as contests and other events)

• Account for project development funds

• possibly others that will be run by the development team for other purposes

NOTE: Please be aware that these future sub-accounts will be called some variation of @dsound.****. Neither these sub-accounts or the main @dsound account will never contact any member directly. We have noticed that there are already a few accounts created on the Steem blockchain that pretend to be connected to the project, such as @dsoundteam, but they are not! Please beware of possible phishing attempts. The main way to contact with the DSound tribe is directly through our discord server and always double-check with the moderators/curators there about any offers or requests you may receive.

Existing SP balance on @dsound account

At the time of the our major delegation removal, the @dsound account had a balance of Steem Power that was part of the funding for the development team. This Steem Power is part of the team's pool of funds that was reserved exactly in case something like this would happen - so that losing the delegation would not represent a major collapse to the whole project.

At the end of the 7 day period, next week, all the funds generated by the old delegation will have been paid to the account - so an 100% power down will be initiated that will last the standard 13 weeks (around 3 months). These funds will be sent to the development team, so that those funds can be used as they are needed to phase out the old business model.

Part of those funds might also be redirected to be powered up and delegated back to @dsound account as the project team sees fit.

In fact, @prc has already delegated back 10,000 SP to the @dsound account from his personal funds, to show his love for the project.

It is mandatory that the @dsound account gets flushed out - so that the new funds that it will hold can be integrally distributed to the delegators, the curation team and the project team - as part of the exciting things to come.

Incentivisation

It is amazing that we have already raised a few tens of thousands of Steem Power from individual delegations just on these last few days!
Thanks a lot DSound Tribe for your amazing support my friends! :)

But unfortunately we still need more and to incentivize further delegations, we will need to offer some interest on the investment for our delegators...
It is the norm on Steem and we need to play by the Steem rules here.

Delegators incentives - why you should "invest" on an exciting and thriving community

So our delegators will receive 50% of the liquid Steem and SBD provenient from the content promotion (see below) after payout of all memos and any other expenses.

They will also receive 50% of the curation Steem Power - this will be powered down 100% all the time to be readily available to our kinds sponsors.

We estimate that this distribution can be in the range of 5 to 10 Steem per week per each 10,000 SP delegated. This is only a conservative estimate - currently we don’t have any way to reliably predict how much content and promotion will be sought by the community, but there are high-chances to get even higher payouts.

This makes DSound curation an interesting investment, being a community effort that supports music and sound creators in Steem platform at the same time.
So you would be sponsoring great content on the platform - while generating an interesting revenue. Sounds like a Win-Win.

All funds will be distributed weekly and will be proportional to the delegation size and duration, so older delegations will have higher weight than newer ones. Also delegations less than a week old will not be taken into account for the first week. This prevents abuse and encourages the delegators to stay more time invested in our platform and to rotate less.

Curation team funds

The curation team will get 50% of the liquid Steem and SBD provenient from the content promotion (see below) after payout of all memos and any other expenses.

25% of the curation Steem Power will be distributed to the curation team, exclusively to fund community projects - such as contests and other events. The events to be sponsored or promoted will be decided by the curation team.

To increase effort to further dynamize our community - the curation team will also receive upto 50% of the community witness block production rewards to be available for this purpose. Please see below for details.

These funds will be sent weekly to the curation team account and, in the future, will be managed by multisignatures, where the curator team can decide and move funds as they please, to the supported projects.

Development team funds

The development team will be distributed the remaining 25% of the curation Steem Power and the remaining of the community witness block production rewards.

Also the beneficiary rewards that will be in place for DSound content will be sent directly to the development team account.

It is feasible that in a near future these beneficiary rewards can be reduced and also differentiated by the involvement of each user with the platform, but for now we are forced to continue with this 25% a little bit longer - due to the uncertainty of how this new business model will turn out.

Community witness node

The DSound witness project currently has 3 nodes:

• Main witness node
• Backup witness node
• Seed witness node

Due to the cost constraints derived from the Steemit Inc delegation removal - as well as by the implementation of the new community organization - the project will have to shutdown the backup and seed nodes.
This setup can be expanded again in the future as this witness eventually reaches higher rank positions. As of now, at the #130 ranking as @dsound witness currently is, it is not feasible to maintain such an infrastructure cost.

We are counting with all the community to help us in spreading the word about the @dsound community witness. Do the best you can to get big accounts to vote for our witness. This way, we will be able to produce more blocks and so to have more rewards to distribute to the curation and development teams.

During the next 3 months, for this witness project to be viable, we would ideally need to achieve the goal of getting our witness to rank #60. A rank lower than this will just not be sustainable. If this proves to be impossible - the witness project might have to be re-assessed and/or discontinued.

In this initial period, while our witness continues below rank #60, the 100% of the block production rewards will be distributed to the development team to reduce the costs of the node.

Between #60 and #41 the distribution will be 25% to the curation team and 75% to the development team and over rank #40 will be 50%/50% to each of the teams.

For positions over rank #40 then the development team will re-assess enabling the backup and seed nodes, depending on the price of Steem at the time, as being closer to the top 20 will require more availability and redundancy to avoid downtimes and missing blocks.

Should we manage to reach the top 20, the DSound community witness might consider the possibility of supporting the network even more with a public API full node.

Curation strategy

We have been designing this curation strategy for months already, in the advent of a day like last Sunday would come.

The goals of a curation system like this are:

• Spread DSound love to all the great content in the platform
• Motivate creators to create more and better content
• Keep all parties engaged and involved
• Generate funds to incentivize other iniciatives (eg. contests)
• Spread awareness about DSound in the Steem community
• Capture delegators to strengthen the power of DSound love

And talking about DSound love...

The DSound Love Machine - CONTEST ALERT!

From now on we'll call the new DSound curation engine (bots) the "DSound Love Machine".

Here you have an inspirational song, a rock one of course, W.A.S.P - Love Machine, selected by @prc and his rocker heart:

We think that DSound deserves a new official tune, something fresh and high tech, and there is so much talent in this tribe!

What do you think? Want to take this challenge? What about a major tribe collab? Guys, the sky is your limit but it has to be called "Love Machine"! :)

We're sooooo excited just by thinking of listening to your songs, guys! There will be a special price for the winner given by @prc. More details in the DSound Tribe Discord soon... ;)

The human factor

We know that human curation beats all others, as we have large experience in music and sound content curation, both on-chain with DSound and in the real world, by having a team that operated record labels and participated in A&R for the existing music industry.

Selecting great content is a huge effort and responsibility, since it requires to listen to countless hours of content and being able to decide what is great and what is not there yet... This is why DSound Love Machine will give a major relevance to the human factor.

The love spread by DSound Love machine will be weighted by many factors, all of them from human sources:

• Being DSound verified creator
• Community votes
• Curator votes
• Total attention generated (Spins)

The exact weight that each of these criteria will contribute to the overall score of any content is not public, and will need to be fine-tuned by the DSound Love Machine project team on a regular basis, due to the many factors that will need to be taken into account.

The period for love accounting will be the first 24 hours of any content published in DSound. The DSound Love Machine will only vote content by the end of this 24h period, leaving enough time for curators and all community to decide on the contents they think are great!

By voting great content early curators get more curation rewards, so the earlier they discover new content the better (but after the initial 15 minute of reduced curation payout, of course), and as a premium for their effort they will have one of their daily contents voted with extra love from @dsound.

Role of the curators

Being a curator in DSound platform is a very important role. The responsibility of the curators goes as far as:

• Listening and selecting the great content that is published on DSound daily
• Verifying the content published as for abuse and SPAM (more below)
• Participate in the DSound Tribe Discord server and interact with the community
• Recruit and choose the DSound Tribe Discord server moderators
• Inspect content creator accounts to be added to DSound "verified content creators"
• Participate in the weekly decision of where the DSound Curation team funds will be applied (curation meetings TBD)

Curation process

The DSound Love Machine will only vote for DSound content on Steem. The sweet spot for Steem voting power to be more effective is to use between 10 and 11 votes per day, giving the account enough time to grow the voting power back and vote always with full power.

This means that the DSound Love Machine will use 10 of those available slots to distribute the so deserved love to all the community, by weighting the factors identified above and performing 10 votes throughout the 24 hours of the day. This means a full 100% vote plafond is avalable every 2.4 hours (2 hours and 24 minutes).

The DSound development team will use the remaining vote as per their discretion, to vote for posts mentioning DSound that might have impact in the community, for marketing purposes, bounties for DSound improvements or to incentivize initiatives that expose DSound to other communities. These are the only votes that might be directed to content that is not DSound content, but that will bring value to DSound community in other way.

So every 2880 blocks, around 2 hours and 24 minutes, the DSound Love Machine will check what content already has passed the 24 hour human curation period and weight the various parameters for each. The content will be sorted by the weight and will fill all available slots for that voting round. The number of slots available per round is limited, so only the top N contents will be entering each round. But each content can still be picked by another round during the next 24 hours, so that rounds with less content might be filled with less popular content from previous rounds.

DSound Love Machine will start replying to all content that receive love with messages that promote DSound and it's community, the curation, the delegation incentives or the community witness, so that we can pass the word about the new ways to support DSound community and music on Steem.

Verified content creators

Being a DSound verified content creator is very important. It means that the artist, song writer, musician, DJ, podcaster or any other sound creator has been in contact with the DSound curation team and has been proven to be who they claim to be, usually by contacting them through other social media accounts or by performing other types of validations.

One of the reasons for this is to lower the effectiveness of copycats and other plagiarism on DSound community. We've been forced to take these actions because we have found several attempts of identity theft, abusive copy of contents from Youtube or Soundcloud or many other types of abuse.

This status helps to create the community that we already have and love, so we are going to make it even more evident to the general public and also make this a central piece that enables creators to get love from DSound!

Also in the future being a DSound verified content creator will be required for some TBA features, so it is important to get verified.

But please don't go running after DSound curators asking for it! Wait for them to come to you... Any kind of hustle over this will just get you Kicked or Banned from the DSound Tribe Discord and will leave you in bad "shape" with the rest of the community.

If your content is great and you create and post regularly, then the curation team will notice you and possibly contact you. Just continue doing what you love, publishing regularly, interacting with the community in DSound Tribe Discord and it will happen! :)

Abuse and SPAM control

DSound Love Machine will be checking the most important Steem Blacklists, besides having its own as well.

So any account that is on any of these Blacklists will not receive any love from DSound:

• DSound
• BuildAWhale
• SteemCleaners
• MinnowBooster
• Utopian
• Smartsteem

Also, to avoid abuse, all the content on DSound that uses any other known promotion tools like "bid bots" will not get love from DSound. DSound weight computation could be manipulated with votes from many bid bots and their trails of followers, so we have to make it fair for everybody!

So if you plan to use bid bots on your content, just allow the DSound Love Machine to do it's love spreading work and use them after the initial 48h period after you have some love heading your way... ;)

But we believe that being able to promote your content is something that has been missing from DSound, so...

Post promotion

DSound Love Machine will allow for creators, fans or any other DSound music lover to promote content, by sending their bid to @dsound account and that way pump up the love they can get from DSound - meaning DSound will vote with higher percentage.

The purpose of this feature is to enable known creators to invest in their contents that they find "amazing", but also give an opportunity to newcomers to showcase their work and to get noticed faster...

Also, if you think that 50% of the total post promotion will go to the curation team funds, and will be used in many initiatives that promote music and engage with the music community. This way you know that you are investing in your content promotion but also contributing to the music community at the same time!
How cool is this?

Please know that there is no assurance that by sending your bid the love you might get from DSound will be higher, neither that you will have any return of your investment. It might, but it is not required as it might depend on the amount of other bids, given the auction base of this market. So you should use this feature at your own risk.

All invalid bids, the ones that will not be accepted by the DSound Love Machine, will be automatically refunded. There will be no way to ask for any refund for user errors, though.

To make a valid bid, you need to do it before the 48h of publishing and supply a valid DSound link to the content you want to promote in the memo field of your transfer to @dsound account.

Implementation

The features described in this post are not currently implemented. DSound Love Machine is still being developed now and will be tested with a minor set of features soon, enabling love spreading as soon as we manage to implement the basic mechanics of it.

The DSound development team will be announcing the alpha version over the following weeks, as well as the progress updates until the end of the entire engine development and testing phase... Stay tuned.

Call for delegators

DSound community calls for delegators that love music as much as we do! :)

We don't want the big whales to delegate just because they want profit. There is no way for us to compete with the bid bots that don't support any community or have any impact of any other kind in the Steem ecosystem besides the profit...

The big whales that we want to captivate to delegate to DSound are the ones that come for the love of music, and stay for the support of creators and music initiatives while still getting nice profit over their investment!

DSound and the music community on Steem is huge and deserves this!

Come join us and help us continuing our journey empowering creators all over the world to make what they know best: music and any sound content! ;)

Why it is important to delegate the sooner you can?

Because the DSound Love Machine will take into account when any delegation started, and the delegators that stay for longer will get more rewards than the ones that just started later... So make up your mind and join us! You don't have to have millions, actually we prefer to have 10,000 minnows who delegate 100 SP than a single whale that delegates 1,000,000 SP, and we know you understand why! :D

Call for curators

Do you want to help the DSound Love Machine to select the best content to which to spread love? Do you create and are one of the DSound verified content creators? Are you an active member of the DSound community as well as other music communities in Steem?

Then come join the DSound curation team! We need you! :)

Please send us a short message on #curator-application channel on DSound Tribe Discord explaining why you should be considered for DSound curators team.
Don't be formal, just open your heart and let it to the talking... ;)

Roadmap

• Implement DSound Love Machine initial engine and start spreading love
• Make an official public call for delegators to @dsound
• Select an initial pool of DSound curators
• Get the curation team up and running, for that they can work on selecting the DSound Love Machine challenge
• Incorporate DSound verified creator on DSound dapp, so that these accounts appear with a "check" mark next to their user name
• Continue to develop the DSound Love Machine engine to support all features, while having it running for testing
• Fine tune the weight parameters and finalize the bid market

TL;DR

• @prc is not running away... No FUD needed:
  
• Do you have some SP and love music? Delegate to @dsound
• Do you have some SP and you don't care about music? Delegate anyway...
• You don't have any SP or you're FUD'ing away? You'll regret it soon...
• DSound will have a community witness node
• DSound Love Machine will vote your content based on:
  • Being DSound verified creator
  • Community votes
  • Curator votes
  • Total attention generated (Spins)
• If you want to promote your content you can send bids to @dsound
• We need 10,000 delegators of 100 SP
• We need curator applicants to choose from
• DSound to the moon! ;)
• But, still don't know what DSound is? Where did you park your spaceship?

But, still don't know what DSound is?

It's ok... You are at the right place!

Let's share what it is with you right now...

What is DSound?

DSound is a decentralized web application that allows anyone to upload, listen and discover music and other sounds stored on top of the IPFS Network.

It uses STEEM blockchain as a persistent database, so by posting their sounds the authors can earn rewards in cryptocurrency, when other users like their content, which can be exchanged easily to US Dollars, Euros or any other currency, with a look and feel very similar to Soundcloud.

Check DSound Intro post for more details

DSound Discord Server (the tribe is connected)

If you're learning about DSound now or you didn't connect yet, please join our Discord server at:

https://discord.gg/hSsBw3b

There you'll find a few channels to have everybody from our community getting together and making DSound even better.

If you need any help, please chat with our moderators who have done a great job in making this server a great place to hang out! Also check their work on DSound since they are content creators as well:

@juliakponsford
@jamesub
@archaimusic
@jamesub
@jeffandhisguitar
@darrenclaxton
@nickyhavey

DSound is this! <3

"Music is what feelings sound like"
DSound <3 Music

---

And If you trust and approve what DSound Community does in the Steem ecosystem, please give us your Witness vote to help us continue this journey...

Design by @aleister

You can vote for @dsound as a Steem Witness here: Vote with SteemConnect

... but if you prefer the oldfashion way, please go to:
https://steemit.com/~witnesses

and vote for @dsound :)

You might not find us on the list yet, so please use this field to vote:

Alternatively you can set @dsound as your proxy, so that you follow the witnesses we vote as well. This might be interesting for all of you that don't know that well for which witnesses to vote... To do so use this field:

Note: You will need your active private key or your master password for these operations.

DSound Community is grateful for your support! :)