New year, new direction?? Some old great community....

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening.... Regardless of where and when ever you are in the world, I hope that 2021has gotten off to a great start for you?

Its been 8month since the @ssg-community account has had anything to blog about, but with a new year, come new things and a possible new direction. Since we are a community, any decisions relating to the community account needs to be discussed, thought through and considered before any changes are implemented. Hopefully, members of steemsilvergold and the #silvergoldstackers community have been happy enough with how I've managed this account on their behalf, and will get behind what I'm proposing to keep and sustain the upvoting service provided by the @ssg-community account.

Let's jump straight in and take a look at what's going on, and how we can keep on keeping on....

In short, the @ssg-community account upvotes good quality content from its members, and does this by leasing steempower to give members a very good upvote ($$). For the past year I've noticed that lease market rates have been climbing steadily, and to keep leasing SP on the open market, this account is having to pay 25%(approx)APR to #dlease.

With members only asked to contribute 25steem or 2500SP delegation to get a top level upvote, there is a big difference between the 25 steem paid per month and the same amount needed to lease the equivalent 2500sp per month. It would take closer to 55steem per month to equal the equivalent of leasing 2500sp.... As you can see, SSG-Community has been subsidising these payments and were now at the point where it miggt need to be looked at and addressed.

The account is currently upvoting with 104k SP and I've tried to maintain a 100k+ upvote as a baseline. With long term leases due to be renewed in the next few days, expect a big drop in the steem help in our wallet.

So this is where fresh new ideas are welcome, can anyone think of ways to keep the funds topped up and the leases paid?

As you can see the account does rather well from curating the quality content its members produce, and there may lead to salvation??!!??

What I'm proposing is stopping all powerdowns and building up ssg's own SP, that way in a few more months, years, we may not need to ever lease SP again. This makes sense, and I'm guessing a few of you are asking why we just didn't do this from the beginning...... This was a specific rule put in to place to stop the account from ever having and holding too much value. We've been let down before by a member that walked away with the complete SP of our previous account bot, so if the account has none of its own SP then this can never happen again.

I'm hoping that after being a part of this community for several years now, you'd trust me enough to NEVER do this, but this is a decision I CANNOT MAKE without the backing of the community.

Using https://steemworld.org/@ssg-community the readily available data, shows a rather poor performing account. I use steemauto to upvote members once per 24hrs, and have set the voting trial to vote at the 4mins mark... I assumed this was the key #curation trimmer, but it's clearly not as effective as it once was.

Any help and advice on how to maximise the efficiency would be greatly received and could make the community account sustainable much much faster.

The other option, and one I will entertain from now, is to post more regular community updates from this account. If these posts can generate a few dollars in value, with the current sbd:steem ratio, we may generate a lot of steem very quickly. So go over to steemauto and set this account to a 100% upvote please and I'll try and keep you all entertained with some fun and informative blogs.

I think I've bored you all for li g enough now. Leave a comment below of reach out to me on discord with some ideas on how to keep our great community account going and sustainable.

I've been @welshstacker and I'm wishing you all a very Happy New year