Dustsweeper - a Dust-Cleaning Service for Your Steemit Comments

Sometimes we receive upvotes on our comments but aren't paid anything for them because the value is too low. There's a minimum value the rewards need to reach in order for them to pay out. I already wrote about this issue in the post below:

Votes Turning into Dust and the Difficulty to Reward Comments

We've been calling this limit the "dust threshold." Many people are still unaware of this threshold, or are aware but still insist on voting to show their support or appreciation. Thinking on a way to make sure that these little votes aren't wasted and that the rewards on these comments reach the minimum to pay out, @davemccoy together with witness @danielsaori launched a service called @dustsweeper. With this service, now we can sweep the dust out of our comments and transform it into earnings!

Image source: Openclipart

Dustsweeper is a bot that looks at comments that received upvotes but didn't reach the minimum threshold six days after publication, and gives an upvote worth $0.028 on the comment to make sure it will go over the dust threshold, so that the author gets paid and the commenters' upvotes aren't wasted. Dustsweeper mainly targets comments, since comments receive less upvotes than posts. It doesn't count self-votes, and has some measures to prevent abuse.

The service isn't free, but is cheap. To receive a vote, you must pay $0.014 SBD (half of the $0.028 vote you'll receive. In other words, the value you'll earn from the votes is double of what you pay!). The SBD the members pay is used to cover the costs of running the service and getting the SP needed to be able to keep these upvote values.

If you expect to receive a lot of dust votes on your comments, you may pay a higher amount so that you don't need to keep paying $0.014 every time you need the bot to come to remove the dust from one of your comments. The bot keeps track of the amounts every user transferred and does the math automatically. For every upvote it gives you, it will deduct $0.014 from the total amount you paid. For example, paying $0.028 has the bot upvote and remove the dust from 2 of your comments, $0.042 removes the dust from 3 comments, $0.056 removes the dust from 4 comments... $1.00 removes the dust from 71 of your comments, and so on.

To read the official launch post explaining about the service, check here