Seems to be lots of interesting things going on. Least they are interesting to me.

Witness Chat in the Ramble This Week

I haven’t put out an announcement post yet but I might as well remind you the monthly Witness Chat is in The Ramble on Wednesday, September 11th at 1pm EDT / 5pm UTC.

Every witness is welcome to attend along with the community. It’s an opportunity to get to know the witnesses and ask questions. I haven’t confirmed it yet but usually some of the Steemit Inc team joins us.

SHADE Contest

I am the creator of the SHADE token. It’s purpose is to encourage sharing and engagement on posts. For the last couple of months I’ve been rolling out what has become a monthly contest for earning SHADE during and after Pimp Your Post Thursdays.

I have released the formal announcement and FAQ for the contest.

The still to be released SHADE report for August will announce that for the month of September, the SHADE points will double as September is my birth month. You sort of heard it here first. I have verbally mentioned it in PYPT.

Watch the Steem Tag Order When Posting

I know a lot of you post on other frontends like your favourite Tribe or Steempeak. They all allow ten tags while Steemit.com still only allows five tags. They have been asked about changing theirs to ten. It’s not a priority for them.

Steemit.com is still the most visited frontend. If you want your post to appear in the tags on Steemit.com where the most traffic comes, you need to make sure the Steem tags are among the first 5 tags you use.

The screen capture above uses 7 Steem tags so 2 are not going to show up no matter what. But making sure the most important 5 come first will make sure they are seen easier on the tags on Steemit.com.

And we’ll have to keep asking until they change the parameter for us.

Pin For Fun On Ginabot

Like a lot of us, I use Ginabot to receive notices of posts, comments, tags and mentions on the platform. I have quite a few options setup which can accumulate a lot of notices over a few hours.

So that means I need to do some managing the notices to be able to keep on top of them. I usually use a line of slashes where I have left off the last time. I had been scrolling back through the new notices to find where I had left off.

Then a week or so ago, I finally had a light come on. Discord has this neat little feature where you can pin items for future reference. It’s available both in channels and in DM’s which is where the Gina notices are delivered.

Now I pin my line of slashes and it takes me just seconds to find where I left off. If I am interrupted while reviewing my notices, I just pin where I’m pausing so I can go right back to where I left off. Thought I’d share that in case others would find it useful.

Apparently, life is easier with pins.

Votes When Curating With Steem & Tribes

I do some curating for @creativecoin and @marlians. I’ve also developed some stake on some of the other tribes not to mention I’m inching my way up toward dolphinhood on the Steem side of things.

My vote is not large but it’s not dust either. I like to support as many content creators as I can. I know a lot of people have split their different stakes onto dedicated accounts. I’ve not done so, nor am I planning to. I rather like being able to give a vote that stacks for the recipient.

Having said that, content creators need to be careful about their choice of tags on their posts. Especially the tribe tags. There are many times I will go through a post and am really ready to give it the upvote, only to discover, one or more of the tags are not relevant. The vote disappears. I wont reward inappropriate tagging.

I left a note on one person’s post to let them know they would have had my vote but for the blatant misuse of a tag. Her response was to suggest to me that I should rearrange my voting so I just vote using the appropriate stake. Or better yet, the system should make it so I select the right stake to give a vote.

No, doesn’t work like that. If you’re the content creator, use the right tags. It’s your responsibility if you want to be curated.

Oh and just to be clear. While I don’t often use the downvotes, when I do it will impact your SP and tokens. I make no apology for that and don’t even bother complaining.

SteemLeo Syndication Account

I’m really liking what the SteemLeo tribe is doing with their @leo.syndication account. They locate good quality investment content on the web. Create a free Steem account for the creator, then post the content with all rewards sent to the free account which the content creator can claim by claiming the account.

It’s a win win. The content producer is introduced to Steem and the opportunity to have an income stream and the content consumers on Steem get to see the person’s content without leaving the platform. Super onboarding method in my opionion.

Curation and SteemLookUp

My thanks to @slobberchops for reminding me about the Steem Lookup Tool for finding posts using various parameters. He’s done a post here on how to use it to find undervalued content.

Request a Curation Review By Burning Steem / SBD

Some of you may have noticed @therealwolf through @smartsteem has been doing some manual curating since the HFs. In an effort to both expand the posts they have a look at and burn STEEM you can now request a review on posts by sending STEEM or SBD to @null. Find out how here

@whatsup’s Pulse of Steem Contest

@whatsup coined the term #newsteem in an effort to get people to start adopting a new attitude toward the platform. An effort to leave some of the kvetching of the past behind and start moving forward. It’s no easy task to define what newsteem is but I get the concept.

She’s created a contest for you to try your hand at, “Steem, The Pulse of Crypto”. You can win 100 Steem with your efforts. Find the details here

Final Thoughts

I have made no secret I was not a fan of HF21. It’s early days but I’m seeing some promising activity going on so my stated willingness to be made wrong about my lack of support for it may have to be the outcome.

I’ve seen some good effort at increasing the amount of curation on posts across a wide range of Steemians by larger stakeholders. Some people are receiving more rewards than they were before. Some of those people in my opinion were long overdue to receive notice.

We’re never going to have a solution which makes it work for everyone. Let me share a contrast between Steem and Medium. Keep in mind that curate on Medium means someone has reviewed the post and considered it to be good enough to go into the relevant topics. Posts don’t appear in topics without being curated. Being curated increases your visibility and thus the number of claps (votes).

On Medium there is full time staff who spend their day doing nothing but searching through posts to curate. They miss a lot of posts and there is lots of talk about authors not being curated and good posts missed.

Sound familiar? The difference is here on Steem, everyone can participate in curating. Even if your upvote doesn’t give much in rewards, you can still bring good posts to others attention through resteems, talking about it to others, sharing the link on social media like twitter and even attending shows like Pimp Your Post Thursday.

Curation is everyone’s job on Steem. If you are producing good work and building a network, you will get some success. It will take time but it will happen. Just like any other platform.

Posting and expecting rewards without doing the work will get you … not much and you'll deserve it.

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Until Next Time — Just Steem on

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