Dolphin 541,753—Monthly Report: May (2019)

More Milestones

Well, I'm calling them milestones, anyway.

In a previous post, I talked about passing 2,500 earned SP and 7,000 SP total. It happened in what I now consider a down month, even though I still managed triple digit growth.

So, May wasn't as good as April or March, but given how May went, I'm just happy to say there was progress.

Read on. Summary and numbers follow.

Quick Summary

Two curie curation upvotes and a lot of smaller ones got me above 100 earned SP again, but the birth of the latest grandson and a return of some apathy (on my part) kept May from being better than it was. I can't blame the kid, but my routine was disrupted for a week or two (because grandma took off time to be around to help), and so I spent more time doing things around the house than I had thus far. Good for the garden and other home related things, bad for stake building.

Posts (no comments)—22

One less post this month than in April, even though I did keep to my post a day schedule. Unfortunately, two of them went with the payout declined. One on purpose, and the other because I forgot to change it back. I didn't feel I should accept payout for a SNAX authentication post I made, but then regretted it since there's always several small autovotes that come on my posts (sorry about that people).

As I mentioned above, two of the posts ended up being curied, with double digit amounts. Seven other posts reached $1 or more, with the highest at $4-something.

May saw the debut of a weekly serialized story I'm calling Crypto Murders. I also continued my series of MISS reveals. What was missing for the latter part of May were the Food Fight Friday posts, but I did keep up with my multi-prompt posts inspired by the daily five minute freewrites.

So, I think I've found some regular posts to make so I can crank out at least one post a day during the week. I would like to up that amount a little more, though. We'll see how that goes.

Total number of posts all time through May, 2019—438.

Comments—228

After getting the comments above a thousand in April, 228 represents more than a 78% drop in comments. I did reply to nearly all the comments on my posts, but I didn't get out to as many others to leave comments as I had been doing.

Again, being pulled away during part of the month to help my wife is part of it. The other part is apathy, or maybe it can be better described as burnout. Regardless, I found myself coming across the same old kinds of posts, and I just got tired of talking about other people's thoughts. That's not a good thing for a manual curator like I really try hard to be.

I think the discussion about the economic improvement proposal producing one post after another didn't help in that mix. So, I had less time than normal, and then when I was on STEEM, I was prioritizing by getting my posts out, answering comments on them, and then trying to wade through the EIP posts and other things.

No excuses here. I need to get the numbers back up. Maybe the EIP will be implemented soon, and after the fallout of that (since there always seems to be fallout after a hardfork), maybe I can get back to normal. June is already looking a little better, but there are a couple of big life changes that I won't go into here (they haven't happened, so no need to expound on either of them other than to state the possibility) that might cut into my time and my desire to be here.

Despite the lack of comments, I still managed, thanks to April, to surpass the 11,000 comments mark.

Upvotes given—140/472

Just like the comments, the amount of upvotes suffered, too. I've thought about autoving more than once, and May was one of those times, but I haven't been able to bring myself to do it yet. I guess as long as I can spend any time on STEEM, I feel like I should be reading, commenting and curating. I do understand why people do it, though, and I'm sure I will continue to consider it as an option, especially after the hardfork happens.

Upvotes received—1,512/3017

While the spread dropped 164 from April, the total increased 141. Thanks to curie, since they came calling twice. I'm not sure what else to say about this other than thank you to those who keep upvoting my posts and comments, even when I'm slacking.

SP increase—156.681

This is a little over a 90 SP drop from last month, but as I said earlier, I'll take it. Most of it was earned through posting with maybe some commenting and Musing mixed in.

Total earned SP through May hit 2,521.348, which means I'm over halfway to the next 1,000. It took 9.5 months to get to the first 1,000 earned SP and roughly four to get the next 1,000. Two and a half months later, I'm just over 500, which could indicate a slow down. By the end of June, I'll know more. So far in June, things aren't looking so good for a 200-plus SP month, but I've said that before and happily been proven wrong.

Year over year earned SP increased by a little over 65, which means I'm close to 600 SP ahead of 2018 through May. That represents more than double earned SP over last year. Still, I'm just over 75 earned SP from 1,000 in 2019.

All SP at the end of May was 7,037.874.

Thanks to this month's increase in earned SP, total stake decreases my per STEEM unit cost to $0.787.

To become a millionaire, I need STEEM to hit $142.088 USD.

Good luck, I know. Still, time, as always, will tell us what STEEM will do, and I don't mind waiting and building stake in the meantime.

Highest single payout—5.613 SBD/14.244 SP

Crypto Murders: Part III—System Threat Evaluation and Eradication Management, the second curie curation upvote received in May beat out MISS Lead—MISSES Character Reveal for highest payout status. MISS Lead ended up at 4.588 SBD/14.536 SP.

This is the second time in 17 months that curie has hit twice in one month. Each time I'm grateful for the consideration.

Most of my posts aren't resteemed a whole lot, which is why I don't normally share the stat, but another post STEEM Is Not A Social Media Platform was resteemed 10 times. That is by far a new record.

Self-upvotes—0

Zero for real with no accidental self-upvotes erased.

Contests—0

No STEEM was won through the engagement and curation leagues or bounties in May.

Flags given/received—2/3

I don't typically have much to report here, because I'm not a big believer in downvotes, but this time, I gave out two and received three. Up until now, the flags I have received came from one of the Steemit Defense League accounts, and such was the case in May with two of them. Those downvotes are just random, though, and they don't ever do anything to potential rewards or reputation.

However, the third downvote came from a user called wayneney, which took off $0.095 STU when it was all said and done. The downvote came on STEEM Is Not A Social Media Platform. There was no comment explaining the downvote, so I'm left to guess that there was something they didn't agree with in the post itself, since payout was only 1.566 SBD/3.749 SP.

As for the two I gave out, both of them went to cheetah. Yes, cheetah. The auto comment was showing up on Food Fight Friday contest posts for months, and despite some conversations between those behind the contest and folks at least loosely affiliated with cheetah/steemcleaners, cheetah kept showing up to tell the world that the author had like content (previous week contest postings).

I feel like I'm pretty hardline when it comes to plagiarism, so I do appreciate what cheetah and other accounts do, but there are contest posts all around STEEM that manage to stay out of cheetah's clutches, even though very few things change from week to week. The point is, new folks are stumbling upon the contest posts each week, and so rules, prizes and etiquette need to be explained. Even so, winners and participants generally change, and that's exactly what was happening with the Food Fight Friday posts. No one needed to be told that Food Fight Friday might have similar posts weeks on end.

It finally got resolved (the right person was finally looped in), but it bugged me enough I downvoted in successive weeks. The downvotes themselves didn't make the change, but the discussion about my downvotes might have led to the whitelisting. Regardless, I'm okay with what I did, though I wish things would have been resolved weeks earlier. It shouldn't take so long, and there should be more than one or two people available to make decisions. Otherwise, those two people need to be more available, or there needs to be a clearer process for whitelisting. Something.

That's more than enough about that. I look forward to a more downvote free June, on both ends.

Reputation Ranking—64

While the fractional ranking rose, it wasn't enough to get me to 65. End of May total reputation ranking was 64.853. No doubt June will put it over, if things continue as they have to date.

Investment—0

I looked at investing quite a few times in May, but held back. Without more income (meaning I get a job), I can't justify it, and so I'm stuck for the time being, even though STEEM keeps jumping over and diving below $0.40 USD.

Miscellaneous

May came and went quickly, and I spent more than I wanted away from STEEM. When I was here, I wasn't really at my best comment or curation-wise. I hope to improve on both in June if I'm not ultimately derailed by a couple of things on the horizon. As I mentioned earlier, more on them if they actually manifest. Otherwise, I don't have much of an excuse.

I might end up adding a SNAX update to this monthly report, since I successfully connected my STEEM account to SNAX and actually have over triple the amount of SNAX as I have STEEM. Of course, SNAX isn't worth anything yet, but it's supposed to hit exchanges sometime this year, so similar to any other token floating around out there, you accumulate as much as you can and hope for something big to happen. Since SNAX is essentially tokenizing existing social media (Twitter was first, followed by STEEM), I think it has as good a chance as any to be successful.

I am far from being an expert, though, so I'm not recommending anything other than checking it out as another possible token to earn and hold. You don't have to do anything other than post on STEEM to earn them. Or you could Tweet. At some point, more existing social media platforms will be added.

That's it for this month. Thanks for stopping in and perusing my progress. I'm happy that it is of interest to others.

Onward and upward.

_{Image source—Pixabay. Text added by Glen Anthony Albrethsen.}