Help Yourself! (steemit for dummies)
This is a simplified version of a previous article that some readers had found to be "too heavy".
There's gold in them thar neurons!
Why are you here? Whether you like to admit it or not, you came here for the "money" (or "quasy-money")! If it wasn't for the money, you'd still lurk on Facebook or elsewhere!
Now of course you didn't expect to get free money, did you? Bitcoin isn't free, is it ? Neither is Ether. If you want bitcoin, or ether, you need to "mine". Well, why would you think getting STEEM is any different ? If you want STEEM, you need to mine too! Except here, you mine ... your brain!
Brain mining for dummies
Steemians write posts (articles) while the steem blockchain fills the "reward pool" with a mix of STEEM and SBD
Steemians "curate" (upvote and, less frequently, downvote) the posts written in 1 above
The mix of rewards from the pool is distributed to the authors that had been "upvoted" (~75%) and to those that "upvoted" (~25%)
A sharp mind would ask: "What happens to the authors that had NOT been upvoted?". Good question! They get zilch, nothing, zero, nada!
Look at these beautiful posts of mine, from an era when I had no clue:
They are long and required effort, thinking, research. Yet they brought me ... zero! Fortunately "money" was only an alibi for me because I wanted to write anyway.
But while you are writing (and reading), why not also make some "play money"? Even if it ends up being worth nothing, it's still more fun!
Advice no. 1: do NOT write!
At least do not put too much energy into writing at first as your energy is better spent differently, as I'll explain below. You can see from the above picture, writing can easily be a waste of time. You put a lot of effort in it and nobody cares. Really, go check for your self, those articles are pretty long and reek of brain juice! Yet nobody ever comes to read what you put time and love into crafting! And when you get a vote, it's from a plankton and worth $0.00. And even that vote comes after the 7 days period, when it doesn't count anymore
Advice no. 2: VOTE!
Voting is wonderful, it has a whole bunch of advantages over writing:
- it requires a LOT less effort than writing an article you won't be ashamed of.
- it draws the author's attention to your existence. It's even better if you manage to accompany the vote with a smart comment. You can easily make more from posting a good comment on the post of a whale than from a full post of yours. If, despite Advice no. 1, you did author some posts, a vote plus a comment can draw the whale to visit your blog and maybe like what he reads and drop an upvote
- it gets YOU some steem (remember the 25% of "curation rewards")!
Advice no. 3: Vote SMART!
Ok, this post has been suggested by @littlescribe. Truth is, I had written first a post in French, that I then expanded in a (big) post in english (link at the end). She offered this very valuable piece of advice:
Most people won't have the stamina to read or understand a lot of what you've put there. But the concept is pretty straightforward. Vote, or else someone else will have access to that untapped voting power. Vote after 30 minutes, or it won't count toward you. Don't vote for yourself until you've given other people a chance to vote for you first, so they can reap from the curation pool.
A few comments to clarify:
a. the reward pool is distributed whether you choose the beneficiaries (by voting) or not ! If you don't vote, you basically leave it up to all the others to decide how the money is distributed.
b. your voting power (whether it's $0.01 or $10) replenishes at the rate of 2% every 2.4 hours and never goes above 100%. If you don't vote at least that often, you are forfeiting your right to pick who gets a bit of the reward pool
c. by the way, you also forfeit some money that you'd have made yourself, thanks to the curation rewards.
Because you cannot be reading Steemit all day long, you might want to choose a tool such as Streemian.com or steemauto.com.
On the latter, go to Dashboard - Settings and set a floor below which steemauto should stop voting for you (in order to avoid it completely depleting your voting power)
Then pick "FANBASE" and on that page enter the users whose writing you are a fan of.
Then as soon as your voting power is above the threshold set out earlier, steemauto will be on the watchout for possible posts published by the authors you are fan of, and upvote them. Make sure you adjust the settings to vote on articles which are at least 30' old in order to optimize your own curation rewards.
Bonus info
If, after your vote, the rewards of the post you voted for increase significantly (perhaps thanks to voting bots), then you as curator stand to gain a lot.
Basically that's it. Give it a thought.
Here's the big post I've mentioned earlier: Best way to Grow on Steemit. If you like what you' ve read in there, consider using the trick I explain here.
Here's a shoutout for you, if you care to take a gander: shoutout for brains mcgee
Here comes my smart comment 😋! Voting and commenting is required in order to make yourself visible on the platform. If you really want to get some significant reward, better invest some money in SP 😁.
Writing articles is still the best way to have a nice organic growth. Of course you will need a writing strategy 😀. That being said, I will recommend the following book. Pitch anything by Oren Klaff
It may look like is not related, but I assure you it is 😉. Enjoy!
I don't see a future of this platform unless there are people who want to grow organically based on content. Believe me, at one point in time it will be veeeeery boring to be around Steemit if the real content creators (the people who managed to have a visited blog even before being on Steemit and do this first of all out of passion and calling) get out and don't find it attractive anymore. There will be only a bunch of people discussing about the technicalities of the platform and the other parts, the "facebook users" kind of people, who will be into this only for the reward.
@sorin.cristescu , a great article as always. I believe that among all the technical articles I read on Steemit, yours are the ones that really made me understand the mechanics of the platform. Thanks man.
Saith the Whitepaper:
Sure, we get it. And I suppose we understand in theory that
The only problem is, at what point do we change algorithms to become more accommodating to organic content creators? Because it's the good ones that are going to lose faith.
....Um, I think we're at that point, @ned.
very, very well pointed out!
I am wholly with you on this one. I admit I was a bit surprised when I realized, from reading @littlescribe's shoutout that "most of my best stuff" is "advice on how to survive on here". Indeed this is the type of content that attracted users to my posts because this platform is so complex and that's the first thing people are interested in when they come around.
But it better don't stay that way: one of the best things about steemit is its catering to the needs of non-techie, non-nerdie people, the "real content creators" as you call them.
Excellent comment, Laurentiu! I'm not a whale (yet) but here comes a dolphin's vote ! :-)
Dolphin or not, it feels so good when I get 100% upvote from a guy who's articles are beyond my dreams in depth and structure.
Thank you, sir! :-)
"Elevate" and "Emotional" I think I can do. What I can't do is "Simple". Deep down inside me I hate "Simple". The world is complex. If the person in front of me doesn't get this, I have trouble respecting him. And if I don't respect my client, I can't run from the thought that I'm trying to sell him something by manipulating him. And if I'm doing that, I cannot respect myself anymore.
You have to read/listen the book. Is about the way a message/information is received by people. You will understand better after reading. No resume can tell you that 😉.
You gave much thought to the topic and I also read your larger post about the "Best Way to Grow on Steemit" at the time of publishing.
I also paid attention to this subject, and I was interested to see how it looks from a complete newbie perspective, with an unfunded account.
I'm not exactly sure how things stand now, after the Steem price increase, but when Steem was around 1.7$ a new account which only has the 15 SP delegated by steemit had very limited options to grow, especially if investing was not an option.
Here's what I can think of:
What doesn't work:
Of the things that don't work, probably the curation rewards is the most unexpected and damaging, because it would be a very good entry point for newbies.
I totally agree with you, commenting on posts is the best way to get rewards at the beginning (but real comments, not spam), but you should still write some content on your blog (even if not largely read) to have a showcase of your work (people will likely follow you if they liked your comment, generating more visibility on your future posts), and lot of time I tried going to the author of the comment's blog to find an empty page, what can I upvote then ? I upvoted his comment, but I wanted to give more.
Curation can be good but you need to know what you're doing, and as the curation rewards system is really complex, it's really difficult to profit from it as a newcomer.
Oh I know... I've been posting since my very first few days. But I had different goals back then. Trying to see if I can post every day, since I have been blogging weekly for a few years, and such a change in rhythm can be difficult. So I had another driving force at first, not the rewards.
For someone who hears you can make money on Steemit and comes here with this mindset, resisting the initial weeks of struggle, and not giving up, can be a real challenge.
But I agree! I have the same feeling some times, when I'd like to see the work of someone and there's nothing on their blog (or even worse, in my opinion, only resteems).
I understand, I came here for the free money, but decided to stay for the community, perfecting my english and the delight of writing and debate.
I agree, only resteems is worse than nothing.
But I went on your blog, it seems nice, so I followed you - I don't like going back in time to read, because it's really time consuming, and I already have a lot to do, I just check titles to see if I'm susceptible to like future added content - but I will read next posts, upvote and comment occasionally.
So that's why I encourage newcomers (not you, you're here for much longer than me, I just took your case for an example) to at least write a few posts reflecting their personalities or their areas of interest to be allowed to benefit from this kind of follows.
I agree with your view, I was definitely a exagerating above :)
Good reflection. What I'm trying to do with my strategy is to increase the curation rewards even for minnows.
But I do believe that you should try to get an account with Bitstamp or Kraken who offer fiat-crypto conversion using SEPA banking relationship with european banks. Then buy BTC for 500 RON ( ~100€) and send them to Binance, buy Steem and send it to your steemit account. I would use 20€ to buy SBD and 80€ to increase my steem power for instance. With the SBD I would use some voting bots to get more visibility for my posts.
Yeah, I already have a Bitstamp account and have done a small test SEPA transaction to see how it goes, total fees, how long it takes etc.
In the comment above I wasn't referring to my account specifically, I already have over 400 SP (some of it is delegated for profit). But mass adoption won't happen without people who are not willing to put a dime in, and they do have a hard time at the beginning. Hopefully their experience will improve as the price of Steem increases and the vote worth likewise.
Hi @sorin.critescu ! Thanks a lot for your articles, I learned a lot about how to curate efficiently reading your blog.
I had a question about Steemauto. I don't need the answer as I'm not using it, but it can be helpful for other people. How are the orders of the automatic votes determined ? For example, you got like 7-8 followers on Steemauto if I remember right and let's suppose they all put a 30 seconds delay. Which vote is made first and which vote is made last ? It changes a lot because of the curation rewards system.
I couldn't find an answer so I made my own bot. It allows me to actualize the best authors to upvote, the vote delay (maximum of 30 minutes but it can vote after 23 minutes if the median rewards of the author is high enough, hence being more profitable to vote before the 30 minutes than after - if there's a lot of votes always coming between 25 and 30 minutes).
And that brings me to my next question ? Should I make that bot public ? Or at least allow people to delegate SP and then get a part of the rewards. What do you think about it ? Is there a place in the market for a bot that is "intelligent" and that doesn't only vote the author you selected after the delay you specified ?
I would be interested in a "more intelligent" bot. Are you saying your bot finds the best time to upvote to maximize curation rewards? This would be great, however I'm pretty sure the more wide-spread such a feature would become, the less effective it will be, because it would be like a stalemate between bots, each wanting to maximize rewards.
The other question I have also asked myself and is a very good one in my opinion: In which order do bots upvote, for accounts that have the same delay set after publishing?
It tries to. It's still under heavy development.
But all is based on the median or mean (still testing which of the two is best). For example, I look at the last 10 posts of an author and how the votes were distributed. And I look when I should vote to be in the 5 first votes and before 1% of the total payout of the post and I apply it for the next post.
Problem is that past data doesn't reflect what will happen in the future, so I'm still "fine tuning it" - I'm thinking adding a tag restriction as some authors have big payouts when using a tag and low payouts when not using it.
And sometimes authors use bots to upvote their posts and sometimes not, and you can't predict that. So it can't be perfect, but you can try to maximize your curation rewards. And for now, my problem is that I'm extremely limited in voting power, so I can't upvote all upvotes that the bot is suggesting. So there's luck involved too for now.
This is an important point to stress: when an author uses bots to upvote his post, it increases the rewards for the curators (often dramatically). And as currently using voting bots is almost "revenue neutral" (it loses a bit of money when steem goes down but it earns money when steem goes up), there are few reasons not to use them. Those reasons not to use them are
a. if you abuse and push a mediocre post too high in rewards you can draw a whale's attention and get downvoted (flagged)
b. if you don't have SBD or liquid STEEM, obviously you can't use them
And here comes my pledge, described in the "Best way to grown on Steemit": I commit to using voting bots to increase the rewards on my posts! - therefore people following and upvoting me are guaranteed to get the best curation rewards!
What is the problem with such a commitment: I might be tempted to abuse the system like haejin and to start pumping useless content. Hence one risks ending up "cautioning", upvoting for abusive content. And here comes the second part of my strategy: I'm using my real name as an additional guarantee that I will not be tempted to abuse people's trust and turn into yet another a haejin. Because if I do that it will ruin my real life reputation.
oops, I must have had too many open tabs and caused a bug ... this comment seems to appear twice ...
Hmm, in the first 5 votes, but after 23 minutes? That probably excludes high profile authors. I've seen cases when they have more than a dozen votes in the first few minutes.
There's a lot more selection criterias (the first one is the median of the percentage of the votes' rewards made after 30 minutes). Then a "score" is calculated taking in account this median, the median of the number of votes before attaining 1% of the total post rewards, and the median of the time it takes to attain 5 votes. And it's this data (and some more) that determines a score of profitability for an author.
But it sure excludes some high profile authors like haejin for example who isn't profitable except if your vote weights a LOT. But the goal is to maximize the ratio Value of the vote given / SP received from curation.
I answered a bit too quickly.
For your remark about it becoming less effective with widespread it's simple :
All bots will be voting sooner and sooner, each time a bot votes before another one, until they attain the limit (in my case 23 minutes) and all bots would "leave this author alone". Last bot to be just before the limit will stay (supposing all bots have the same limit).
And when all bots are gone, the author will go back to "normal upvotes" attracting bots once again. If there's no limit, it will ultimately push the bots to be the first to upvote (so right after the author publish his post at 0 minute), hence defeating the purpose of the bot itself.
Yes, but this behavior works if the times the other bots are upvoting are already known in advance (and they usually are right now, as far as I know). I was thinking of a more "interactive" approach, in which the future bots won't know when each other will be upvoting, by analyzing past data.
That's what my bot does, but if every body went from simple upvote after x minutes to this kind of interactive voting, that's what it would lead to (as after each vote, the current delay between post and vote of a bot will then be known by the other bots).
Do you take in consideration different upvoting scenarios, based on how upvoting for the analyzed post goes? You already mentioned you might consider tags as a distinction.
No, it's not yet real-time, when the post is published, I just put a delay on it depending of my previous calculations, but I'm not modifying it real time (or canceling it) depending on what happens.
It will be implemented as for tags, but I'm still in test phase for the "core" system.
Wow. That's an interesting bot. As we know, the 30 minutes works on a graduating scale, so as you get closer to the 30 minutes, then your portion of the curation vote approaches 100% of its total weight. So this could be really good.
Phew. I guess even the good guys can find a work around. I'm sure spammers are already taking advantage of steemauto.
I'm not doing it, but that's a good idea. You just watch people who are heavily followed on Steemauto. On one post, you get all votes to determine who is voting when, and then you just place your vote before everybody.
That was the point of my question, as I feel like SteemAuto could easily profit from the data it possess about all future automatic votes.
This is an important point to stress: when an author uses bots to upvote his post, it increases the rewards for the curators (often dramatically). And as currently using voting bots is almost "revenue neutral" (it loses a bit of money when steem goes down but it earns money when steem goes up), there are few reasons not to use them. Those reasons not to use them are
a. if you abuse and push a mediocre post too high in rewards you can draw a whale's attention and get downvoted (flagged)
b. if you don't have SBD or liquid STEEM, obviously you can't use them
And here comes my pledge, described in the "Best way to grown on Steemit": I commit to using voting bots to increase the rewards on my posts! - therefore people following and upvoting me are guaranteed to get the best curation rewards!
What is the problem with such a commitment: I might be tempted to abuse the system like haejin and to start pumping useless content. Hence one risks ending up "cautioning", upvoting for abusive content. And here comes the second part of my strategy: I'm using my real name as an additional guarantee that I will not be tempted to abuse people's trust and turn into yet another a haejin. Because if I do that it will ruin my real life reputation.
I must confess, your behavior is exemplary, making not only genuine original and informative content, making money for yourself and for others. We can't say that for a lot of authors in your "category" (in terms of post rewards).
I couldn't thank you enough as I learned how Steem works with your blog.
Definitely! The more tools there are to choose from, the better.
I can't give definitive answers to questions about steemauto, you should direct them to the author, @mahdiyari. I would be very happy if he would come to answer them here ! :-)
Meanwhile I suppose it's based on the order on your list from "fanbase"
I would like to start playing and write some tools as well (although I'm not a gifted coder) but there's so many things to do and I tend to choose the "path of least resistance". I'm currently on Win 10 and didn't yet manage to install steempy ("pip install steem" fails when compiling pycrypto because of what looks like a classic: "GMP or MPIR library not found")
Anyway, do wrap around a simple web interface like @mahdiyari and make your bot public! I think that as the market is growing (more people coming to steem), there is a place for more tools, especially "evolved" ones like what you describe.
For the error you're pointing out, I remember I had the same on Linux. It's because the install script of steem-python uses the library pycrypto who's failing installing (deprecated). You need to install another module (pycryptodomex) and the installation of pycrypto will be passed when installing steem-python, allowing it to finish installation.
OK thanks, I will work on making my bot public then, will keep you informed.
Thanks a lot for your answer.
Hi @algo.coder, are you on Discord by any chance ? I've installed both pycryptodome (someone on stackexchange mentioned it) and pycryptodomex that you recommend. but I suspect I need to edit a setup.py somewhere and remove the dependency on pycrypto because it's still there,
is still attempting to build pycrypto and failing with the same error ...
So if you are on Discord and have a minute or two to give me a hand, my user is @sorin.cristescu#6999, thank you in advance!
I added you (FlashCrypto). I can try to help you but that's a long time I haven't been on Windows, I'm a bit rusty.
@trufflepig
Thanks for calling @sorin.cristescu! Here is a small upvote for this post and my opinion about it.
To my mind this post is at least 6 SBD worth and should receive 58 votes.
By the way, you can find TODAY'S TRUFFLE PICKS HERE.
I am
TrufflePig, an Artificial Intelligence Bot that helps minnows and content curators using Machine Learning. If you are curious how I evaluate content, you can find an explanation here!Have a nice day and sincerely yours,
TrufflePigThank you Truffle Pig, 6 SBD is seriously above the median payout and is still more than I got on this post "organically", before promoting it with bots. Which might tend to indicate that my network is still not up to what it could be and also that existing human curators do not compensate for an insufficiently developed network
OK. I gave it some thought. You are now officially in my fanbase. Or I am in yours? Either way, I'm set up to vote for you. So make me proud sorin!
Thank you @littlescribe. I'll try to!
@littlescribe sent me here :) Thanks for the eye opening advice, I clearly have plenty to learn on how to get the most out of my steemit efforts
You are welcome. What I didn't repeat in this post compared with the previous, longer one called "Best way to Grow on Steemit" is that I also intend to promote my posts using bots ~2 days after publishing in order to increase the curation rewards of those who appreciate my writing.
Wait, this post is yours? Hahahaha, I checked it out a couple times with a group of friends who found it on Google. One of them liked it so much that he started using it as a sort of bible and calling himself a believer in Satoshi. 😂
And I think that I can't earn more than 2x or something like that off my vote, so I don't think it's very worth it yet. I'm not sure. I'd have to test a bit, but in general, I think that when you're a minnow, it's better to upvote others and that will get you on friendly terms with others who will upvote you and give you more.
So nowadays I use my upvotes for the very little ones who need the money a lot (one upvote a day from me is 3 minimum salaries in Venezuela) and I also upvote those who have supported me from the beginning, and the best comments on my threads, etc.
I think that since my vote is so tiny, this is the best way until it's worth something.
Wow, someone found my "Church of Bitcoin" post on Google? That feels good, you know! :-)
About what you can earn - take a look at the comments I've posted to this very post (below).
Look for instance at @luciancovaci who voted third with a vote power of $0.007 (less than 1 cent). Before my sending the bots he is slated to reap 0.003 SP for that vote.
Then look at the snapshot taken AFTER I've sent the bots: for the $0.007 vote he has in the end received 0.029 SP ! With Steem at around $2 (say), that means $0.058 which is 8 (eight) times more than the VP he spent !
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm... I may put you on autovote for a week to test. Although I don't know how to check the rewards I receive from curation, since ginabot stopped giving me those notifications!
Here you go - after the passage of the bot squad (as explained in the previous comment I've missed the 3.5 day limit of most bots and had to make do with smaller ones).
As you can see the SP you earned went from 0.003 to 0.013, a more than 4 times increase even with a small bot boost on my side and despite the fact that your vote came a bit late, after more sizeable ones (littlescribe, equil1br1um, evildido, alexvan)
Had your vote come before littlescribe for instance, you'd have possibly quadrupled the curation reward yet again
Unfortunately I was travelling and this morning I realized I've missed the 3.5 days window by 2 hours. Sent some SBD to minor bots that take bids for posts older than 3.5 days but the boost will not be the same
Nothing better than trying it for yourself. I don't publish very often anyway (I wish I had more time, there are so many topics I'd like to write about). Do you read French by any chance ? I've just published an article in French about two hours ago
In order to check the rewards the easiest I've found is using @penguinpablo's steemblockexplorer. As I note you've just voted, lookie here :
for a $0.078 vote you are at this moment supposed to receive 0.003 SP which is ... nothing to write home about, right ?
I'll take another snapshot after I promote the post in a day or two (probably tuesday morning)
I like the way you explain the things and I completely agree.
That's right you don't have to put too much effort at the beginning because it takes time until your posts will be seen by others so better socialize, make friends, share short interesting things to make them be curious and want to see more and then give your best and push your limits.
At least that's what I've learned here..when I first joined Steemit I was struggling to make great posts but there just a few followers and no one knew about me.
Personally I believe that it's either about luck or just about your effort you put it.
:)
or a bit of both ! :-D
Your posts are great and they create a style. Mine is more eclectic, I blog about various topics, both approaches are valuable.
Well it's interesting to read various things from the same person. :D
Thanks for your appreciation :)
Luckily I found your comment to another account.
Like your advice, I expected and invested my time and energy much.
I thought that Enlish writting would make money much.
( I'm Korean, so it's difficult to write in English well. )
I'll read your posts and apply them.
Thanks a lot for your advice. ^^
Thank you for your kind words. I'm glad you found these recommendations useful.