Day #4 of SteemFest² featured a rainy day in Lisbon, Portugal at two beautiful venues. Would you like to read the stories of the day because these impacted me the most?

To start the day, I woke up at noon and tried my first Uber Black ride which is basically a slightly fancier version of a normal Uber. My driver was Rui Meira who gave me a wonderful audio tour of the city on the drive to Lisbon Secret Spotd where the main conference took place today!

After arriving without eating for about 18 hours and normally eating about a kilogram of fruits and vegetables each day, I was hunting desperately for the fruit. Thankfully halfway through lunch the little fruit sticks came out and I had about fifty of them including handfuls of the empty sticks.

The view outside was just beautiful where I had an amazing conversation with @lifemovedbysteem. She shared that she joined Steem because it was the first social network and blogging platform she felt inspired to join because of the morality in its creation to empower and give back to users. Our conversation was deep and confirms what I saw in Steem from the beginning in a community where we can truly connect, share our stories from the heart, and share in the value we create for the world.

After taking a few pictures in this tree with @teamhumble and @dayleeo, I did some acroyoga for the first time with @acromott and @karensuestudios which was an awesome experience because in reading Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss I had been hoping to try it for months! We did the acroyoga down on the grass here!

After acroyoga, I had a wonderful talk with @noisy who helped me learn a new way to explain Steem where we think of earning rewards or leveling up with our efforts posting instead of putting it in terms of trying to make money. For future videos on Steem, I will be presenting in the style he shared with me. I loved seeing his family also and teared up a little bit watching them and missing my own family!

Next @ned did his fireside chat which we enjoyed listening to and hearing him answer a lot of challenging questions combined with a few that Google would have been happy to answer! I was grateful to do standup comedy later where I got to talk the entire time :)

After @ned's talk, @timcliff and @artist1989 stopped by and we shared a conversation rooted in presence talking about everything from witnessing to travel and relationships. Tim shared his experience witnessing with his bottom line being to make an outstanding contribution as a witness and trust that the rest such as votes and rewards will take care of itself. When he first made it into the top 20, he was very excited only to drop out quickly right afterwards. I often have an idea that a little tip like this will be really helpful because less than 24 hours the exact same thing happened to my witness.

After a few days in the top 20, the second largest vote for my witness and one of the original supporters for months, @clayop removed his vote dropping me out of the top 20 which removes about $200 a day from the advertising budget at https://airtable.com/shrXuoYTnODWA0QG1 because I am using all of my witness earnings to advertise Steem. This means a drop of about 100,000 ad impressions per day and probably a loss about a hundred new signups for Steem each day. Of course this is a big disappointment because I am an ordinary person that gets excited and disappointed like anyone else along with having no idea why the vote was removed!

At the same time, I am very grateful for the talk with Tim yesterday before this happened because he already went through the same and is now one of the top 5 witnesses consistently. I am also happy to see to see that @clayop approved my friend Jeff @followbtcnews with the vote that was going towards my witness because Jeff is doing valuable work for us with the @minnowsupport project along with his new blockchain explorer and I am sure he will be very excited to see the huge upvote for his witness especially when combined with the recent upvote from @pumpkin!

If you would like to vote for witnesses, would you please vote at https://steemit.com/~witnesses because the witness votes we make are the most important for determining the future of Steem?

After talking to @timcliff, I watched the courageous pitches from the hackathon participants to Steem and BitShares for the rewards! I also learned and will share more soon about @steemitworldmap and am beginning to add my posts in with a location tag after hearing this presentation as seen below!

!steemitworldmap 38.728995 lat -9.122128 long d3scr

Congratulations to @oroger and @martibis for winning the 2017 hackaton with the @steemitworldmap and thanks to @roxane for her post which helped me find the names of the winners again after I forgot at https://steemit.com/steemfest/@roxane/steemfest-hackaton-first-price-french-community-rocks-2017113t182616301z.

After the hackathon winners were announced, I met @andrewmcmillen just before a lovely dinner in the same location! At dinner, I had the pleasure of sitting next to a fellow YouTuber @heiditravels along with my friends from Florida @terrybrock and @ginacarr! I did not make any time to take pictures but some of my tablemates did!

@heiditravels shared some of the comments she receives on YouTube which gave me a laugh and help for being able to respond kindly to the comments on my posts and channel as well! @allasyummyfood across the table had a discussion with us about the best ways to eat healthy and I enjoyed seeing her take pictures of the food for her blog! For the best pictures of the dinner, I would check out her post on it when she publishes it!

As @terrybrock, I started to realize that I have been without a mentor a long time in my business and started listening to what he shared with this in mind! He shared several helpful stories at dinner and gave me a lot of laughs along with explaining why collision is illegal which I had no idea about! Here is what Terry, Gina, and I got for our vegetarian dinner!

While the dessert was probably not vegan, I enjoyed it anyway and felt fine afterwards!

After dinner we went for an amazing afterparty with a live performance by @steembirds as well as my stand up comedy and the best DJ set I have ever experienced live from @sneak! Even though I planned to head out directly after my comedy, I stayed and danced almost the entire time to the music along with lots of laughs with @tomasgeorge who knows so much about music he could tell me ahead of time what @sneak would do with the beat to the point where I was even getting it right sometimes by the end of the night! @ashleypeat, @starkerz, and @molometer spent most of the night with us and I took another Uber ride home!

For the standup comedy, I will post the video to YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/jerrybanfield and Dtube if it works @tomasgeorge made as soon as he edits it and gives me the file! I am grateful to @roelandp for giving me the chance to make my first live stand up performance at Steemfest2 and appreciate the incredible support from each audience member laughing and enjoying the performance!

Finally, I read and upvoted at 1% almost every comment on my last post at https://steemit.com/steemfest/@jerrybanfield/steemfest-speakers-inspire-my-new-upvoting-system because I care what you have to say! Going forward, if I upvote your comment I have read it and if not, I have not. I will plan to upvote everyone 1% to allow you to decide who the top comments should be instead of me doing it. To see if I read your comment, check back in 24 to 48 hours to see if you have a vote from me. When I see the same comment on multiple posts, I will begin/continue ignoring it.

What you write helps me adjust what I do accordingly in a real time dance we do every day. For better or worse, I am flexible in most of what I do meaning if I do something that does not add value to Steem, I am willing to immediately stop it based on feedback. The challenge for me is that from my point of view what looks like a great idea to help our community might not look the same to you. I also respect that disagreement is healthy for us and often confirms going forward with an idea.

Upvoting

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Automatic and manual curation both are important for Steem because of how they interact. Authors like me receiving a lot of automatic upvotes have the best positive reinforcement to keep showing up and posting on Steem every day. While some posts I make are crap, many are too long to read, and sometimes I earn more money than I might deserve on a post, other times I make posts that bring thousands of new users to Steem and collectively have brought about 100,000 views to Steem so far from organic traffic sources on my posts like Google search, Twitter retweets, Facebook shares, etc. Automatic upvotes have been critical in inspiring me to show up every day because I know I have a good chance of earning on every post.

When we add in manual curation with automatic upvotes, we have a very good system where authors can both earn consistently for effort and earn big on the best posts. Authors getting more automatic upvotes have a better shot at getting recognized for manual curation projects and being found by whales for huge upvotes. The biggest difference on a post is $0.00 to $0.01 and 0 upvotes to 1. Our manual curators are essential for helping the best content on Steem get rewarded the most.

The best help I can offer is in automatic upvoting with @steemvoter because I am limited in my ability to read posts on Steem while I have enough Steem Power and voting power to upvote as many as 2,000 posts a day with at least $0.05 each. Others of us are empowered with time and energy to read hundreds of posts every day and provide all votes manually.

If you would like me to notice your post and add you to my auto upvoter, would you please use the tag jerrybanfield in your post. If you would like to MANUALLY CURATE the posts to help me find the authors I need to add to my auto upvoter first and vote up the most, would you please upvote the best posts with the jerrybanfield tag because I will read the posts and the authors in order of the trending page at https://steemit.com/trending/jerrybanfield. I will be adding new authors daily to my autovoter from this tag and am happy to see so many posts already.

EXCEPTIONS for my auto voting. I will not upvote video only posts or authors consistently posting videos not from DTube with almost no text or pictures because this actually subtracts value from Steem by lowering our Google organic search ranking with pages that have no content and just an embedded video. Pictures from a video help to rank in Google image search and allow a reader to experience the video without watching. Not following these guidelines will result in not being added and/or being removed from my autovoter.

Planning to Hire Full Time Developer With My Witness Rewards

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Given I am not contributing with my witness to the coding and if anything happens to my servers I am currently completely dependent on other witnesses to help me, I am planning to hire a developer full time in whichever programming languages are needed the most using the rewards from my witness. This developer will be very strong in coding, focus completely on Steem, be available to help with my witness and all witnesses in times of emergency, and will empower a vote for my witness to also bring a strong contribution to the code.

My plan is to learn which skills are currently lacking the most among the top witnesses and hire a developer for about $2,000 a month full time from a country such as Bosnia where this is a full time salary to focus completely on contributing to the coding with Steem. I have a friend in Bosnia that can refer me to many developers just graduating from university who would be very excited to earn $2,000 a month and I also have the ability to put a job announcement out to the millions of followers online to find the best candidates. After hiring hundreds on Upvote, I can even make the hire via Upwork if necessary.

While I was hoping to get started with this immediately because I think it would add a significant value to our community to have another full time developer working for us, I am not ready to begin hiring today today because of the loss of the upvote from @clayop which was worth about 3 million dollars in Steem Power. Therefore, it would be irresponsible of me to offer to hire someone when I do not know when I can consistently pay them using the witness rewards. While in the top 20 the rewards are enough to provide $100 a day for ads, $100 a day in delegations to authors and projects, and $60 a day to a developer at $1 Steem, at rank 21 to 30 the rewards are about 50 Steem per day.

When we decide to vote me back into the top 20 witnesses at https://steemit.com/~witnesses into a position where I am not likely to drop out with one or two votes removed, I will announce my job opening for a developer to work full time in collaboration with my witness and who will be paid out of the rewards! Until then I am mentioning it here and will again because maybe you can connect me with the right person who will be ready to start work when we are ready with the rewards?

If you support my work here on Steem, would you please make a vote for jerrybanfield as a witness or set jerrybanfield as a proxy to handle all witness votes at https://steemit.com/~witnesses because 100% of the rewards I receive are spent advertising Steem and when I am in the top 20 I am planning to hire a full time developer to assist with our blockchain out of the witness rewards I receive? Thank you to the 1800+ accounts voting for me as a witness, the 640M VESTS assigned from users trusting me to make all witness votes by setting me as proxy, and @followbtcnews for making these .gif images!

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Love,
Jerry Banfield

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