HF21/22 - Payout changes and ToS Update
With the changes the new hard fork(s) bring, MinnowBooster is making some changes too. Some to how our payouts to vote sellers work, some to our ToS.
It's important to remember that with the new downvote pool, people will likely flag a lot more. We cannot refund losses due to downvotes, as these are a tool for the community to regulate itself.
Here's the summary!
Payout changes
Our P2P vote selling allows the sellers to keep the curation rewards. This is not possible for those who delegate to the bot, which is why we decided to relinquish our 15% fee on the @minnowbooster bot.
In summary:
- P2P vote sellers receive Full curation rewards + 85% of SBD paid for the vote, note that after HF21 curation rewards are now 50% of the post value, pre-hard fork it was 25%.
- Delegators to the bot receive 100% of earned SBD paid to the bot
Upvote calculator
If you've bought a vote via MinnowBooster before, you've probably encountered our upvote calculator.
At the moment, the calculator assumes linear rewards, but those only apply after a certain overall payout value. The calculated rewards can thus fluctuate between -50% and +20%. Please keep that in mind when buying smaller votes!
We will be adding a disclaimer to the site soon.
Terms of Service
The changes to our ToS aim to ensure the ethical use of MinnowBooster (MB). We will enforce the new ToS even stricter than before, so act responsibly! Abusers that upvote content in violation of our ToS will have the upvote removed without a refund of payment.
What constitutes as abuse of @minnowbooster?
- Using multiple accounts to post duplicate content and purchasing MB votes for them
- Using multiple accounts to post low-quality content and purchasing MB votes
- Upvoting posts that are written in copy/paste style
- Using a MB vote for very short or repetitive content. Length is subjective, but 150 words is a good safe guideline.
- Using MB with automation scripts and bots
- Scraping information from the MB website
Rules for Photography
- Posts containing only a single photo are not allowed
- Posts must contain supporting text and show significant effort in terms of production value (location, setup, lighting, and subject)
Rules for Art, Videos, and Animation
- Content must be originally produced by the author and contain supporting text
- Memes are not considered art
Rules for Public Domain Content
- Sources and Authors must be correctly cited and linked to original content
Topics barred from upvotes
- Violence, self-harm, gore
- Politics & political opinion
- Religion
- Drugs and other illegal substances
- Scams and pyramid schemes
- NSFW
If you want to upvote a post, consider the individual circumstances. A small upvote for a short post may be okay on occasion, but keep our rules in mind.
Abuse Policy
Users who violate our Terms of Service regarding upvotes will face the following consequences:
- Your post may be unvoted by MinnowBooster
- You will not receive a refund for the original upvote
- Your account can be blacklisted
Other
- User errors while using our upvote or delegation services are non-refundable
- Violation of the ToS can result in temporary or permanent blacklisting. In case a user is blacklisted, the first 10 transactions to Minnowbooster will be returned with a warning in the transaction memo. No further refunds will occur after the 10th
- Users that frequently abuse other Steem users may also be added to the blacklist, regardless of their vote-buying behavior.
- MinnowBooster and BuildTeam shall not be liable for any losses whatsoever suffered from blockchain downtime and hard forks, losses may include no payouts for the duration of the downtime, low/no voting demand in the days preceding or following the event, failed votes etc.
If you have any questions or encounter violations of our ToS, please feel free to reach out on our Discord server!
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Great to see the services heading in this direction! At the end, we are all trying to provide value to the ecosystem and this will surely help!
Posted using Partiko iOS
Pleasure, thanks for supporting our services.
Very good terms of service improvement for the sake of the community @minnowbooster
Duly noted. Thanks a lot, minnowbooster.
Posted using Partiko Android
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It's tempting to downvote this. I'm thinking about it.
So, let's say I bought a hard copy movie. I would get a case, a disc, some paper. Some of that paper might be useful, but I certainly wouldn't say I bought the movie for the paper inside the case.
This post is a terms of service. This would be the one card, out of all the paper I acquired within the movie case, that I'd most likely throw away/recycle.
That being said, I approve of the message, but the rewards, not so much, for the reasons stated above. Please do not take the downvote personally.
Have a nice day!
Up and dowbvotes are an integral part of the value discovery process of steem.
We appreciate that you have added a comment to tell us why you are downvoting. And while we do not agree with you in regards that a TOS is not very valuable, we respect your opinion and wouldn't take it personally.
Happy #newsteem 😊
I can agree a TOS would be valuable, to you/the organization, when it's your TOS. I promise you, it was a tricky call. I'm still feeling my way around in the dark, trying to get a good handle on these new and improved curation tools.
It's my understanding the upvotes received were not organic. Those who upvoted did agree to vote blindly though due to a contractual agreement. They're earning curation rewards, so it's not like this post was selfish or something like that.
Did the Steemvoter service recently add some kind of a random voting order feature for trails or am I confusing that service with something else? When the subscription payment votes roll in, are they always in the same order? Do members of your organization vote first? I hope these questions are not coming across as hard pressed. I'm not trying to stir things up. I'm curious.
These posts are tricky because they're almost immune to downvotes, at least from those who subscribe to the service.
The votes you see are from our Steemvoter 1 freemium service. These votes don't have any order imposed on them but we don't actively randomize them either, which is something we can look at, even though we planned to discontinue development of sv1 to focus on sv2 which has timed and randomized vote capabilities.
As history has shown our posts are not immune to downvotes, but rather the services we provide and post about are liked by many users, so most accept that we deserve rewards for it. Should our post rewards get downvoted, that would mean that BuildTeam would have to charge more premium fees instead of a freemium model. We like to offer both options to give our users the choice, but we will also adapt in a situation where that is no longer possible.
Regarding the curation rewards, the best way to earn curation rewards is to frontrun our freemium guild. That way you are automatically on the front of the queue and our software will detect that and not issue a second vote. This way we reward users who are passionate about supporting us.
A random vote order could potentially turn into a nice bonus for those supporters, but play out like a daily lottery. That's a lot of SP following the first few votes. Could be another potential incentive to power up as well, leading to more powerful votes, more curation rewards, more bank for you folks. People like those little perks and having another small reason to power up doesn't hurt. So that's something to think about.
That wording makes me uncomfortable. It's like saying member 'X' must put up with an inorganic post posing as something popular on the trending page, or everyone else pays a price.
It's your responsibility to create something appealing to lower the odds of receiving downvotes, so your customers can stay happy.
It wouldn't be fair to those curating and using downvotes as they see fit if you closed up shop and told hundreds of customers, "It's the fault of a few people who used downvotes."
That would create unnecessary animosity in a worst-case scenario.
In the post above I see a lot of rules and you're expecting to see quality. You can, too. ;)
I'm not saying the post above is shoddy. Not trying to test your patience either. I want to see people succeed here.