Minnow #541,753—Monthly Report: May
Here We Go
Last month, I indicated that increases in comments in particular would lead eventually to better rewards, potentially being realized in May. Did it happen?
Quick Summary
Curie knocked once, but even without it, an increase in SP over the previous mark in April was in the works, and the rest of the numbers stayed somewhat solid across the board.
Steem prices dropping the latter part of May slowed growth.
I continued to participate in @abh12345's Curation and Engagement Leagues, which have started to pay some dividends outside the league.
Posts (no comments)—47
The number of posts were back up to March's level, an increase of four over April. Posting days, however, also increased, from 22 to 25.
Comments—1,322
This is an increase of 87 comments over April, again a new personal record. The highest amount of comments in any given week were 330, with the highest number of comments in a single day being 90, another personal record. There were a total of 27 days worth of comments, for an average just below 49 a day. That is a slight decrease from April's numbers.
Upvotes given—251/1862
Numbers in this category were fairly similar to last month. The number 251 corresponds to the total number of users of which I upvoted posts or comments, while 1,862 are the total number of upvotes cast. The former is a 10 account decrease, while the latter represents an increase of 98 upvotes over April. Whereas April represented a significant increase in upvotes due in part to STEEM prices being significantly higher, May's suffered from nearly two weeks of a decrease. In the latter part of the month, my voting power was seriously depleted even as I tried to change my voting habits.
Upvotes received—804/2167
Last month, with one post catching the eye of the OCD trail, the number of accounts upvoting all posts in April were 340, with a total of 1,345 upvotes. In May, thanks to the Curie trail upvotes on another single post, the amount of accounts upvoting skyrocketed to 804, while the total number of upvotes reached 2,167. While great to see, and very much appreciated, counting on a monthly hit from any curation trail is hard to do and impossible to forecast.
The highest amount of upvotes received from a single user were 148.
SP increased—91.572
Following an uptick in SP of 13 in April over March, May more than doubled the increase, eclipsing April's total increase by 32.465. Much of that can be attributed to the Curie upvotes, but an increase was already in process, and the actual amount of SP also suffered from SBD values being consistently less than STEEM throughout May.
The total earned SP (not including investments) from January 1 to May 31 was 332.296. Monthly average SP increase nudged up slightly to just under 66.5.
Highest single payout—26.661 SBD/8.842 SP
This is what the Curie hit paid out for the fortieth installment of The Maya, the serialized work-in-progress I still have running on Steemit. This is the second time Curie has upvoted The Maya. The first one took place on February 22. Overall, this is the third Curie upvote I've received.
Self-upvotes—0*
This has an asterisk behind it because after two months of no accidental self-upvoting, I had a number of them in May. I could blame it on a change in comment views when you click on replies, but ultimately, I'm the one who clicked the upvote button. As in previous times, I guess I could have left them, but I removed each one of them. I don't know how many there were, but my guess is May exceeded all previous months of accidental upvoting combined.
Contests—4
All four weeks were from the Curation and Engagement Leagues weekly contest. This month was kind of odd after April where I pretty much led out most of the month. In May, I was surpassed by one other person twice and and I also won twice. Totals since joining the leagues include five first place finishes, two second places and one third place finish.
Overall, I've received 26.5 STEEM in winnings. The news here is I've suspended receiving awards for any placing in the Top 10 I might do. I've done this for the time being because my time commitment on Steemit is significantly larger than nearly everyone else currently participating in the leagues. If a contender arises, I reserve the right to opt back into the winnings. I will still participate in the competition each week, however, and fully intend to see my name at the top of the list.
Flags received—0
I may discontinue this stat since it hasn't happened yet, mostly because I'm not big enough to be noticed, and because I don't go out of my way to attract unwanted attention.
Flags given—0
This category too may go to the wayside since I'm fairly convinced that I want to use my voting power on curation only at this point. I'll bring both flag categories back if something changes.
Followers—520
I managed to see what the amount was this time, for what it's worth. This is at least an increase of 200 followers over the amount in April, when I finished with around 315. Most of these accounts glommed on after I would publish a post. GINAbot would ding multiple times and I would see up to a dozen accounts start to follow. Which means that most of those are bot or duplicate accounts, which I guess are set to follow at certain milestones? It was fairly peculiar to watch, and yet fascinating, too.
Reputation rating—54
Reputation rating was up one point over the end of April.
Investment—$0
No further investments have been made out of pocket. Everything earned from posting, commenting and curating has been powered up, although for the better part of May I let the SBDs pile up. No particular reason other than the potentiality of SBDs becoming more valuable than STEEM as they have been in the past. That did not happen, so I traded them in for STEEM and powered up. Only 25 STEEM from my engagement league winnings have not been powered up. I want to do something with them, but haven't quite formalized how.
Miscellaneous
As has been my lot with SP, I came within less than 1 SP of reaching 1400. I might have reached it had I converted the SBDs sooner, or as they came in per my normal procedure, but who knows. I could have ended up with less, too.
The Maya continues to run, though it is winding down. I've been debating whether or not to complete the story and publish it here, or do it at a future date. So much of my time is spent on Steemit, with decent returns now, that I'm hesitant to do that until I know the first domino is completely over and that enough inertia has been exerted for things to continue to grow while I pull back. I don't see that time being now, or even into the foreseeable future, so I will continue spending the same amount of hours I am now producing and curating for as long as I can.
That's All Folks
That concludes the statistical report for Minnow 541,753 for the Month of May, 2018.
Over and out.
1300 comments! wow, that is some solid interaction @glenalbrethsen. A week or may be 2 weeks ago I had asked abh12345 to add me the league. I am also trying to interact more on steemit and i thought i was managing to do well at 100 posts a week... but.. :)
Anyway. this report is very helpful, helps to know how much effort people are putting over here.
great stuff. resteeming so that other people can benefit reading about your experience.
I'm glad you got something out of it, @karamyog. I mainly do it as a somewhat ready reference, but obviously, by posting it here others can see and do whatever they want with it.
I had a similar reaction when I first joined the leagues and saw that week's results. I was being outworked by a lot of people, even though I thought I was doing as much as I could to produce.
So, I decided I needed to do more, which is pretty much why I'm where I'm at now.
There are still people who are commenting more than me every month in the leagues, though, so their commenting counts are going to be in the upper 1,000s to 2,000s every month. I haven't been able to match that.
Now that you've been a part of the leagues, I look forward to seeing your name in the list of the top 20% (at least, right?) each week. :)
I hope so, its just so difficult to get so many comments in while working full-time but i try to. And i hope to try harder.
This post was definitely helpful in the sense that others can also get to know about achievement of people like you. and then from that learn about curation league. I did something similar about my activity last month and i saw that lots of newcomers found it useful. which is why i resteemd yours. so that they can see how much can be done and then read the comments for more insight.
Yeah. Having a full-time job, plus whatever other responsibilities like a family can cut into the time here quite a bit. I'd say you're doing good to have time to make 100 comments/posts a week. Since I've been doing this full-time, that's how I'm able to do the numbers I do. A lot of the people at the top of list spend some amount of time in between what the two of us have and still make it happen. So the magic occurs somewhere in there.
Well, thank you for the resteem, and as I said, I hope it's helpful for anyone who might come across this post.
Always nice seeing your achievement spelled out so well! I think I've said this before, but I have considered doing posts like this, but my mind is a mess of generalities like, "I've commented and upvoted a lot this month", and I couldn't actually tell you what's in my wallet or how much SP I have unless I look. It's weird and it's something I should maybe pay more attention to, but I don't :) I can however tell you what you cooked on Memorial Day weekend, and how many stacks themanwithnoname now has, or gillianpearce's latest flower pic color. Not sure what all that means or where I'm going with it haha, but congratulations on a successful month.
I just re-read my comment and it reminds me of a wedding speech gone bad haha
I think there are different ways to process and analyze information. Some of it's more formal, others informal. I tend to like statistics (if they're my own), and it helps me to see where I've been. With many of you in talking about this, it would not help. It would just cause stress, which isn't at all the purpose behind this. It's supposed to be the exact opposite.
In my case, the only thing I need to look up are the votes in and out because I only keep track of the number of upvotes I make, not to whom or how many from whom I've received. The rest, though, is fairly easy to know at a glance.
I particularly pay attention to SP, though, because that's what's helping me increase my stake and portion of the reward pool. The rest of the stats are more like benchmarks, helping me determine if I'm doing what I've done before, a little more a little less, or whatever, so I can know what to push a little more or back off of the next month.
I've actually whittled down some of the stats, like resteems, simply because there wasn't an easy way to get stats for it, and in the end, I don't know just how valuable a stat it is. Last month I had four or five posts resteemed by dragosroua for his challenge and even though he's celebrating 8,000 followers this morning, there may have been one or two users out of all of them that may have upvoted and or commented on my post. Absolutely nothing against dragosroua, but resteeming doesn't always mean more eyeballs on a post, especially if those eyeballs are following thousands of others, or don't even look at their feed anymore. The rest are bots or duplicate accounts, so I don't need to tell you what they're doing. :)
The fact that he resteemed means something though, doesn't it? Regardless of how many viewers your post actually received from it. It means you are being noticed...always a good thing.
I like the idea of resteeming. I think it's a way for someone to endorse the work of someone else. Unfortunately, two things are happening which basically kills its otherwise nice potential.
By and large, people don't follow others for their curation skills as much as they follow them for their creation skills. That seems to be the number one complaint, that unwanted posts about undesirable topics keep showing up in people's feeds.
The other point, and probably the biggest, is that people follow way too many other people. If you look at the dolphin-sized people on up, a lot of them have a manageable sized group they follow. You look at the newbies and a lot of us minnows, though, and we're following multiple hundreds or even thousands.
And then people I've talked to lately don't even look at their feeds. They're not looking at the trending page either, so I'm not sure where they're looking.
Given that the vast majority of our followers are either bots, duplicate accounts or people following hundreds to thousands of people, as great of a tool as resteeming could be, and as nice a gesture it is anytime someone does it for someone else, in my opinion, we as users are ruining its effectiveness.
I'm one of those that never checks my feed or trending. What I've started doing is in ginabot's settings, I list names of those where if they post, I get notified. One day I will perform a cull on my following list, but for now, that works pretty good.
I've got my feed below 30 again. I have GINAbot set to notify me about you and some others when you post, and it's great when I'm on Steemit and looking for something to read. It doesn't help as much if I'm working on my own post or going through a bunch of replies. I refresh the pages so much that I'll catch things on my own just as quickly. I could just get rid of my feed and rely solely on GINAbot, or vice versa I suppose. If I get rid of all who I'm following, then I'm stuck with the trending page showing up when I log on, which doesn't sound all that great.
Seems like a solid month to me, even with the downturn in prices. Not a bad haul from the Engagement League :D
I'm happy with it. Not much I can do about it the downturn, so just got to keep reaching out and plugging along, I guess. :)
It helped that you handed out a few 5 STEEM prizes. :) I'll probably want to talk to you about what I intend to do with them, just not yet, but maybe in the coming weeks.
Yeah, same for everyone - keep on trucking.
Are they not powered up yet? :D
Nope. They're awaiting some other use to be finalized in the aforementioned not too distant future. :)
Sounds interesting, i'll wait and see what for!
Nice going Glen.
You are now part of the less than 1% who have powered up more than 1k.
That is a surprising statistic.
I want to celebrate my milestone for followers but have a feeling that it is kind of empty because of all those auto follow accounts
Well you always have good quality posts.
Well, considering over 1,000 of that SP is from USD invested in STEEM, it's not like I got there through my work on Steemit. It is a surprising statistic that less than 1% of the million-plus accounts have over 1,000 SP. And it's kind of sad and frustrating, too.
Oh, go ahead and celebrate. Everyone else does! :) You would be right, though. Too many are going to be auto following bots or something. Not sure why they bother, though. They don't seem to upvote me, and I certainly don't upvote them.
Well, as far as good quality posts go, I'm trying to out the good in the least amount of time so that I don't get hung up with hours of work for pennies on the dollar. I think it's probably the best way to go until there's a little more juice flowing from the upvotes.
Interesting stats @glenalbrethsen. Glad to see everything moving in the right direction.
I've done a similar thing with SBD except that since they dropped from 1:1 I haven't powered them up at all. I'm still hoping they will go back but I'm not sure whether powering up every day, which is what I was doing, would have paid off in the long run.
I suppose it all depends whether or not it ever gets back to 1:1 but even then there must be a point when it would have been better to have kept powering up every day.
On the other hand, I do power up Steem. It takes a while to build up to 1 Steem but at that point I power it up, keeping a balance of 5 in my account in use I want to use it for something that pops up.
Yeah. I don't what the ultimate answer is for the SBD conversion. I know there are times where it doesn't make sense, but most of the time it does. I haven't actually sat down to figure that out, but maybe someone has. The trick would be finding it. :)
I almost had 100 SBD sitting there and decided that I'd rather have it in SP, for a couple of reasons, then waiting any longer, especially since I hadn't really intended to do it. It just got started and I didn't do anything with it.
I guess it's left up to each one of us to determine how we'll do that. Since i've been here, SBD has been worth more than STEEM a number of times, so there's not much to go against that trend happening again, especially with someone on Hitbtc driving prices up abnormally high. Except that there are witnesses increasing the bias percentage of their feeds to produce more SBD to see if that will help the market move prices down to the $1.
So, flip a coin. That's about how precise predictions would be anyway. :)
Im on vacation but am still working to get a few comments in, if for no other reason than to stay in the habit. Full time work really makes it difficult for sure, but my freetime could be filled with worst things than trying to build a rep and help curate content. However, I wont be able to match anything close to your level of comments. Looks good, it is nice to see what hard work and dilligence can achieve.
I hope you're enjoying your vacation, but thank you for stopping by. :)
I think there's an acceleration process taking place, at least with the posting, commenting and curating end of this. The more that happens in a week, the better. However, I also believe there's an accumulative effect from being consistent that's at work, too. It just takes a while longer. So you do what you can do with the hours you have and over a period of time, depending on the increments you were able to give it, the achievements begin to manifest. :)
@glenalbrethsen I am going to read your content on the regular. I have already started to take some of the advice. Thanks for taking your time to give honest and appreciable amounts of feedback.
Happy to help, if indeed it helps. Reading other people's ideas on how to do things would be helpful, too, though, so hopefully I'm not the only one. I'm largely finding my way here still, too. Five full months and a week-ish isn't necessarily expert territory, even if it does feel like I've been here longer. There's a definite learning curve, and at some point, they'll change things enough that it will require at least a reassessment of tactics if not major changes to them. It's an ongoing evaluation process.
That's some pretty thorough statistical analysis. Interesting reading and good to know (yet not entirely shocking) about the autofollowers. The other anomaly that gets GinaBot dinging is when someone unfollows you then follows you again to try and get a followback. I have couple that do that yet they have never interacted on any of my posts.
I've had a few of those try to do it succession. Three accounts, follow, unfollow, follow, unfollow. I think they did it three times within maybe a twenty minute period. Annoying!
Well, I hope you got something out of it. It's basically my way of keeping track of what I'm doing, but others seem to find something useful, so I'm glad it's not just taking up space on the blockchain solely for me. :)
Absolutely. I find it interesting to see what metrics different users to measure success.
Asher's engagement and curation leagues are fascinating, particularly being able to actually measure myself on a level playing field against the big guns
I probably had about 150 new followers insta-follow after posting in the past month. They are all the same person, part of a video farm. Kinda annoying really, its completely pointless, all it does it just spam the blockchain. They are all added to @mack-bot. So it's a waste of their time too. Like what's the point.. haha
Anyway, that aside. +91 SP, nice one! That's pretty decent. I reckon next month you will break 100. It's only a matter of time. :D
That's probably what happened to me then, too. I can't remember exactly who any of them are, but mack-bot sounds familiar. What precisely is a video farm? Are they taking people's videos they find here and then reposting them, or are they grabbing them from YouTube and posting them here? As you said, either one sounds useless.
I'd love to string together some 120 SP or more months, but it's going to depend on more people being around and prices going back up somewhat, because it's like ghost city again and I'm largely playing to a vacuum.
Video farm is usually multiple accounts either autoposting or even manual posting youtube videos sometimes with text, usually incoherent babble lol
Problem with ghosts is when they try to vote their hand goes through the screen. 😏
Yeah, and they generally upvote with dust, too. :)
Oh, okay. So, the old take from YouTube and post with incoherent babble trick. :)
Putting all of that together must be really easy to go to the trouble of doing it for what can't be more than a pittance. I mean, even if newbies are falling for it left and right, they're dust voting. That's a lot of newbies to get anywhere. The higher SP should know better, and then cheetah seems to show up whenever that's happening, so I don't know. I suppose they continue to do it because there's rewards to be made, but it all seems like a very exhausting royal waste of everyone's time.
Well if they are making 100, 1k accounts each with 15sp from steemit i guess it adds up when they all start circle voting. Then there are accounts like hr1 auto voting, then random noobs voting everything they see. Lol
But making that many accounts is not worth the effort in my opinion. Not unless you can hide it.
If they put as much effort into writing something original that would be preferable 😂
Congratulations! Your post has been selected as a daily Steemit truffle! It is listed on rank 17 of all contributions awarded today. You can find the TOP DAILY TRUFFLE PICKS HERE.
I upvoted your contribution because to my mind your post is at least 22 SBD worth and should receive 95 votes. It's now up to the lovely Steemit community to make this come true.
I am
TrufflePig, an Artificial Intelligence Bot that helps minnows and content curators using Machine Learning. If you are curious how I select content, you can find an explanation here!Have a nice day and sincerely yours,
TrufflePigWell, thank you again, @trufflepig. :) One of these days the market will catch up to your predictions of worth and it will be a glorious day indeed.
Ha, ha, ha @glenalbrethsen. That's hilarious. @trufflepig has never visited me. 😂
Although, hang on a minute, I think he might have once.
Obviously it works off of some criteria, and I've read it, just can't remember what it is or whether or not I've incorporated it. If I recall right, though, it was in pretty general terms. At any rate, I'm not even sure if I agree with its market analysis as far as what my posts are worth, but I'm not convinced that's what happening in practice around here, anyway. Which is what I believe you've said, too. There is a big difference between theory and application.
Totally agree @glenalbrethsen.
And while I'm here I just wanted to let you know that I will be on retreat next week so you won't see me commenting as much as usual and, maybe, who know, not at all.
It's a very casual retreat so I'm pretty sure I will be logging in and, hopefully, posting from photographs from Devon, but more than that I'm not sure.
And, while I was thinking about that this morning I thought "I'd really love to know how much I earn through posting and how much I earn through commenting".
I can use Steem Supply to easily see what's expected in the next seven days but I was wondering, do you know if any of the tools would easily let me see how much I earned from posts and how much I earned from comments for the whole of June? Or is it laborious to work out?
Having been away these last few days and kept up the same pace as at home I'm feeling really burned out now. Every night I've been to bed last and up first, staying up until the early hours to reply to all my comments.
As a result of that and my forthcoming break next week I'm thinking it might be a good time to reassess how I want to continue here.
It also seems a good time to reflect having reached 1000 followers and 10000 posts.
Have a wonderful week! 😍
So, the best place to go for that that I know of is steemstats.com. When it's working, which it hasn't for over a month now. But it's supposed to lay everything out according to comment rewards, post rewards, and curation rewards. You might not be able to get a full month's set of a data in one sitting, though, so you'll need to check it more than once during the month, and right now, they're only showing comments and curation rewards.
If I come up with something else, I'll let you know. I've not paid as much attention to the rewards breakdown. I probably should, but it's usually a lot of comments to go through with a bunch of $0.00 behind them. :)
Hmmm. I don't want to know so much that I'm prepared to spend a lot of time on it @glenalbrethsen. But thankd fo the information.
I was looking for something that would give me totals by time period. 😊
Can you please write another post to explain how you retreive all these numbers?
Really awesome to read this as it's really my kind of field.
I'm not sure when I would get to such a post, but basically, this is what I do:
I keep track of my comments and upvotes everyday.
I use justyyy's website here to get the rest of the upvote numbers for my upvote spread, upvotes received and from how many different accounts, plus the highest upvote amount.
I eyeball the number of followers from my blog page at month's end.
I keep track of my SP from month to month.
I check steemworld.org for the Curie hit, if any takes place, and I look on steemd.com for the payout amount. There's other places to find that, too. I used to be able to look at my wallet history for that kind of thing, but they've truncated what we see.
I don't normally flag or get flagged, so that's pretty easy.
The reputation rating is available on the blog page and steemworld.org if you want more precise numbers.
Post amounts from steemworld.org.
I know if I've self-upvoted or not, but steemreports.com keeps track of that, too.
I keep records of my investments.
That's it. There might be more efficient ways to keep track of all that, but I haven't found it. Maybe you could come up with that.
I don't know any better way. I was just hoping that you had 1 website for all the stats.
Unfortunately, there just isn't one spot that keeps track of all of this. Especially for a month. Steemworld does a lot of it within a week's period of time, but then it gets overwritten by the next week's worth of stuff. I have been able to narrow it down from five or six places to three or four, though, so I consider that to be an improvement. :)