A fork in the path ahead
Hi, MinnowBooster fans and readers! It has been a long time since we addressed you directly and asked for your feedback, but now's the time, we want to hear from you which path you think we should take on this road ahead.
It's been 9 months since we introduced the MinnowBooster Community managed whitelist, where already established and respected members could invite other users, whose blog quality they deemed high and eventually, vote them into the list as well.
Whitelisted users enjoyed slightly higher profits on their post promotion purchases and often can access higher vote availability and values.
We've experimented with the list, offering various perks for voters and inviters, we've had hard times, as the list sometimes tended to get polluted by low-quality inviters and bloggers; we've had good times - the number of users that have voted on other bloggers is impressive.
But we never got out of the final beta phase, as it still needed managing by administrators.
One of the biggest complaints to date is that quality is in the eye of the beholder. What the 5 users (five accept votes which is needed to get in) currently voting on a bloggers post might deem not qualifying, might be excellent to another man at another time.
The fact remains, that Steem is not a static thing. It grows, evolves, changes. The massive userbase shapes it, molds it, according to the majority of users, but it also has nooks and crannies for the minorities.
We might have similar interests, but we're all different.
So here's our question:
Do we keep the course? Keep the whitelist in its current somewhat flawed form and lay the responsibilities of managing the list on its userbase? The list will keep growing and will need more time managing, taking time away from everyone and making the MinnowBooster service more complex with unequal buying power and benefits for our userbase depending whether they are on the list or not.
Do we scrap the whitelist, allowing every MinnowBooster user equal but increased profit, making our services much simpler and more transparent? We can call the whitelist a cool social experiment and move on to the new interesting projects we have in store for you in 2019.
After all - people are basically good - they just need a nudge in the right direction, so maybe most of us belong on same profitability scale with equal access for all? We can always filter out abusers reported to us in our abuse channel.
We understand that many of you have spent hours inviting and evaluating users, but change is not always bad. There's more to offer on every other front if we decide to scrap the whitelist.
Let us know in the comments section and whatever happens, we will take all your opinions into account. Thank you, it's been an awesome ride!
BuildTeam is one of the few service providers on Steem that runs and maintains its own RPC servers. Maintaining this infrastructure is expensive. If you want to support the growth of Steem network outside of Steemit.com, consider using some of our services, this helps to pay the bills, keeps the machines running and helps us incubate great developer talent within BuildTeam. The easiest and most effective way to support BuildTeam is to delegate to Minnowbooster or enable vote-selling within the https://minnowbooster.net user settings. For other options to help BuildTeam secure and grow the Steem community, contact Steem witness @thecryptodrive.
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@thecryptodrive (witness), @cryptomancer and @reggaemuffin (witness)
I'm a bit late to the party on this one. I think you can put the whitelist out to community governance - with a small stipend for the governors. As an approximation, five recommendations worked well enough, but now the feature probably needs a bit more automation in support of human based governors.
Removing the whitelist will probably encourage spam and worsen reward pool abuse. With current sentiment towards upvotes services bring quite negative, it probably pays to work with the community more. Having community contribute to governance might help with buy in to MB's services.
Posted using Partiko Android
I would certainly be unhappy if what was advertised to us as a long-term percentage benefit from doing the work to fill out the whitelist were suddenly done away with. I suppose if you wanted to scrap the whitelist concept but maintain share payments for the users who were evaluated that would be fine.
If I'm to be totally frank about it, you had several interested and talented whitelist moderators who would have been happy to have an expanded role and take up more of the work of the whitelist, and you decided to let us go without even talking to us ahead of time. That was a mistake, and it's a big part of what led to problems with the list being "polluted." We were the ones watching it, we were the ones looking ahead for future problems, and you decided that we were unnecessary. That turned out not to be true. I don't know if there's another generation of those out there, or if some of the others might be willing to return, but I would advise you to be looking in that direction.
I fully agree. There have been a number of persons who commited themselves to the White List and who's work was not valued enough.
If you change and open the flood gates... tons of spam will be noticeable in a week or two.
Posted using Partiko iOS
I'd say scrap the old and give everyone a equal but increased profit. I think it would attract more user to the service and site.
Keep the whitelist.
Posted using Partiko Android
It would be good if you treated everyone fairly. Not everyone knows about this preferential treatment list and might be put off by it once they know about it. At the end of the day it is up to you what course you would like to take.
While I might be biased since I am on the whitelist, I think it and the process should remain as it has something to look forward to as an author. I was honored when getting vetted and immediately felt the responsibility to do the same for the community. However, I think the process needs more governance as I myself was hesitant to send invites and instead looked to review them instead because I felt a sense of lack of guidance. I love the concept but think that it could lead to abuse. I support the project no matter it’s future as I trust in Buildteam’s capabilities as a champion for the ecosystem. Thanks for reaching out an including us in the process.
Posted using Partiko iOS
easy choice, scrap the list.
will my one actifit post per day with aprox 30 words written make the white list? if not scrap it
Thanks again to everyone who took a minute to voice their opinion on this. We really appreciate your feedback and will take it into consideration, when discussiong options and future course.