All About the Steemian Spotlight

Greetings, everyone! It has been a while since I've done a series of posts, so today I'd like to announce a new series of posts entitled The Steemian Spotlight. Each episode of The Spotlight will focus on a specific Steemian who has either made an impact on my time here, has worked on a helpful initiative for the platform, or some combination of both.

I've alluded to many of these Steemians in previous posts, but I wanted to take the time to focus on their motivations and fill you in on some background information that you might not think about when interacting on Steemit. It will also be interesting to observe their thoughts on the platform as a whole, as well as what their lives are like outside of Steemit.

The Steemian Spotlight will have at least seven volumes, but I may add more as I discover more Steemians to interview. Volumes 1-5 will be posted each day following this post, and I'll return to the series after Christmas.

So without further ado, I'd like to begin with a Steemian who I have to thank for my curation trailing bots: @inertia.

Spotlight on @inertia

I first came across @inertia's work when searching for an alternative to Streemian for curation trails. I've detailed the motivation behind this quest in a previous blog, so I won't elaborate too much here. Inertia was quick to respond to my questions about getting the bots running when I contacted him on Discord, so I've been following his work ever since. In fact, I eventually made a modification to one of his bots in order to curate more effectively.

Inertia has created several helpful tools for Steemit coded primarily in Ruby. You can check out his projects on Github and Github Gist. Inertia also maintains a Ruby forum on ChainBB if you'd like to interact with him and learn more about Ruby.

Inertia's activity on Steemit dates back to July of 2016. He traces his introduction to Steemit back to a now defunct YouTube show:

@inertia: I was watching The Daily Decrypt when Amanda B. Johnson was going into Bitshares Prediction Markets. So I looked into that and got all excited about Bitshares. But then I saw that Dan Larimer was abandoning Bitshares and starting something called STEEM. I thought it was stupid so I stopped paying attention. A few months later, @thedashguy mentioned STEEM on the Dash slack so I took a peek and realized that what I ignored was actually pretty cool.

It seems that even @inertia was hesitant at first to join Steemit, but having followed other cryptocurrency news, he jumped on board and has been Steeming along ever since.

When I asked about what his favorite subjects were to blog about, he responded:

I think probably humor and economics, especially when I can do both at the same time. I was into photography for a while there. Maybe I'll get back into that.

Inertia's recent blogs have concerned his Ruby projects, most notably some updates to his voting bots. However, if you scroll back a bit, you'll find some other interesting content he's posted about various subjects such as taxation and theft, Christianity, the future of Steemit, and self-voting.

Since I have used his bots for various curation aspects, I asked @inertia what types of posts he most enjoys curating, to which he responded:

I like curating post written by liberty minded authors. People already on the platform like @ftlian and @marcstevens. They're on the front lines of the voluntary society.

Steemit has been an outlet for many who are like-minded with such users, so if you'd like to learn more about the voluntary society, you don't have to look very far.

Life, Offline.

I'm always curious about what life is like for Steemians when they are offline. @inertia's life sounds like one that he has much to be grateful for:

I work from home so I can be close to my family. I love working along side my wife to make our household a great place for our kids to grow up.

Hopefully Inertia's efforts on Steemit can help to accomplish that goal.

Inertia also says that he prefers to use Macs over PCs and Linux, and enjoys the television show Primer (click here to read his review)

Thoughts on Steemit

As mentioned earlier, @inertia is very active on his Ruby forum on ChainBB. He also told me that he's fairly active on the SteemSpeak Discord server.

Since @inertia has contributed many great things to the platform, I was curious if he had any thoughts about changes he'd like to see on Steemit. He responded,

I think the platform is doing great. The thing I'm looking forward to are Smart Media Tokens, but even pre-SMT Communities are exciting. We have the opportunity to play with some of these community building ideas over on chainbb.com.

But in terms of that platform as a whole, I'd like to see more witness parameters. I know it would be a programming nightmare, but imagine if the witnesses could decide what reward curve to implement based on their guidance. Giving more parameters to witnesses would make STEEM Power more valuable because in order to change these fundamental underpinnings, you have to have the stake.

When asked about promoting any witnesses he's fond of, @inertia provided this as his answer:

Here's his witness thread if you're interested.

@inertia's Contributions Shine in the Spotlight

Inertia had some great thoughts, so I appreciate him taking time to answer my questions and give us a bit of insight into his life as a bot creator, Steemian, husband, and father. His efforts look fantastic under the Steemian Spotlight, so I would like to provide a list of just a few of his contributions to the platform. Feel free to follow the links if any of these projects interest you.

Projects by @inertia:

• Dr. Phil- Voting Bot
• Dr. Otto- Vote bidding bot
• Dr. Doogie- Curation Trail Bot
• Dr. Gator- Delegation script
• LuckyLuke- Voting bot that votes on URLs sent in token transfers
• Stinky Pete- Reward claim script
• CatFacts- Bot that responds with a random cat fact.

I asked Inertia to describe Steemit in one word or phrase as if he were talking to someone unfamiliar with the platform. He responded "cromulent," a word which admittedly I had to look up. I'll just let you enjoy the same enlightenment I did. Click here to appreciate @inertia's cleverness.

Final Thoughts

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If you've followed my blog for very long, you'll know that I often end my blog posts with a section called Final Thoughts, in which I summarize my post and give my last words on the subject. I plan to ask my interviewees for their final thoughts (anything else they'd like to add), and @inertia's seemed fitting to end this post with. When asked for any other thoughts, he simply responded,

Do Your Job; Don't Be Stupid.

Words to live by, indeed.