[Popular STEM|Announcement] Expanding our barebones visibility service - 5 pinned slots now available!

The Popular STEM community is expanding its visibility as a service (VAAS) activities. Here's how.

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Introduction

In my 6+ years on the Steem blockchain, we have talked a great deal about the topics of "rewards" and "engagement". However, the topic of "audience" has received relatively little attention. In my opinion, however, "audience" is the key to sustainable value on the social blockchain.

I have been an Internet user for almost 3 decades, and one thing I know is that I usually prefer to "lurk" rather than to "engage". I like to read and to share the things I read, but I'm usually not really a commenter. I think many many people are that way. So, what I have had on my mind recently is the question of how to attract the other lurkers?

Of course, these people aren't going to be motivated by rewards, and they're not going to be motivated by engagement. Their attention is valuable, however, as larger audiences will motivate our authors and also attract other authors. So the question is, how do we attract them? The answer, of course, is to deliver attractive content and make it easy to find. Tonight, with that in mind, I'm announcing our community's next two steps towards connecting author and audience.

First, in this post, @cmp2020 described some of his recent enhancements to the experimental @mod-bot community curation tool. After his recent changes, it is now possible for communities to automatically "pin" promoted posts or posts with @null beneficiary settings. The number of pinned slots can be adjusted on a community by community basis.

As announced here, we began using this service back in early August. Today, we're announcing two more pinned slots that are available to authors in our community (for a total of five).

Second, I have reactivated the Facebook page, Science and Technology on the Social Blockchain, and intend to use it for external visibility of our community's posts.

Read on to learn the details.

mod-bot adoption

As the first adopting community for @mod-bot, Popular STEM has had some success with using @mod-bot to pin promoted posts. The next step in mod-bot's evolution is to enable automated pinning of posts with @null as a beneficiary setting. So, that was activated earlier this week. Now, we have a total of five available "pinned" slots that our authors can take advantage of for increased visibility.

1. The top post in Popular STEM promoted posts
2. The second post in Popular STEM promoted posts
3. Cycles randomly through all other posts in Popular STEM promoted posts in proportion to the promotion amount.
4. The post in the community with the highest @null beneficiary setting
5. Randomly traverses through all other posts in the community with @null beneficiary in proportion to the beneficiary setting.

Because of the way that post-pinning works, these posts will appear in reverse-chronological order (newest to oldest).

Note that there are no minimum values (at present). The promotion amount can be as little as 0.001 SBD and the @null beneficiary can be as low as 1%. ( To use the #burnsteem25 tag, however, the post should still have a @null beneficiary of at least 25%. )

We do reserve the right to exercise final discretion on the posts that get pinned and to exclude posts from pinning if they are plagiarized, spun, appear to be AI generated, or are otherwise inconsistent with the goals of the community.

We have other enhancements in mind for @mod-bot's pinned slots, including a way to pin posts in the community that have outlived their payout period, so stay tuned!

Facebook sharing

As noted above, I have now reactivated the Science and Technology on the Social Blockchain Facebook page and intend to use it for sharing STEM-related posts from this community (and perhaps elsewhere, but this community is first in line, especially #steemexclusive posts in this community). My thinking is to share somewhere around 10 posts per week of posts inside and outside of their payout windows. Further, I will intentionally be sharing them after they have aged for several days or more so that the Facebook audience will (hopefully) be motivated to come here in order to see them earlier.

"Asks" for the community

Authors

Keep delivering quality content that complies with the community guidelines and relates to Science, Technology, Engineering, and/or Mathematics (STEM). Also, it would be very helpful to open your post with a summary sentence or two that is suitable for copying/pasting into a Facebook status.

Community Members

"Like" the Science and Technology on the Social Blockchain Facebook page, set it to show you all posts, and also like, share, and comment on the posts when they appear in your Facebook feed.

And of course, it goes without saying that we'd like you to support our authors here on Steem with upvotes and comments, too.

Highly reputable Steem users

Let me know if you're interested in helping me out as a moderator of this community and/or the Facebok page in order to help advance an "audience first" agenda to connect our STEM authors with ever-growing audiences.

Conclusion

Thank you for your attention!

Please let @cmp2020 or me know if you observe any problems with @mod-bot or if you have any suggestions for improvement.

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Thank you for your time and attention.

As a general rule, I up-vote comments that demonstrate "proof of reading".

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Steve Palmer is an IT professional with three decades of professional experience in data communications and information systems. He holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics, a master's degree in computer science, and a master's degree in information systems and technology management. He has been awarded 3 US patents.

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^{Pixabay license, source}

Reminder

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