WITNESS ANNOUNCEMENT - New Witness on the block - Partnering with @davemccoy

in #witness-category7 years ago (edited)

Please accept my declaration to become a STEEM Witness.

To give you a better picture of who I am and to get an idea about my intentions, I will cover the following points in this post:

  • My Background
  • Community Building
  • Witness Partner
  • My Dev work
  • Bid Bots
  • Paid Witness Votes
  • Witness Setup

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Background banner

Hello, Hejsan, こんにちは。

I would like to begin by telling you a bit about myself. My name is Daniel, an IT Engineer with a long background in the IT industry, working mainly with networks and security. I have been coding and scripting in various languages both as a hobby and part of my professional career. Python is an especially useful tool for a network and security engineer and I was very excited when I realized I could use my coding skills after I got involved in the STEEM blockchain.

I'm Swedish, and I speak, in addition to Swedish, English and Japanese (to some extent... :)) And for any Dutch speakers, please feel free to try me out. 😄So please reach out to me in one of these languages. For everything else, there is Google translate. 😉


Community Building banner

When I joined Steemit I quickly realized the power of interaction, and what an important role comments play on the platform. I will never forget the welcome message from @sirwinchester, with his cool animation, and the warm welcome from @teamsteem and @playfulfoodie. They had a big impact on me after I had published my introduction post.

I started to actively write my blog in May 2017 and I joined the Minnowsupport project in June, only a few days after @aggroed and @ausbitbank had kicked it off. Through the Minnowsupport Project I learned the importance of networking outside of Steemit and I met some extraordinary people, and I got many ideas for various projects.

Comment Challenge

My longest running initiative is the Steemit Comment Challenge, which I started in mid-June 2017. I'm currently up to round number #26 and with the current schedule, there is a new challenge released every Sunday.

I did a quick summary of all the prize money during the last 25 rounds. In total I’ve paid out 418 SBD. In addition, I've recently started to give away SP delegations and have so far delegated 2600 SP split into several 1 week periods.

Although I understand the importance of community building, my biggest weakness is probably in sales and self-promotion. For this reason, I have found a great partner which I think will be a perfect complement for my witness campaign.


Witness Partner

Partnering with @davemccoy

I'm happy to introduce my PR & Sales Manager, @davemccoy. 😀 I got to know Dave after I featured one of his posts, and he has been, by far, the most awesome person I met through my Comment Challenge.

Dave has an enormous drive and his engagement on Steemit is outstanding. He is one of the co-founders of the Newbieresteem initiative, found under the #newbieresteemday tag or on Newbieresteem's Discord server, and it is absolutely remarkable what he has achieved in this short time.

Dave joined Steemit little over 3 months ago, but in this time he has helped a great number of people and encouraged them in the best possible way.


Tech Dev banner

Most of my Steem development activities have been linked to the Minnowsupport project and I have, for example, built 4 different bots.

  • @Minnowsupport - As far as I know, this is the biggest community bot in terms of users and votes. It is free for all registered users as long as the content is inline with the Minnowsupport project’s guidelines. The current user base is above 17K and with active management from the Moderators, the number of votes are kept below 2000 per day. 2000 votes is the current daily average maximum when allowing the voting power to recover.
  • Pond Patrol - This bot is a pure Discord bot with the purpose of keeping channels clean of Steemit link spam. It keeps track and warns abusers, and notifies Mods in case of repeated violations.
  • "The Law" - This is the bot, "You know who", which name shall not be said. 😄This is the brain behind the MSP Blacklist. A blacklist with currently over 3000 banned users. The bot allows easy administration of the blacklist, it can mute accounts, pull votes and updates a Google spreadsheet which is publicly available.
  • @Dorabot - This was initially my personal helper, which has now transformed into an MSP/PALnet exclusive bot.

Among other various projects, I have been helping @freezepeach to build a bot to neutralize flags. It started out as a simple script but has now a Discord interface with an option to neutralize flags for a single post or for a user's all posts and comments.

Public blacklist

Something I have in the pipeline is to make the MSP blacklist available in a different format. Currently, it is only available as a read-only Google spreadsheet.

The idea is to provide an API which will allow queries for blacklisted users. The idea is also to provide a dump of the full list and possibly also allow filters to only dump a list of users belonging to a specific ban category.


Bid Bots Banner

As this is a hot, and somewhat infected, topic I want to share with you my view.

I am not fundamentally against bid bots and I have used them myself. With the current Hard Fork I think they are a part of the eco-system and the economic forces surrounding it. But I think they unfortunately take the focus away from good content creation and I think the community would be better without them.

I have recently changed my point of view and this has led me to change the way I use the bots.

The reasons for using bid bots I would divide into two categories, Post Promotors or Cash Generators.

Post Promotors

This is to make your post more visible. The goal would either be to spread a message or to indirectly increase profits by the upvotes received due to the increased exposure. The ROI is not an important factor, the main thing is to maximize publicity.

Cash generator

Here ROI is everything! The goal is purely to increase your post earnings. Getting a good bid is crucial as the return can otherwise easily turn into the negative.

A majority of people using bid bots I would say fall into the second category. And they use the Steem Bot Tracker developed by @yabapmatt to find opportunities and to maximize ROI.

Bid Bot Conclusion

Even with a positive result, I’ve started to think that bid bots do more harm than help. If I find a post with huge bot votes, I would be discouraged to upvote myself. And this feeling would be magnified if it is a new user. I’m excited to help newbies on this platform, but if someone thinks bid bots are the path to success, I would assume they are in no need of help and I would be less encouraged to act.

Furthermore, if I see a post on Trending which ended up there because of paid votes, it has to be a pretty damn good post for me to not get discouraged. And if we are talking about such "damn" good quality, it would probably end up on Trending anyway... 😉

If I’m thinking this way I’m sure there must be others feeling the same.

For this reason, I have changed my own habits. I have up to recently only used bid bots on my contest posts, as a way to boost prize payouts, but I have now decided to stop that as well. Although I've returned the extra profit to the contestants, I feel the negative aspects still applies. I also want my actions to be consistent and fully transparent as I take the step to become a STEEM witness.

An Ethical Whitelist Vote Bot

I have actually been working on a project for some time, that involves a new type of vote bot. It is a 100% whitelisting bot and it was my aim to create the most ethical vote bot out there. But as my negative sentiment for vote bots has increased this hasn't really been a priority. At this point I might abandon this idea completely. Please stay tuned to find out more.


Paid witness votes banner

Although I have no experience yet being a witness, I’ve heard rumors that there are people engaged in witness vote selling.

I have no clue how widespread it is so I just have to wait and see. I just want to make it clear that I will not accept this behavior. And you can be sure I will report back if I get exposed to it.


Witness setup banner

I’m currently running a server hosted in Germany with the following specs:

  • Intel i7
  • 64 GB DDR3 RAM
  • 2 x 2TB HD
  • 1 Gbps connectivity and high-speed Internet

My idea is to get a backup server as soon as I start to climb in ranking. Due to my Japanese connections, I would love to host a witness node in Japan, but I would have to see if it is financially feasible.

Price feed

I'm currently using the Price Feed Tool from @yabapmatt, running with a 60 min update interval.


Please consider voting me as a Witness.

Vote for @danielsaori

SteemConnect Link

Steemit Link
Vote for danielsaori

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As you know I am very very honored to be your "sales manager/promoter" and I will do my best to help you get as much awareness as possible. We need community-minded witnesses like you that understand how important engagement is at all levels, especially with the newbies and minnows. If we ever want to grow as a platform, then engagement by real humans is key.

I am so excited to know that you are stepping up and I am 100% confident in you as a person and know you have our backs. I mean all the "little people" that want to see this as a wonderful social platform where we can share, play games, and make real connections..

You will be great and I'm happy to fully support you and a few more new witnesses like @abh12345 and @paulag from @steemcommunity. I know we can leverage our various connections to find ways to improve the experience for everyone! In fact this is so important, that I am making it my number 1 priority until you both make it into the top levels and can have real influence.

I'm honored to have you by my side and I hope we can do something awesome out of this. As you said, "engagement by real humans is key". A lot of today's delegated SP need to be made available for curation and not wasted on bid bots. We will most likely need a system change to see any bigger changes. Curation is just not profitable enough to compete with the bid bot service. But let's work together to at least spread the word and hopefully we will end up a bit closer to the "perfect world". :)

I will do my best and really believe in you :)... I have crafted this banner to show you one way I would like to get the word out... Please tell me how it looks and let me know if you would like to make any adjustments.

ps.. "Payable Pennies" is a concept that I will leave at least 3.0 pennies so that they will get paid.. Most people don't even know they don't get paid below 1.9 pennies (or something close to that number).

Congratulations, these Payable Pennies are my way of supporting @danielsaori for witness to build this community from the bottom up!

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danielsaori witness.gif

I have voted for @danielsaori for witness

Looks super cool! :)
I tried to keep the gif in a similar style to the comment challenge gif. Nothing exclusive, but hopefully it will do.

You did a great job... I think it looks great too :)

Congratulations, these Payable Pennies are my way of supporting @danielsaori for witness to build this community from the bottom up!

red-diamond.gif

danielsaori witness.gif

I have voted for @danielsaori for witness

Maybe this idea will find some traction with you folks....

Allow users to toggle on a feature that would present a CAPCHA when they went to upvote. Such non-spammer/non-bot upvotes would be run through the n^2 calculation for reward payout and all non-CAPCHA treated as n ().

Such an approach may depreciate two deviant activities in one swoop.

It would work on Steemit, but Steemit is just a frontend to access the STEEM blockchain.
So I'm afraid it wouldn't do much good.

Thanks for the clarification. Back to.the drawing board. 😎

Congratulations! And thanks for the great competitions!

Congratulations! And thanks for the great competitions!

I come to know about you because of @beeyou and @davemccoy. They both are doing fantastic job for the community and from your post I learned you are also doing a lot. So, one of my witness votes definitely goes to you.

Hi @reazuliqbal. Appreciate you stopping by to show support! I met Daniel months ago and he has always supported the little fishes here in the community. 🙂

thank you for the kind words @reazuliqbal! I appreciate them very much... Here here are a few Payable Pennies!

Congratulations, these Payable Pennies are my way of supporting @danielsaori for witness to build this community from the bottom up!

red-diamond.gif

danielsaori witness.gif

I have voted for @danielsaori for witness

@beeyou and @davemccoy are some excellent people on this platform to be friends with. They are doing a lot of good stuff.

Thanks for your vote and your support!
SteemOn!

This is great news.
At this time, wonderful people become witnesses.
Recently he became a witness @Noisy.
And suddenly this announcement comes.
@Danielsaori, you got my vote, although not too strong, but dedicated with great joy.

I had the opportunity to get to know you as a wonderful man. You are a great man who works tirelessly for the entire community.
You are a curator who does not hesitate to support every good author. You are always full of optimism and joy and spreading them around you. You will never refuse to help or advise.
You teach many new and older Steemians what's the most important to Steemit. You learn that good content, not only in posts but also in comments, is more important than stupid and unnecessary speech. The appealing futility can get a great reward, but in a few days no one will remember it. But good words can help someone in a few years because they stay in the blockchain.

Daniel, I wish you only the best, many successes and lots of witness votes.
Stay as you are and you will certainly be much better.

Steem On!

Wow, that is an amazing comment Petecko! I don't know what to say, I'm speechless.
I promise I will do my best to make this a better place.

I hope everything is good on your end. It was a while since we last time.
How is the little one doing? Is he giving you many sleepless nights ;) or has he found a nice pattern?

I have less time for Steemit now. If I want to sleep.
Little is awesome! It's almost 8kg of luck.

Nice to hear. It is beautiful to see the little ones grow up. I wish you a wonderful time.

Heard about you and being a witness from @davemccoy... read your post, looked at your projects and involvement and went straight to vote for you.

Good luck!

Thank you for the vote!
I wish you a nice day/evening.

I may have to stop being lazy using a proxy and go vote your witness. You have been a godsend to many projects I'm involved in, and you are definitely one of best steemians I know of. I just hope your PR man can effectively convey the level of professionalism that I have personally witnessed in the months of interaction with you.

Thank you R0n for the nice words. It means a lot to me!
And I'm 110% sure @davemccoy will do an awesome job. :)

Thank you for the vote of confidence, I will do my best! :)

I can dig it but why would you want to nutralize flags. that is the only thing keeping trending eaven remotely under control from becoming a puss infected gaping wound that just so happens to also be the face of steemit to new comers. I mean look at jerry banfield shamelessly bot voting his post to over $2000 . that is PATHETIC . Flags are the only thing keeping him and the hajins in check from raping the reward pool daily.

@freezepeach would be better suited to answer. But I know their mission is linked to free speech, where they try to help people being flagged due to opinion disagreement. Normally these are small accounts as well, so it wouldn't have anything to do with the trending pages.

I hope that helps. I can get someone behind the @freezepeach account if you want a more in-depth follow-up.

i would be fine with it if it helps minnow accounts that get smashed by whales but i would be 100% against it if it was used by the trending A holes. I will go give it a look see and try to figure it out a bit.

Much appreciation for the work you're doing automating @msp-makeaminnow. Do you have plans to start a public API node?

Sorry I didn't get back to you about MaM. I will ping you later on Discord. I'm aiming to have it ready by the end of the week.

I have been thinking about starting my own node, but it requires some big investments to pull it off. If my witness goes well, it would definitely be on my list. I would probably start with a private node dedicated to all my MSP related apps/bots, and then expand from there.

you've got an amazing profile @danielsaori and in my opinion, you're good for the job. I you're community minded and also experienced, so that makes you fit for the job.

Thank you for your support, Israel. Great to have you here.

Good luck with your ongoing projects!

Awesome....
You sold yourself quite well as opposed to saying you're not a campaigner sort of.
Lol

Getting @davemccoy to be your PR is actually the best thing you've done.

I've seen him being so supportive of not just you but many others.

You have my vote already.
You won my heart by the weekly comment challenge which, though I have never won, but has made me be better in commenting.

See you at the top....

I'm sure resteeming this for my friends to support you too.

Cheers....

Thank you very much for the nice comment about me @julietisrael... I'm honored :)

And I have already added @danielsaori too ;)

Thank you for resteeming and spreading the word!!!

you're welcome Dave

Many thanks Julietisrael for your support.
Sounds like a good idea to meet at the top. ;) See you there!
Have a nice morning/day/evening.

Smiles.....
Thank you
Success

Why are all the witness announcements made during work hours? I have to go hunt down my active key to make my witness vote! It was the same for @steemcommunity. :)

You have my small SP support. I even checked steemd to make sure the witness vote holds (had to vote three times). I found out with my last witness vote that votes for anyone outside the top 50 don't always take. You have to cast the vote twice, even three or four times for some. Who knew?

Very happy to see this announcement Daniel. You have shown tremendous support to the redfish and minnows. Happy to be able to show some support back to you.

Smart of you to choose @davemccoy as your PR & Sales Manager! 😀 I've only known Dave a few short months, but he is a force onto himself. He does amazing work supporting fellow redfish and minnows on here. I'm proud to be part of his #newbieresteemday community.

Congratulations on this big step forward. I know you and many others have the Steemit community at heart.

I really appreciate your support and your quick vote. But no rush, this is not a race, more like a never-ending marathon. :)

I look forward working with Dave and I promise to do my best to make this a better place.

I look forward working with Dave and I promise to do my best to make this a better place.

I have full faith you will!

A never-ending marathon...and we want to ensure you get that full wind force pushing you forward from the start!

I know you will be right there @beeyou, thank you for everything you do :)