SteemMag – Steemit’s Weekly Digest #33: Of User Engagement and Growth: A Chat With The Steemian behind MInnowSupportGroup….Meeting A Whale (Whaleshares) and This Week On Steemit

It’s a historic one. I welcome you the thirty-third edition of SteemMag, a weekend digest for Steemians.

Every week, I take a look at some of the most important/trending topics and have a chat with top Steemians who have expert views on such topics.

Here are links to Issue #1 , #2 , #3 , #4 , 5 , #6, #7 , #8, #9, #10, #11, #12 , #13, #14, #15, 16,#17, #18 , #19 , 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, #26 , #27 , #28 , #29, #30, #31 and #32

This edition will literally be the first SteemMag to be published on a Monday. For a while now, we’ve been testing the best times to post in order to get maximum followership.

Last week has been a quite a good one on Steemit. More users are trooping, HF 19 happened and lots of minnows and dolphins are happy.

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In this edition, SteemMag had a chat with one of the earliest Steemians who is also a co-founder of BitShares. He is especially popular with the developers since he runs #beyondbitcoin hangout.

We also had a chat with @agrroed, the Steem witness behind one of the fastest growing community of Steemians, the minnows support group.

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A Chat With @officialfuzzy

SteemMag: What inspired you to start Whaleshares?

@officialfuzzy:
Whaleshares was inspired in the same place my role in bitshares, brownie.pts, and steem came from: my time running guilds, building communities and loving people.
I found over time that all it takes to make a community strong is to care about it and show others that you care about it. Think of it like growing a garden... ;)

SM: Did you face any challenges while developing the idea?

@officialfuzzy
The idea itself has not been challenging ironically so much as some early attacks from unfriendly whales. But early entry into bitcoin and being a founder in the bitshares community, one can say I had a wonderful opportunity to think about the importance of a strong community and the tools they would need to grow their own footprint in the world.

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SteemMag: How has the community adopted the token? and which areas are you working on to further boost adoption?

@officialfuzzy:
It’s been stunning. We have already gone over 40k tokens used and my curation rewards have never been higher!
Though some of it is super-secret, we plan for other whales to be able to pay monthly to get their own token and we now have finally completed the mvp of censored.net so people can see downvoted content on steem.

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SM: Where do you see Whaleshares at the end of the year considering future outlined Hardforks and other community features?

@officialfuzzy:
Steem will grow and evolve and as the community coin idea I came up with in earliest days of steem in our beyond bitcoin hangouts is implemented. Since I have been kicked from the steemwhale slack ned started and his chosen shill in steemspeak has chosen to threaten whaleshares and even attack it after banning me from steemspeak, I cannot guarantee that Steemit inc has intents or plans for hardforks that may intentionally kill the value proposition for whaleshares, but I suspect this will not be the case--because whaleshares will only make steempower more valuable. Regardless we do recommend people choose to earn them as opposed to purchasing them.

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Wow. After several months, it’s fantastic finally having you on SteemMag. Thanks so much for having a chat with us.

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A Chat With @aggroed

SteemMag: What is the minnows support group?

@aggroed:

The Minnow Support Project is a Witness project designed to help growth hack Steemit through retention and support of the newest members.

There is a community page where announcements and contests are posted. There is a Discord channel that has 1150 people in it after 9 days. Within the channel there is a bot that controls the community account, which currently has 110,000 SP delegated by @benjojo and @neoxian and a few others. The bot Discord room and the bots are completely public and free to use. There's a timer on the bots so no one posts too many times, there are standards of what is supported because it's public, and there are 1150 eyes that go on posts because upvotes are watched by the whole community. These guys that used to make 30 cents on a post have a good chance now to make $100. It's awesome to see.

SM: Was there a particular event/condition that inspired you guys to start the idea?

@aggroed:
The condition was that it took @aggroed 8 months to make any traction on the site and that was way too long of an investment for most people. The idea was that a community built around the minnows by the minnows might actually stand a chance to get some attention quicker and form the connections that people need. The Discord room has roughly 200 people standing in there during the day and the conversation is going roughly around the clock.

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SM: What has been the biggest achievement so far?

aggroed:
We just hit 1,150 people in the Discord channel. It's been 9 days. We're clearly addressing minnow pain here. So, to see that growth is awesome. To have the support from @benjojo who has delegated this project with 90k SP (a $200,000 asset) is amazing. @aggroed has worked with a couple groups to already send 4 people to Steemfest. It's a pretty excellent initiative that's helping folks all over the community.

SteemMag: Do you think there will be a need for a minnows support group in the future?

@aggroed:
The goal is to help grow steemit. As long as we are successful doing that we're going to have new Minnows. While the minnows that start here we want to move along to dolphins and whales and keep giving back to this community we want to keep welcoming new people to the platform here.

We just added a message to welcome bot, and hopefully, we keep bringing people here. So, as long as we can help this place grow there will continue to be a need for us.

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SM: How can Steemit Inc and the community further encourage the cause?

@aggroed:
I think what I do as a witness is really only try to think about what minnows need. There are lots of stake holder groups, and lots of great people. My focus is just on the minnows though. So, if I could stress anything it would be to think from a minnow perspective on the decisions they make.

User interface is a really steep learning curve, access to tools takes a little programming knowledge and that's hard for most of the minnows, and really trying to think through the minnow perspective on all aspects of changes. They may not be the most powerful group around, but they are the most numerous by far. Also, as we move into new countries finding way to minimize the language barrier and form groups on chain would be awesome.

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Leaders in here are @aggroed, @ausbitbank, @teamsteem, @canadian-coconut, @thecryptodrive, @someguy123, @theprophet0, @acidyo, and @neoxian hangs in the channel with us. @anyx and @kingscrown are recent additions too that like to stay in the room.

We also added delegation from the minnows themselves so we're just shy of 120k SP on the Minnowsupport account and we're growing what we're bringing apart from the whale delegation that we've gotten.

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Nice to have a chat, @aggroed. It’s exciting seeing you do what you every day. Wish you loads of luck in your endeavors.

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A lot of interesting events happened this week. And in case you missed them, we’ve got your back. Here are some of the most important events that happened on Steemit this week.

~@steemitblog successfully release HF 19 and announce proposals for HF 20.

~ @penguinpablo releases new updates for SteemNow.com

~ For a comprehensive list of dedicated Steem blockchain apps. Check out SteemTools.com

~ Steem rises to no 15th on the coinmarketcap.com’s crypto market capitalization list.

~ Meanwhile, SBD rates ranged from 1 SD = $ 1.54 – 2.4

~$1.4 and $2.19 were the lowest and highest value traded this week for a unit of Steem respectively.

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P.S Thanks for getting to the end of this week's special edition. What was your favorite feature? Do you have any project you would like to have featured on SteemMag?

I would love to hear from you!

(And don’t forget to follow all mentioned Steemians and vote for their witnesses too!)

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